Produced by: Mohsin Shaikh
After 20 years offline, Voyager 1’s roll thrusters sparked back to life—resurrected by a last-minute gamble that defied engineering expectations.
With Earth’s only powerful enough antenna heading offline, NASA had weeks to bring the spacecraft back in line—or risk losing it forever.
Every command to Voyager takes nearly a day to reach it. Engineers had no idea if the fix worked—until they saw a faint temperature spike from billions of miles away.
The reactivated thrusters were written off in 2004. But a hunch about a “flipped switch” gave them new life, just in time to preserve contact.
Only Canberra’s DSS-43 dish could reach Voyager—and with it set for a long shutdown, there was a narrow window to act before the signal slipped away.
Voyager’s reawakened thrusters were meant for Jupiter flybys. Now, in interstellar space, they’re the spacecraft’s last hope to stay pointed at Earth.
To make the fix, engineers had to risk Voyager’s navigation system drifting too far—one wrong move, and it could’ve been lost in deep space forever.
With no spares and no second chances, NASA engineers used pure ingenuity to outwit 47-year-old hardware—and rewrote the rulebook on spacecraft survival.
What was thought to be mechanical death turned into one of NASA’s most improbable comebacks—proving that even in deep space, hope isn’t dead.