2023-08-04 21:30:29
It’s the end of a big scare: NASA announced on Friday that it had fully restored communications with its legendary Voyager 2 probe, following inadvertently interrupting them at the end of July. It is the only spacecraft to have flown over Uranus and Neptune.
The probe, launched into space in 1977 and currently located 19.9 billion kilometers from Earth, is “operating normally” and has remained “on its expected trajectory”, the US space agency said in a statement.
Commands sent on July 21 had mistakenly pointed the ship’s antenna in the wrong direction, away from Earth, interrupting data communication.
This week, NASA confirmed that it had succeeded in detecting the signal from Voyager 2 thanks to the “deep space network”, an international network of antennas, indicating that it was in “good health”. Then the “equivalent of an interstellar cry” was sent, “ordering the probe to reorient itself and return its antenna to Earth”, NASA explained on Friday.
Little chance of success
The scientists explained that this technique was unlikely to work, but it finally paid off. Given the distance at which Voyager 2 is, the command took just over 18 hours to reach it, and it took the same amount of time before being able to be sure of the result, NASA explained.
If this method had not worked, NASA hoped that an automatic reorientation maneuver would solve the problem, but this was not expected until a distant date, in October.
The US space agency is now receiving science and telemetry (distance measurement) data from the probe once more, she confirmed.
Flyby of Uranus and Neptune
Voyager 2 left the protective bubble of the Sun, called the heliosphere, in 2018 to enter interstellar space. Before leaving the solar system, it became the only probe to fly over Uranus and Neptune.
Its twin Voyager 1, also launched in 1977, became the first craft to enter interstellar space in 2012 and is currently regarding 24 billion kilometers from Earth. The two probes, mythical NASA missions, each carry recordings of sounds and images of the Earth on gold and copper plates.
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