NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft was again chatting it up on Friday.
| Photo Credit: Reuters
NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft was again chatting it up on Friday after flight controllers corrected a mistake that had led to weeks of silence.
Hurtling ever deeper into interstellar house billions of miles away, Voyager 2 stopped speaking two weeks in the past. Controllers despatched the incorrect command to the 46-year-old spacecraft and tilted its antenna away from Earth.
On Wednesday, NASA’s Deep Space Network despatched a brand new command in hopes of repointing the antenna, utilizing the very best powered transmitter on the enormous radio dish antenna in Australia. Voyager 2’s antenna wanted to be shifted a mere 2 levels.
It took greater than 18 hours for the command to attain Voyager 2 — greater than 12 billion miles (19 billion kilometres) away — and one other 18 hours to hear again.
The lengthy shot paid off. On Friday, the spacecraft began returning information once more, in accordance to officers at California’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
“I just sort of sighed. I melted in the chair,” challenge supervisor Suzanne Dodd instructed The Associated Press.
“Voyager’s back,” challenge scientist Linda Spilker chimed in.
Voyager 2 has been hurtling via house since its launch in 1977 to discover the outer photo voltaic system. Launched two weeks later, its twin, Voyager 1, is now probably the most distant spacecraft — 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometres) away — and nonetheless in contact.
The two-week outage was believed to be the longest NASA had gone with out listening to from Voyager 2, Ms. Dodd mentioned.
As lengthy as their plutonium energy holds, the Voyagers could also be alive and effectively for the fiftieth anniversary of their launch in 2027, in accordance to Ms. Dodd. Among the scientific tidbits they’ve beamed again lately embody particulars in regards to the interstellar magnetic area and the abundance of cosmic rays.
“We have been very clever over the last 10 years to eke out every single little watt,” Dodd mentioned. “Hopefully, one of them will make it to 50. But they are old and certainly events like this one that just happened scare the dickens out of me, as far as making that type of a milestone.”
