NASA Voyager 1 Comes Again To Life Utilizing 43 years Outdated tech

NASA’s spacecraft Voyager 1 stunned scientists by lately contacting Earth once more. This spacecraft has been on an area journey for 47 years. The wonderful factor is that the radio transmitter by means of which it made contact was final utilized in 1981. Which means it despatched the message with the assistance of a 43 yr previous transmitter. Scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) established contact with Voyager 1 on October 24.

Voyager 1 exists 15 billion miles away in house. On October 16, one among its transmitters shut down, inflicting a short lived disruption in communications. Scientists speculated that the shutdown could have been brought on by the spacecraft’s fault safety system. In line with the report, this method typically shuts down another programs working within the spacecraft. This technique does this when the spacecraft begins consuming an excessive amount of energy.

In line with NASA, it takes 23 hours for a message from Voyager 1 to achieve Earth, or from Earth to Voyager 1. Which means a message despatched one-way covers the space in about 1 day. On October 16, the engineers despatched a command to the spacecraft, however until October 18 they didn’t obtain any response from the spacecraft. Then a day later, contact with the spacecraft was utterly misplaced. Investigation revealed that Voyager 1’s fault safety system had switched the spacecraft to a different, decrease energy consumption transmitter.

Voyager 1 has two radio transmitters, however for a few years it has been utilizing just one, referred to as the X-band transmitter. However, S-band transmitters use one other frequency that has not been used since 1981. At current, NASA has postponed the choice to change to X-band transmitter once more.

The company says it won’t accomplish that till it finds out why the spacecraft modified the transmitter. In the meantime, scientists once more despatched a message to the spacecraft on 22 October, to which they obtained a reply on 24 October. This ensured that the spacecraft was working correctly with the S-band transmitter. Voyager 1 has additionally found a skinny ring across the planet Jupiter. In addition to, its two new Jovian moons – Thebe and Metis have additionally been detected.