'Brilliant' team performs electrical balancing act to keep probe pointed at Earth
The tenuous power situation onboard the veteran Voyager 1 spacecraft has required engineers to perform a delicate balancing act while switching between thrusters as fuel lines gradually become clogged.
In 2002, the mission engineering team noticed that some of the fuel tubes in the attitude propulsion branch were clogging. Not a problem – the team switched to the second branch. Then that branch began to suffer the same, so the team The clogging is caused by silicon dioxide, a byproduct that appears with age – the Voyagers are approaching half a century in space – from a rubber diaphragm in the spacecraft's fuel tank.Voyager 1 regains sanity after engineers patch around problematic memorySwitching to different thrusters would have presented no problem in decades past. Now, however, the dwindling power is presenting challenges for engineers.
Could one of the remaining science instruments be turned off temporarily to free up some power? No – engineers worried that the instrument would not come back online afterward.
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