After two weeks of silence, NASA has just reestablished contact with Voyager 2, its far-flung spacecraft located billions of miles away in interstellar space.
Contact had been broken Voyager 2 when flight controllers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California accidentally entered a command for the vessel to tilt its antenna away from the Earth.
The team at NASA was relieved to capture a signal from the 46-year-old craft, but the problem of its antenna being poorly aligned remains.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory will try to send the correct command to Voyager 2’s location using the giant dish antenna based in Canberra, Australia, which is part of NASA’s Deep Space Network.
Yet there is little hope that flight controllers will be able to successfully issue the command, meaning it might go unfixed until October, when Voyager 2 automatically performs a system reset.
“That is a long time to wait, so we’ll try sending up commands,” wrote project manager Suzanne Dodd in an email to the Associated Press.
Launched in 1977, Voyager 2 is currently exploring the far reaches of space alongside its twin Voyager 1.
Its mission includes flying by Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.
In fact, Voyager 2 has already sent back eye-opening information about these planets, such as the existence of previously unknown moons and rings.
For instance, the craft was able to glean more information about the beginning and duration of the spoke season for Saturn’s rings, as previously covered in The Dallas Express. Resembling the spokes of a bicycle, the phenomenon is believed by scientists to correspond to Saturnian equinoxes, which occur about every 15 years.
As Voyager 2 continues its journey more than 12 billion miles away from Earth, Voyager 1 does the same even further out at a distance of 15 billion miles.
Contact with these distant vessels isn’t easy. Signals take over 18 hours to travel one way.