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Voyager 2 calls home! [1]
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Date: 2023-08-04
The Voyager 2 spacecraft, traveling on its own for over 46 years, now 19.8 billion km away, managed to call back home today and let us know that all is well.
The announcement from www.jpl.nasa.gov/… —
The agency’s Deep Space Network facility in Canberra, Australia, sent the equivalent of an interstellar “shout” more than 12.3 billion miles (19.9 billion kilometers) to Voyager 2, instructing the spacecraft to reorient itself and turn its antenna back to Earth. With a one-way light time of 18.5 hours for the command to reach Voyager, it took 37 hours for mission controllers to learn whether the command worked. At 12:29 a.m. EDT on Aug. 4, the spacecraft began returning science and telemetry data, indicating it is operating normally and that it remains on its expected trajectory.
You may ask what happened? Did we lose the venerable Voyager 2 spacecraft?
In case you were unaware, Earth had lost contact with the NASA Voyager 2 spacecraft on July 21. Apparently, a series of planned commands were sent to the spacecraft on that fateful day, which inadvertently caused the spacecraft and its antenna to point away by 2 degrees. NASA was no longer able to send commands or to receive data from Voyager 2 via its Deep Space Network (DSN) station in Canberra, Australia.
Mistakes happen and good designs even anticipate them. Voyager 2 is programmed to reset its orientation periodically to keep its antenna pointing at Earth; the next reset is planned to occur on Oct 15, which would have restored communications.
Meanwhile, NASA engineers worked out a scheme to send some commands using the 70 meter dish in Canberra on Aug 3, at a higher power than normal, hoping that Voyager 2 with its mispointed antenna could pick up and decode the signal. Mispointed parabolic dishes can receive signals although they are much weaker than from a properly pointed antenna. It took 18.5 hours for the signal to travel to Voyager 2 and 18.5 hours for any signal from Voyager 2 to arrive at earth.
Lo behold, 37 hours later, Canberra today detected a normal signal from Voyager 2, indicating that it had received the commands, reoriented itself and was reporting its status.
Kudos to NASA engineers and scientists and those at the DSN for their foresight, ingenuity and perseverance in restoring normal communications and operations with Voyager 2 in such a short time.
And hats-off to the designers of the spacecraft and its 1960s technology and computer systems, that are still (mostly) functioning after 46 years in the cold harsh environment of space.
The Voyager Spacecraft
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