Nasa misplaced communication with the Voyager 2 spacecraft on July 21. The spacecraft, presently located almost 20 billion kilometres away from Earth, has since re-established contact with operators. Whereas it’s nonetheless operational, full communication has not but been restored.
For a number of days following July twenty first, Nasa was unsure in regards to the spacecraft’s standing. It was not till August 1 that a number of floor antennas from the Deep Area Community (DSN) detected a service sign from the probe.
The spacecraft makes use of a service sign to transmit information again to Earth. Nonetheless, Nasa confirmed that the sign detected by DSN was too weak to ship any info. Even so, the sign was sufficient to make sure that Voyager 2 was functioning and nonetheless on track.
Nasa detected a faint “service sign” from Voyager 2 on July 31. This sign would usually include real-time information if the antenna was accurately aligned. Nonetheless, because it wasn’t aligned correctly, the sign wasn’t robust sufficient to extract any info from it.
Slightly than ready till October, the Voyager group on the bottom determined to take motion. They developed a plan to ship a command to the spacecraft utilizing the DSN, instructing it to show its antenna again in the direction of Earth. It took 18.5 hours for the message to succeed in the probe and one other 18.5 hours for Nasa to obtain science and telemetry information, confirming that Voyager 2 had obtained the command.
Voyager 2 was launched again in 1977, and it has been travelling towards the outer edges of the photo voltaic system and into interstellar house ever since. It’s presently the second-most distant spacecraft from Earth, with Voyager 1 being virtually 24 billion kilometres away. Regardless of being launched 46 years in the past, a few of its scientific devices, reminiscent of its magnetometer and cosmic ray detector, are nonetheless functioning and transmitting information again to Earth.
Nasa predicts each Voyager 1 and a couple of will stay related with the DSN till 2036, they state that the gathering of “science information will not possible be collected after 2025.”
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