CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — After weeks of silence, NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft resumed communication on Friday following a correction made by flight controllers. Hurtling deeper into interstellar space billions of miles away, Voyager 2 had stopped communicating due to a mistake made by controllers who inadvertently tilted its antenna away from Earth.
On Wednesday, NASA’s Deep Space Network sent a new command to realign the spacecraft’s antenna, using the powerful transmitter at the massive radio dish antenna in Australia. The adjustment required a mere 2-degree shift.
It took over 18 hours for the command to reach Voyager 2, which is over 12 billion miles (19 billion kilometers) away, and an additional 18 hours to receive a response.
The gamble paid off. On Friday, officials at California’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory confirmed that Voyager 2 had started transmitting data once again.
“I just sort of sighed. I melted in the chair,” said project manager Suzanne Dodd, expressing her relief. “Voyager’s back,” project scientist Linda Spilker added.
Since its launch in 1977, Voyager 2 has been on a mission to explore the outer solar system. Its twin, Voyager 1, launched two weeks later, is now the farthest spacecraft from Earth at a distance of 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers), and it remains in contact.
The two-week communication outage marks the longest period without contact with Voyager 2, according to Dodd.
As long as their plutonium power source lasts, the Voyager spacecrafts may still be operational and thriving by the time of their 50th launch anniversary in 2027. Suzanne Dodd believes that the Voyagers have been very resourceful in conserving power over the past decade. Their recent transmissions have contributed valuable scientific insights on the interstellar magnetic field and the abundance of cosmic rays.
“We’ve been very clever over the last 10 years to maximize the usage of every watt,” said Dodd. “Hopefully, one of them will make it to 50. But they are old, and incidents like this one that just occurred are worrisome in terms of achieving such a milestone.”
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