This most recent interview that NASA was a part of not too long ago left us with our mouths hanging, to say the least as it appears like after a whole 37 years of drifting through space, we might actually finally get Voyager 1 to come back home.
That’s right, JPL and NASA’s first spacecraft that has been said to have been lost around 37 years ago might actually make it back home as NASA recently reported the fact that the secondary thrusters off of the ship are back online and they might be able to carry the ship back home after all.
Since it went offline while drifting at full speed through space it essentially fell off course a while ago and it began floating farther and farther away across our solar system at 35,000 miles per hour. At the moment you can find it at a whopping 13 billion miles away from our planet but NASA declared that they believe that they will be able to make contact with it again soon enough. With the TCM thrusters back online the ship might be able to fly around for an extra 1-2 years which would get it close enough to us to the point where we would essentially be able to retrieve it.
NASA gathered up a team made up of Chris Jones, Robert Shotwell, Carl Guernsey, and Todd Barber that was given the task to make sure that the spacecraft returns back home. Hopefully, their mission will be a success as they’ve already received a positive response from the ship after waiting for 19 hours and 35 minutes for the ship to acknowledge the commands they sent towards it.