Voyager 1 receives a new boost from NASA after decades of neglect
Humanity’s most distant object has been given an extra push while on its huge journey.
In May 2025, NASA successfully reactivated a set of thrusters on the Voyager 1 spacecraft that had been dormant since 2004. This was a crucial step for scientists as the currently active thrusters, responsible for maintaining the spacecraft’s orientation towards Earth, were experiencing performance issues.
The reactivation ensures continued communication with Voyager 1, especially important with the impending temporary shutdown of the Deep Space Station 43 antenna for upgrades.
The original thrusters ceased operation in 2004 after the failure of their heater circuits, leading engineers to rely on backup thrusters. However, these backups have been degrading over time.
Voyager 1 and 2 are perhaps humanity’s most iconic pieces of engineering ever. Launched in 1977 to study the outer planets - Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune - the pair of ships now find themselves about 15 billion miles (Voyager 1) and 13 billion miles (Voyager 2) from Earth.
‘It was yet another miracle save for Voyager’
Spotting the problem was not easy. NASA engineers hypothesised that a misconfigured switch might have caused the heater failure and promptly sent a command to reset the switch, which they hoped would restore functionality. After a 46-hour round-trip communication delay, data confirmed that the heaters were warming up, indicating a successful reactivation.
Kareem Badaruddin, Voyager mission manager at JPL, admitted that the story is one of miracles: “I think at that time, the team was OK with accepting that the primary roll thrusters didn’t work, because they had a perfectly good backup. And, frankly, they probably didn’t think the Voyagers were going to keep going for another 20 years.”
Despite the spacecraft’s age and diminishing power supply, this successful intervention showcases the ingenuity of NASA’s engineering team and their commitment to prolonging the mission’s scientific contributions for planet Earth’s understanding of our place in the Universe.
“It was such a glorious moment. Team morale was very high that day,” said Todd Barber, the mission’s propulsion lead at JPL. “These thrusters were considered dead. And that was a legitimate conclusion. It’s just that one of our engineers had this insight that maybe there was this other possible cause and it was fixable. It was yet another miracle save for Voyager.”
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