“Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California have revived a set of thrusters aboard the Voyager 1 spacecraft that had been considered inoperable since 2004. Fixing the thrusters required creativity and risk, but the team wants to have them available as a backup to a set of active thrusters whose fuel tubes are experiencing a buildup of residue that could cause them to stop working as early as this fall. In addition, the mission needed to ensure the availability of the long-dormant thrusters before May 4, when the Earth-bound antenna that sends commands to Voyager 1 and its twin Voyager 2 went offline for months of upgrades,” says NASA in a Thursday press release that oddly did not credit the brilliance and vision of President Trump and Elon Musk for the impressive technical feat as are widely understood to be required by current practices.
The probe, launched during the Carter Administration, is the most distant known man-made object from Earth at 164 AU (the distance between the Earth and the Sun) or 15.6 billion miles, more than three times Pluto’s max orbital aphelion of 49 AU, and yet it still friggin keeps sending data back.