Voyager 1 Fires Up Thrusters After 37 Years
Found on NASA on Saturday, 02 December 2017
If you tried to start a car that's been sitting in a garage for decades, you might not expect the engine to respond. But a set of thrusters aboard the Voyager 1 spacecraft successfully fired up Wednesday after 37 years without use.
The thruster test went so well, the team will likely do a similar test on the TCM thrusters for Voyager 2, the twin spacecraft of Voyager 1. The attitude control thrusters currently used for Voyager 2 are not yet as degraded as Voyager 1's, however.
40 years after the launch of Voyager 1, 40 years of innovation and scientific advancements later, the technology won't even last a decade anymore because it either simply breaks (sometimes by design) or because that trendy cool "cloud app(tm)" required to operate it gets shut down.