Today I'm remembering one of the coolest space things ever: Voyager 2's S-band radio receiver has been broken for 44 years, and yet we can still talk to it.
Back in 1978 the primary receiver failed, and the team discovered the backup receiver had a faulty capacitor in the PLL circuit that adjusted for Doppler shift. Since then, Voyager 2's receive bandwidth has been much narrower, and the band-pass window wanders back and forth by a few hundred Hz with temp changes.
A lesser team would have declared the spacecraft lost after concluding the receivers were no longer working. But the badasses running Voyager figured out that they could make the Deep Space Network sweep the range of frequencies where V2's receiver _could_ be listening, then lock onto an adjusted frequency ground-side to compensate for the wonky receiver.
And so, for the last 44 years, every couple weeks, the DSN does a search to find where Voyager 2's receiver is hanging out today.
What I'm saying is, the Voyager project team at JPL are ridiculously resourceful, tenacious people, and deserve to be celebrated more.
This ramble brought to you by today's news that the project team once again pulled a rabbit out of a hat, and figured out a way to stretch Voyager 2's dwindling power budget by several more _years_ before having to power down more science instruments.
Half a century later, still teaching those amazing machines new tricks.
Today's happy news about stretching the science mission even more: https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/news/details.php?article_id=129
Hackaday's delightful rundown of the radio systems on the Voyagers: https://hackaday.com/2022/06/08/how-is-voyager-still-talking-after-all-these-years/
Dave Anderson
Daniel Borges
James Garry