Earlier this year, Voyager 2 shut down.
For those who forget, the Voyager program was an endeavor undertaken by NASA to launch two robotic probes into space.
These craft, taking advantage of a rare alignment of the planets, would travel to Neptune’s orbit and beyond, gathering significant data about our solar system along the way.
Incredibly, both Voyager 1 and 2 have successfully ventured to the edge of the solar system, crossing the edge of the heliosphere in 2012 and 2018 respectively.
But on January 25, Voyager 2 attempted to calibrate its magnetic field instrument and failed. Doing so caused the probe to try and draw on additional power, which triggered a failsafe that shut down its functionality.
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See, NASA’s engineers recognized that the probes would be venturing far beyond the reach of the Sun’s rays, meaning that solar power would not be sufficient enough to keep them both running.
So, they fitted both of them with radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs)s, which converts the heat from radioactive decay into electricity.
This is what’s been keeping the two probes operating for the past forty years.
But there’s a limited supply of fuel for the RTGs, which has forced NASA to gradually shut down parts of the probe over time.
That’s also why the failsafe exists: to prevent too much power getting used for anything that might be considered extraneous… like a failed calibration.
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Incredibly, NASA’s engineers managed to diagnose the probe’s issue and bring it back online.
They essentially did this while the probe was over 11 billion miles away, making this a truly incredible feat. And it was by no means an easy task.
See, given the great distance, a singular command from the headquarters at Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) takes 17 hours to travel to the craft, and 17 hours to make a return trip.
That means the engineers had to wait almost one-and-a-half days each time to see if they had been successful in a given step!
Make no mistake: the technology that we have today is undoubtedly incredible; but for the truly mind-blowing feats, one need not look farther than the feats of space travel.
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