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 sort of 20 billion kilometres away from Earth. Now, operators have heard from Voyager 2 once more – the spacecraft continues to be working, however they’re nonetheless struggling to regain full communication.

Voyager 2 launched in 1977 and has been hurtling in the direction of the outer edges of the photo voltaic system and into interstellar area since then. It is now the second-most distant spacecraft from Earth after its sibling craft, Voyager 1, which is sort of 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 least, till 21 July, when a collection 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 alerts from the spacecraft weren’t reaching satellite tv for pc dishes on the bottom, and operators couldn’t ship any alerts to attempt to flip it again in the direction of us.

Thankfully, they aren’t fully at midnight. 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 comprise real-time knowledge from the spacecraft, however as a result of it isn’t aligned the sign wasn’t sturdy sufficient to extract something from it.

“We see the ‘heartbeat’ signal from the spacecraft… so we know the spacecraft is alive and operating,” mentioned Suzanne Dodd, the supervisor of the Voyager venture at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, in a press release despatched to New Scientist. While catching the sign was sudden, the truth that the spacecraft itself is okay wasn’t a giant shock – it has been scudding alongside for 46 years, in spite of everything.

But if something had been to go mistaken, we might haven’t any method 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,” mentioned 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 routinely reset its orientation just a few instances a 12 months in case of conditions similar to this one. The subsequent automated reset will probably 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.