In service for just over 47 years, the venerable Voyager 1 is not spared from technical problems. Thanks to a new “pirouette”, communications with the latter were recently able to be re-established.
New glitch for Voyager 1
Communicate with Voyager 1 and its twin, Voyager 2, is far from simple. The furthest machine from our planet, the first is currently more than 24 billion kilometers from us. This implies that 23 hours are necessary for a radio signal emitted from Earth to reach it, and the same amount to receive a response from it.
Barely a month after the delicate reactivation of one of its thrusters, the probe interstellar was the victim of a new glitch. On October 16, NASA engineers ordered him to turn one of his radiators back on in order to stabilize his temperature.
Having still not received a response from the probe two days later, the American Space Agency turned to the Deep Space Network, a global network of radio antennas, and finally picked up a “sign of life » of the probe, emitted in an alternative frequency band.
While Voyager 1 normally had the energy necessary to carry out this operation, it turned out that the initial command had triggered the craft's integrated protection system, responsible for deactivating its subsystems deemed non-essential when its consumption electrical power exceeds a critical threshold.
A transmitter last used in the early 1980s
Thinking that everything was back to normal, the engineers discovered to their amazement the next day that communications had again ceased. In all likelihood, the integrated protection system would have been triggered twice more, forcing Voyager 1 to completely turn off its main radio transmitter to fall back on a backup device, less energy-consuming, but also less powerful.
If they feared that the latter, used for the last time in 1981, was out of service, or that the weak signals it emits could hardly be picked up by terrestrial installations, the NASA teams were relieved to receive a response from the probe on October 24.
Working to precisely identify the causes of the malfunction, engineers hope to restore the operation of the probe in the coming weeks.
