After weeks of silence, NASA restores contact with the 47-year-old Voyager 2 spacecraft,interstellar
After weeks of silence, NASA finally managed to communicate with its 46-year-old Voyager 2 spacecraft on Friday. Communication was restored after flight controller corrected a mistake that led to weeks of silence. Two weeks ago, VOyager 2 stopped communicating because of a wrong command sent by controllers to the space craft.
Another thing that blocked the communication was the tilting of its antenna away from Earth. On Wednesday, NASA's Deep Space Network sent a new command in hopes of repointing the antenna. This was made possible by using the highest powered transmitter at the huge radio dish antenna in Australia.
A mere 2 degree of deviation from the correct angle led to weeks of non-communication. The command reached after more than 18 hours to Voyager 2, which is located more than 12 billion miles away. After reaching Voyager 2, it took additional 18 hours for the signal to come back.
However, the long journey and patients proved to be of all the worth when spacecraft started returning data on Friday, 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 said. Voyager 2 has been hurtling through space since its launch in 1977 to explore the outer solar system. Its twin, Voyager 1, is currently the most distant spacecraft, located 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometres) away.
It is still in contact. It is worth noting that the two-week outage is one of the longest outage between NASA and Voyager 2. Project manager Suzanne Dodd said that due to the plutonium in the spacecraft, Voyager will continue to function well for the 50th anniversary of their
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