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An artist’s impression of NASA’s Voyager spacecraft
NASA/JPL
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 space since then. It’s now the second-most distant spacecraft from Earth after its sibling craft, Voyager 1, which is sort of 24 billion kilometres away. A number of 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 have been, a minimum of, 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 alerts from the spacecraft weren’t reaching satellite dishes on the ground, and operators couldn’t ship any alerts to attempt to flip it again in the direction of us.
Fortunately, they aren’t fully in the dead of night. On 31 July, NASA detected a faint trace of what’s referred to as a “service sign” from Voyager 2. Usually, 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.
“We see the ‘heartbeat’ sign from the spacecraft… so we all know the spacecraft is alive and working,” mentioned Suzanne Dodd, the supervisor of the Voyager mission at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, in an announcement despatched to New Scientist. Whereas catching the sign was surprising, the truth that the spacecraft itself is okay wasn’t a giant shock – it has been scudding alongside for 46 years, in any case.
But when something have been to go fallacious, we’d haven’t any technique to ship any instructions to Voyager 2 whereas the antenna is pointed away from Earth. “We at the moment are producing a brand new command to try to level the spacecraft antenna towards Earth,” mentioned Dodd. “There’s a low chance that it will work.”
Even when it doesn’t work, all isn’t misplaced – Voyager 2 is programmed to robotically reset its orientation a couple of occasions a 12 months in case of conditions identical to this one. The subsequent automated reset will likely be on 15 October, and communication ought to resume then. Till then, the spacecraft’s operators will preserve making an attempt to show it round and proceed to watch the heartbeat sign.
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