Engineers at NASA say they have successfully revived thrusters aboard Voyager 1, the farthest spacecraft from our planet, in the nick of time before a planned communications blackout.
A side effect of upgrades to an Earth-based antenna that sends commands to Voyager 1 and its twin, Voyager 2, the communications pause could have occurred when the probe faced a critical issue — thruster failure — leaving the space agency without a way to save the historic mission. The new fix to the vehicle’s original roll thrusters, out of action since 2004, could help keep the veteran spacecraft operating until it’s able to contact home again next year.
Voyager 1, launched in September 1977, uses more than one set of thrusters to function properly. Primary thrusters carefully orient the spacecraft so it can keep its antenna pointed at Earth. This ensures that the probe can send back data it collects from its unique perspective 15.5 billion miles (25 billion kilometers) away in interstellar space, as well as receive commands sent by the Voyager team.
Swap the NASA and the Pentagon budget!
This is how we get to Mars y'all xD
I'm of the opinion we can't safely travel to mars. Not in our lifetimes.
The earth has a nice magnetic field that protects us from background ionizing charged particles, and an atmosphere that catches most other radiation (X-ray, gamma).
The length of time it would take with modern rockets to get to mars exposes the crew to extreme radiation. They could survive it, but radiation over time kills you with cancer, if you survive any acute effects.
We could maybe make superconducting magnets strong enough to create a field to reduce the charged particles, but then you have to keep them powered, and still deal with the uncharged background radiation (mostly gamma/X-rays). You could create a giant cylinder of lead around the crew capsule, but that would take an extraordinary amount of time to build in orbit.
Not to mention once you are on mars, you have to maintain those protections too - the Mars atmosphere is too thin to be very helpful and it does not have a a magnetic core.
There has been a notable lack of progress in that realm, and it will likely remain the reason we don't see a human to mars program.
Nuclear thermal rocket engines look like they could cut that travel time down significantly. There's a few prototypes in the works already.