NASA has regained contact with Voyager 2 after losing it for a week

On 21 July, NASA misplaced contact with the Voyager 2 spacecraft, which is almost 20 billion kilometres away from Earth. Now, operators have heard from Voyager 2 once more – the spacecraft remains to be working, however they’re nonetheless struggling to regain full communication.

Voyager 2 launched in 1977 and has been hurtling in direction of the outer edges of the photo voltaic system and into interstellar house since then. It is now the second-most distant spacecraft from Earth after its sibling craft, Voyager 1, which is nearly 24 billion kilometres away. Several of its science devices, together with its magnetometer and its cosmic ray detector, are nonetheless working 46 years after launch and sending knowledge again to Earth.

Or they had been, at the very least, till 21 July, when a sequence of instructions from mission management inadvertently shifted the orientation of the spacecraft, pointing its antenna simply 2 levels away from Earth. That meant that the indicators from the spacecraft weren’t reaching satellite tv for pc dishes on the bottom, and operators couldn’t ship any indicators to attempt to flip it again in direction of us.

Thankfully, they aren’t fully in the dead of night. On 31 July, NASA detected a faint trace of what’s known as a “carrier signal” from Voyager 2. Generally, if the antenna was aligned correctly, this sign would include real-time knowledge from the spacecraft, however as a result of it isn’t aligned the sign wasn’t robust sufficient to extract something from it.

(*2*) stated Suzanne Dodd, the supervisor of the Voyager venture at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, in a assertion despatched to New Scientist. While catching the sign was sudden, the truth that the spacecraft itself is okay wasn’t a massive shock – it has been scudding alongside for 46 years, after all.

But if something had been to go fallacious, we’d don’t have any solution to ship any instructions to Voyager 2 whereas the antenna is pointed away from Earth. “We are now generating a new command to attempt to point the spacecraft antenna toward Earth,” stated Dodd. “There is a low probability that this will work.”

Even if it doesn’t work, all just isn’t misplaced – Voyager 2 is programmed to mechanically reset its orientation a few occasions a yr in case of conditions identical to this one. The subsequent automated reset can be on 15 October, and communication ought to resume then. Until then, the spacecraft’s operators will hold making an attempt to show it round and proceed to observe the heartbeat sign.