Imagine you had a car sitting in storage since 1980, and suddenly you needed to start it up. Now imagine that it revs up like a charm as soon as you turn the key.
That’s the scenario NASA is using as a comparison for this week’s startup of a thruster system that’s been sitting dormant on the Voyager 1 probe for 37 years.
One important difference: Voyager’s key had to be turned by remote control from a distance of 13.1 billion miles.
