Voyager team plays games with the power supply to keep probe alive

[mikegarrison]

https://www.npr.org/2023/04/30/1172921603/nasa-voyager-2-2026-backup-power-space

Quote

With Voyager 2's power supply dwindling, NASA was about to shut down one of its five science instruments onboard the spacecraft. To keep it going, engineers had already sacrificed heaters and other nonessential parts that drained power. But engineers have now found a way to tap reserve power from a safety mechanism that regulates the spacecraft's voltage. "The move will enable the mission to postpone shutting down a science instrument until 2026, rather than this year," NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said this past week.

 

[darthgently]

On 4/30/2023 at 10:32 PM, mikegarrison said:

https://www.npr.org/2023/04/30/1172921603/nasa-voyager-2-2026-backup-power-space

 

The Voyager 2 releases it's inner "energizer bunny".  Again.  NASA rules at this mission extension hacking beyond any others

[mikegarrison]

Well, the thing is, they over-build these probes as much as they can because just launching the mission at all is so expensive. So once they complete their primary mission, they can start using up their margins and redundancies to keep going.

This mission had something like 11 or 12 science instruments, and only 5 of them are still alive (but now that they are far from any planets, not all of the instruments would be useful anyway).

[darthgently]

4 minutes ago, mikegarrison said:

Well, the thing is, they over-build these probes as much as they can because just launching the mission at all is so expensive. So once they complete their primary mission, they can start using up their margins and redundancies to keep going.

This mission had something like 11 or 12 science instruments, and only 5 of them are still alive (but now that they are far from any planets, not all of the instruments would be useful anyway).

Exactly what I meant, but since the article spelled the points you highlight I was going for concise 

[Nuke]

best tape decks in the known universe.

[wumpus]

On 5/5/2023 at 6:33 PM, mikegarrison said:

Well, the thing is, they over-build these probes as much as they can because just launching the mission at all is so expensive. So once they complete their primary mission, they can start using up their margins and redundancies to keep going.

This mission had something like 11 or 12 science instruments, and only 5 of them are still alive (but now that they are far from any planets, not all of the instruments would be useful anyway).

They also knew they only had one shot for the "full tour" for at least a hundred years.  So there was even more desire to overbuild.  But if they wanted to extend the mission, they could have used americanium instead of plutonium in the RTGs.  But that would have reduced margins and/or added mass during the critical moments when near planets.  So plutonium was ideal and they went with that (and they were also familiar with plutonium RTGs).