NASA Started a Propeller set on Board Voyager 1 After 37 Years of Break

December 23rd, 2023 by dayat No comments »

If you try to start a car that has been in the garage for decades, you expect the engine not to respond. But a set of propellers onboard the NASA Voyager 1 spacecraft was launched on Wednesday, November 29, 37 years after its last use without any problems. Voyager 1 is the only man-made object that has arrived in interstellar space, being also the space probe created by NASA, which travels at the highest speed and is at the highest distance from Terra.

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The probe flies for 40 years and can change its position to keep its antenna pointing to the Terra using some small propellers operating in very short halves, in the order of milliseconds. NASA’s Voyager team has been able to launch a set of back-up propellants that had not been in use since 1980. The test succeeds in extending Voyager 1′s life to a minimum of 2-3 years. In 2014, NASA engineers noticed that Voyager’s propellers used to change direction degraded. Over time, propellers end up working longer than normal to get the same effect on the direction of the probe. NASA experts have designed several working scenarios to solve the problem and concluded that it is best to use a series of back-up engines to control the probe’s direction. These propellants had not been used for 37 years. NASA has been forced to search for decades old archives and use an obsolete programming language that no one uses to compile commands that have been transmitted by radio waves to the small computer on board to Voyager 1. The probe is more than 20 billion km from Terra. In the early years of the mission, Voyager 1 passed past Jupiter, Saturn and some of the satellites of these planets. In order to maintain the correct distance and orientation of on-board instruments, engineers used a series of Trajectory Correction Maneuvers (TCM) with dedicated, but identical size and functionality to those used for small flight corrections. These propellers used to correct the trajectory are placed on the back of the probe. After the encounter with Saturn, Voyager 1 did not need them, the last use being on November 8, 1980. These propellers had been used in a different way, meaning they were operating for long periods, not for very short-lived pulses. All engines on board Voyager were produced by Aerojet Rocketdyne, the same type of engine being installed on other spacecraft such as Cassini and Dawn. On November 28, Voyager engineers started the four TCM engines and tested their ability to steer the probe using 10 millisecond pulses. Researchers were then forced to wait for the test results to travel through space, in the form of radio waves, to be received after 19 h and 35 min by an antenna from Goldstone, California, part of NASA’s Deep Space network.

Keywords: Voyager 1, Propellers, NASA, Space Agency.

Introduction

If you try to start a car that has been in the garage for decades, you expect the engine not to respond. But a set of propellers onboard the NASA Voyager 1 spacecraft was launched on Wednesday, November 29, 37 years after its last use without any problems.

Voyager 1 is the only man-made object that has arrived in interstellar space, being also the space probe created by NASA, which travels at the highest speed and is at the highest distance from Terra. The probe flies for 40 years and can change its position to keep its antenna pointing to the Terra using some small propellers operating in very short halves, in the order of milliseconds.

NASA’s Voyager team has been able to launch a set of back-up propellants that had not been in use since 1980. The test succeeds in extending Voyager 1′s life to a minimum of 2-3 years.

In 2014, NASA engineers noticed that Voyager’s propellers used to change direction degraded. Over time, propellers end up working longer than normal to get the same effect on the direction of the probe. NASA experts have designed several working scenarios to solve the problem and concluded that it is best to use a series of back-up engines to control the probe’s direction.

These propellants had not been used for 37 years. NASA has been forced to search for decades old archives and use an obsolete programming language that no one uses to compile commands that have been transmitted by radio waves to the small computer on board to Voyager 1.

The probe is more than 20 billion km from Terra. In the early years of the mission, Voyager 1 passed past Jupiter, Saturn and some of the satellites of these planets.

In order to maintain the correct distance and orientation of on-board instruments, engineers used a series of Trajectory Correction Maneuvers (TCM) with dedicated, but identical size and functionality to those used for small flight corrections. These propellers used to correct the trajectory are placed on the back of the probe.

After the encounter with Saturn, Voyager 1 did not need them, the last use being on November 8, 1980. These propellers had been used in a different way, meaning they were operating for long periods, not for very short-lived pulses. All engines on board Voyager were produced by Aerojet Rocketdyne, the same type of engine being installed on other spacecraft such as Cassini and Dawn. On November 28, Voyager engineers started the four TCM engines and tested their ability to steer the probe using 10 millisecond pulses. Researchers were then forced to wait for the test results to travel through space, in the form of radio waves, to be received after 19 h and 35 min by an antenna from Goldstone, California, part of NASA’s Deep Space network. On November 29, engineers learned that the engines worked perfectly. Now, the plan is that, as of January, Voyager 1 will only use these four propellers to target the antenna to Terra. These engines need heat to propel the probe and heat is obtained using the energy supplied by a small nuclear reactor that has as fuel a plutonium isotope. As the energy reserve is limited, engineers are planning to use these propellers for a limited period of time and will reuse start-up motors to orient the antenna when the energy reserves are too low.

Voyager 1 is a space probe launched by NASA on September 5, 1977, still in operation. He visited the planets Saturn and Jupiter, being the first probe to transmit images to the satellites of these planets. Her sister, Voyager 2, was launched on August 20, 1977 (before Voyager 1) is the only probe that has visited all four large planets of the Solar System: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, due to the alignment of these planets. After completing their initial plan to study the planets, the two probes continued their journey into space. Voyager 1 left the heliosphere in August 2012, entering the interstellar space. Voyager 2 will follow in a few years (Petrescu et al., 2017a; 2017b; 2017c; 2017d; 2017e; 2017f; 2017g; 2017h; 2017i; 2017j; 2017k; 2017l; 2017m; 2017n; 2017o; 2017p; 2017q; Petrescu, 2016; Aversa et al., 2017a; 2017b; 2017c; 2017d; 2017e; 2016a; 2016b; 2016c; 2016d; Mirsayar et al., 2017; Petrescu and Petrescu, 2016a; 2016b; 2016c; 2013a; 2013b; 2013c; 2013d; 2012a; 2012b; 2012c; 2012d; 2011a; 2011b; Petrescu, 2012a; 2012b; 2009; Petrescu and Calautit, 2016a; 2016b; Petrescu et al., 2016a; 2016b).

Materials and Methods

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is the most renowned and important independent agency of the federal government of the United States, responsible for civilian space programs as well as all aeronautical and aerospace research programs initiated by the United States of America.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who set up NASA in 1958, mainly thought of it as having a distinct civil (more than military) orientation in order to be able to create independent, independent missions to conquer the cosmic space, obviously the sea passion and basic mission of humanity, seen as something superior, namely to learn as much as possible about the space we live in and try to conquer it in the next millennium. We can’t be locked here on our planet and not think of who we are, where we come from, where we go, what we represent in the giant universe in which we are, how we can know it and explore it, which are its limits and how we can learn other surrounding verses. Too many questions for a small man, but very few for a humanity so big and especially so important!