Voyager 1 Fires Up Thrusters After 37 Years

On Saturday, 2 December 2017 11:34:12 UTC-5, Chris L Peterson wrote:
On Fri, 1 Dec 2017 18:43:15 -0800 (PST), RichA
wrote:

On Friday, 1 December 2017 20:41:25 UTC-5, palsing wrote:
This is so cool!

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.p...ly201 71201-1

"If you tried to start a car that's been sitting in a garage for decades, you might not expect the engine to respond. But a set of thrusters aboard the Voyager 1 spacecraft successfully fired up Wednesday after 37 years without use..."

Thank goodness for miracle of radio-thermal generators. Still providing 300 watts of power after all these years.

They're a great way to power deep space probes. But they weren't the
remarkable thing here. The remarkable thing was that moving parts
actually moved after decades in a vacuum. That's a very tricky thing
to manage.

That, and unless they built it at -270 deg. C, they would have had to be very careful with mechanical tolerances.