The Voyager 1 is both NASA’s greatest machinery ever built and its biggest tragedy at the same time. While it is not the best technology-wise as we have come a long way over the past 37 years or so it is still the pioneering spacecraft they built alongside JPL.
So, you can only imagine the shocked look on their faces when they realized all of that money and time went down the drain when the ship stopped responding to the commands and began drifting through space 37 years ago.
Their official report stated that the thrusters stopped responding altogether and this was made even more apparent by the fact that the ship continued to float away through space at 35,000 miles per hour reaching a total of 13 billion miles away from home by now.
But, after 37 years of having given up on it altogether, NASA recently reported that hope might not all be lost as they recently received a signal back from their ship.
Apparently after all this time the ship’s TCM or backup thrusters actually forcefully kicked in right now giving it an extra 1-2 years of driving power.
To make sure that this wasn’t a mistake they sent in a command to the ship and waited to see whether they would receive the response or not only for 19 hours and 35 minutes later to receive the confirmation signal back.
So, NASA now established a team made out of Chris Jones, Robert Shotwell, Carl Guernsey, and Todd Barber to make sure they can get the ship as close to our planet as possible so as to be able to pick it up and bring it home after all this time.
