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A Remarkable Engineering Triumph
Voyager 1, the most distant human-made object from Earth, has been traveling through space for over four decades. It is the first spacecraft to enter interstellar space, and it continues to send valuable data back to Earth. To maintain communication, the spacecraft must orient its antenna towards our planet, a task achieved by firing tiny thrusters in millisecond bursts.

The Challenge of Dormant Thrusters
In 2014, NASA engineers noticed that the primary thrusters, which orient the spacecraft, were degrading. To address this issue, they decided to switch to a set of backup thrusters that had not been used since 1980. This required delving into decades-old data and utilizing an outdated programming language to create the necessary commands.

The Successful Test
On November 28, 2017, engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory sent commands to Voyager 1 to fire the four backup thrusters known as Trajectory Correction Maneuver (TCM) thrusters. After a suspenseful 19-hour wait for the signal to travel over 20 billion kilometers back to Earth, the team received confirmation that the test was successful.

The Significance of the Maneuver
This successful maneuver has not only extended Voyager 1′s operational life by an estimated two to three years but has also highlighted the incredible durability and design of the spacecraft. The TCM thrusters, produced by Aerojet Rocketdyne, are identical in size and functionality to the primary thrusters and were originally used for more extended periods rather than short bursts.

Voyager 1′s Legacy and Future
Launched on September 5, 1977, Voyager 1 has provided humanity with unprecedented views of our solar system, including the first detailed images of Jupiter, Saturn, and their moons. As it continues its journey, the spacecraft will switch to using the TCM thrusters for orientation, conserving energy from its limited plutonium power source.

Voyager 1′s Ongoing Mission
Voyager 1′s mission has been a testament to human curiosity and ingenuity. As it travels further into the unknown, it carries with it a golden record containing sounds and images representing life on Earth, a message for any potential extraterrestrial intelligence it may encounter.

The Future of Deep Space Communication
The success with Voyager 1′s thrusters is a crucial step in ensuring that we continue to receive data from the edge of interstellar space. It also serves as a learning experience for future deep space missions, emphasizing the importance of designing spacecraft with long-term operability in mind.

The Role of NASA’s Deep Space Network
The communication with Voyager 1 is made possible by NASA’s Deep Space Network, a collection of large antennas located in California, Spain, and Australia. This network is vital for communicating with missions throughout the solar system and beyond.

Conclusion
The revival of Voyager 1′s thrusters after 37 years is a remarkable achievement that underscores the longevity and resilience of NASA’s deep space exploration technology. As Voyager 1 continues its journey, it remains a symbol of humanity’s desire to explore and understand the cosmos.

Acknowledgements
This milestone in space exploration has been recognized and appreciated by the scientific community, including Dr. Veturia CHIROIU, an honorary member of the Technical Sciences Academy of Romania.

For more information on Voyager 1 and its mission, visit NASA’s official Voyager website here. To learn more about the Deep Space Network and its role in space communication, click here.

The average Americans spend approximately five hours a day on mobile devices, and for businesses, they will need to develop apps if they want to catch up with the trend and stay relevant. 50% of the users who spend 5 hours a day are usually on entertainment, media, messaging and social applications. The growth in the mobile market has been driven by communication which has become a great source of entertainment.

In the business world, C-Suite executives, startups and small businesses understand the power of mobile, but they still struggle to make the most out of it. Most companies have a tough time getting their first application to market, let alone scheduling update releases. Updates are important for the functionality and lifetime of an app because most users usually are quick to point out glitches, as they offer improvement ideas. In case a company decides not to respond to the bug fix suggestion that users recommended, users, go for competitor apps.

In the process of a mobile app development, mobile app developers usually iterate fast to the point of deploying several updates in a day. As businesses push for more production of their apps, the need to ask themselves where the issue is in case things are not going right is an important part of the whole process. One important issue that needs to be looked at is the lack of efficient feedback cycles and control for mobile app developers and designers. Anders Lassen who is the CIO of Fuse, recommends that a quality app is created with a limited feature-set because translating an idea into a real product can be complicated. After all that is done, organizations have to think about the improvements that they need to make to get the apps to market faster.

What to do with the mobile app development lifecycle

Developers who use the waterfall development cycle make the mobile application development process take a lot of time. The distinct sequence of the traditional app development approach cannot work in this day and age. Even though the method has a good structure, it is slowing down productivity in modern project management environments.

In this traditional workflow, developers cannot head to the previous step without going back to the beginning. The waterfall approach has not been a good model for developers and even managers. The waterfall model makes it hard for managers to predict the start of the engagement because of its strict structure which makes improvements hard to execute. This results in a long process which does not meet the client’s needs, making communication even difficult.

Responsiveness and interaction

How the mobile app responds to input of commands, how it shifts between views, and how the user interface model works represent the responsiveness and interaction of the app. Delays are experienced in some cross-platform interfaces since commands have to move across an extra layer. Some tools find it hard to use multi-touch functions without libraries and additional programming.

Euphemia Wong, a Designer & Strategies, and a UX Researcher in The Interaction Design Foundation recommends that designers should take note of the interactions between the screen of the app and human cognition to make it easier for the user to understand, navigate and have a valuable interaction with the app. He further adds that if users have an easier time going through the app without the need to learn new toolsets or representation, it reduces the thinking process, which eliminates confusion.

Organizations have to understand the user first.

When a consumer app or an organizational app is being designed, users already have an idea of how the app needs to work. These expectations are a pile-up of the usual experience that users have on a daily basis while interacting with a company’s product.

Having the user in mind allows one to have users in the development loop. When you have a more empowered group of developers, your app can grow easily as they can test their ideas with the users to cut out the design ideas that are not working. The faster the test phase is done, the better the app will be.

The future of mobile app is huge, and when you take a long time in mobile application development, you will miss out on the market. Any business needs to understand the speed at which an app development should take; the app development environment is getting more fluid with the visual features that make the process simpler, this cuts the lag between development stages, making the process faster.