CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft was back chatting it up Friday after flight controllers corrected a mistake that had led to weeks of silence.
Hurtling ever deeper into interstellar space billions of miles away, Voyager 2 stopped communicating two weeks ago. Controllers sent the wrong command to the 46-year-old spacecraft and tilted its antenna away from Earth.
On Wednesday, NASA’s Deep Space Network sent a new command to repoint the antenna, using the highest-powered transmitter at the massive radio dish antenna in Australia. Voyager 2’s antenna needed to be shifted a mere 2 degrees.
(FILES) This 1977 NASA file image obtained 29 August 2002 shows a gold aluminum cover that was designed to protect the Voyager 1 and 2 "Sounds of Earth" gold-plated records from micrometeorite bombardment but also serves a double purpose in providing the finder a key to playing the record. NASA's Voyager 2 probe has signaled it is in "good health" after mission control mistakenly cut contact for several days, the space agency said in its latest update. Launched in 1977 as a beacon from humanity to the wider Universe, it is currently more than 12.3 billion miles (19.9 billion kilometers) from our planet, exploring interstellar space along with its twin, Voyager 1. A series of planned commands sent to Voyager 2 on July 21, 2023, "inadvertently caused the antenna to point two degrees away from Earth," NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) said in a recent update.
A gold aluminum cover that was designed to protect the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 "Sounds of Earth" gold-plated records from micrometeorite bombardment also serves a double purpose in providing the finder a key to playing the record.NASA via AFP - Getty Images file
It took more than 18 hours for the command to reach Voyager 2 — more than 12 billion miles (19 billion kilometers) away — and another 18 hours to hear back.
The long shot paid off. On Friday, the spacecraft started returning data again, according to officials at California’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
“I just sort of sighed. I melted in the chair,” project manager Suzanne Dodd told The Associated Press.
“Voyager’s back,” project scientist Linda Spilker chimed in.
The two-week outage was believed to be the longest NASA had gone without hearing from Voyager 2, Dodd said.
As long as their plutonium power holds, the Voyagers may be alive and well for the 50th anniversary of their launch in 2027, according to Dodd. Among the scientific tidbits they’ve beamed back in recent years include details about the interstellar magnetic field and the abundance of cosmic rays.
“We’ve been very clever over the last 10 years to eke out every single little watt,” Dodd said. “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.”
