NASA
The Voyager 2 spacecraft has been on Earth for more than 43 years, and is now located in astronomical units from our planet. Which is 125 times the distance between the earth and the sun.
Understandably, this distance makes it difficult for NASA to communicate with its distant spacecraft – there is a delay of more than 17 hours. However, with Voyager 2, there is another complication in talking to the spacecraft.
After flying through Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus, Voyager 2 made a flyby of the last planets past Neptune in August 1989. Scientists were also interested in flying through Neptune’s fascinating moon Triton, so they ordered Voyager 2 to fly over Neptune at Triton’s North Pole. This route took him southward relative to the Solar System plane and he continued to book it southward.
This is the result of interacting with NASA’s Deep Space Network on Earth, which features three large radio antennas worldwide in California, Spain and Australia. Typically, this geographic spread still enables all of NASA’s spacecraft, capable of communicating with at least one feature at a time.
But, with Voyager 2 sinking too far south of the Solar System, it can now only communicate via a line of sight with a 70-meter-wide antenna in Canberra, Australia. Since the facility is nearly five decades old, it needed to be refurbished and upgraded starting in March, and has been offline since then. The work is expected to be completed in February, so NASA has been unable to send signals to Voyager 2 since then.
Last week, Voyager mission managers were able to send a series of signals to the spacecraft for the first time since March, to test the newly installed hardware on the big dish. Voyager 2 responded that it had indeed received signals and executed NASA commands, the space agency says.
It’s generally good for NASA and science, as Voyager 2 (along with Voyager 1) is now moving out of the solar system, into interstellar space. Outside of the black color outside, Voyager 2 will continue to provide data about the speed, density, temperature, and pressure of charged particles in the intercellular medium.
