Voyager 1 was launched in 1977, which, if you're counting, is more than 33 years ago. During that time, it's flown past Jupiter and Saturn and nearly made it out of our solar system, but it's still feeling frisky enough to perform a series of acrobatic roll maneuvers. Not bad for a spacecraft that was new at the same time as the Atari 2600.
The fact that Voyager 1 is still operating as well as it is is a minor miracle unless you work at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in which case it's just business as usual. After all, how many sophisticated electronics do you own that are 30 years old and still work great after zero maintenance? And how many of them have spent the last three decades operating at 400 degrees below zero while being exposed to radiation? It's mind blowing.
Last month, Voyager 1 performed a 70 degree roll maneuver with its gyroscopes for the first time since 1990. It went flawlessly. These maneuver commands, incidentally, take a staggering16 hours to make it out to Voyager, plus another 16 hours for the verification to come back. By way of comparison, the communication delay between Mars and Earth maxes out at a mere 22 minutes and is sometimes as short as only three. So yeah, at 11 billion miles from home, Voyager is way the heck out there.
NASA is planning to start having Voyager roll on a regular basis to better detect changes in the solar wind, which is petering out as the spacecraft approaches the boundary with interstellar space. Five of these rolls are planned for the next seven days, with more rolls every week for the next three months. It seems like Voyager is going to continue out into space sending back tasty data for the foreseeable future, at least until it gets gobbled up by a race of alien machines and comes back to find us. LINK
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