Tag: Voyager 1
-
NASA Tests Power Fix on Voyager 1 as Twin Probes Diverge After 49 Years
Voyager 1 needs the fix more urgently than its twin did. It has less power in reserve, has already lost more of its original instruments, and in February this year came close to tripping its own emergency shutdown during a routine roll manoeuvre. That event prompted NASA in April to switch off the Low-energy Charged…
-
News from the Press Site: Boeing Starliner gets go ahead for Crew Flight Test
In this week’s edition of News from the Press Site, Spaceflight Now’s Will Robinson-Smith is joined by Tariq Malik, editor-in-chief of Space.com, and Passant Rabie, space reporter for Gizmodo. The panel discusses the arrival of the NASA astronauts who will be the first to fly onboard Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner, the reestablishment of contact with the…
-
Recoding Voyager 1—NASA’s interstellar explorer is finally making sense again
Engineers have partially restored a 1970s-era computer on NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft after five months of long-distance troubleshooting, building confidence that humanity’s first interstellar probe can eventually resume normal operations. Several dozen scientists and engineers gathered Saturday in a conference room at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, or connected virtually, to wait for a new signal…
-
NASA knows what knocked Voyager 1 offline, but it will take a while to fix
Engineers have determined why NASA’s Voyager 1 probe has been transmitting gibberish for nearly five months, raising hopes of recovering humanity’s most distant spacecraft. Voyager 1, traveling outbound some 15 billion miles (24 billion km) from Earth, started beaming unreadable data down to ground controllers on November 14. For nearly four months, NASA knew Voyager…
-
Finally, engineers have a clue that could help them save Voyager 1
It’s been four months since NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft sent an intelligible signal back to Earth, and the problem has puzzled engineers tasked with supervising the probe exploring interstellar space. But there’s a renewed optimism among the Voyager ground team based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. On March 1, engineers sent a command…
-
Humanity’s most distant space probe jeopardized by computer glitch
Voyager 1 is still alive out there, barreling into the cosmos more than 15 billion miles away. However, a computer problem has kept the mission’s loyal support team in Southern California from knowing much more about the status of one of NASA’s longest-lived spacecraft. The computer glitch cropped up on November 14, and it affected…
-
Voyager 1 probe fires long-dormant thrusters in interstellar space
Artist’s concept of the Voyager 1 spacecraft. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft has fired a set of four control thrusters for the first time in 37 years, giving the long-lived probe a new way to point itself on its cruise into interstellar space 13 billion miles from Earth. The backup rocket jets were originally…
-
Year in Review – Part 1: NASA’s planetary probes dominate in 2011
It was an interesting year for NASA as the 2011 calendar brought about the retirement of the iconic Space Shuttle fleet, the completion of the USOS segment of the International Space Station, the launch of three new planetary missions, and the ongoing scientific endeavors of NASA’s fleet of planetary probes. In all, 2011 proved a…