After a seven-month hiatus without ordering Voyager 2, NASA is now able to communicate new directions and procedures to the craft, the agency announced.
Voyager 2 is a Voyager 2 space probe launched in 1977 Traveling outside for more than 43 years than visiting Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.
Repairs and upgrades by a team at NASA March Work on the Deep Space Station 43 in Canberra, Australia, has been underway since mid-March. That station is the only antenna in the world capable of communicating with the probe. This is due to the position of Voyager 2 in deep space, the location of the antenna in the Southern Hemisphere and the fact that it can interface with the 1970s technology of antenna probe.
Rators Porter was making the necessary repairs to his dish, which measures around 70 meters or 230 feet. One of its two radio transmitters has not been upgraded in 47 years.
On Thursday night, mission administrators sent a test signal to Voyager 2, which is now in international space. The craft pulled back Monday morning. Voyager 2 Accepted the signal and executed the command sent by the mission controllers.
“What makes this work unique is that we’re working on all levels of antennas, from ground level pedals to feedcons (which are the home parts of antenna receivers) that extend to the center of the dish.” Above the rim, Brad Arnold, project manager for the Deep Space Network, said.
He added in a news release, “This test communication with Voyager 2 certainly shows that things are on track with the work we are doing.”
The improvements are expected to be completed in February 2021.
In the international space
After achieving that feat in 2012 with its two pairs of Voyager 1, Voyager 2 became the second man-made craft to cross international space in 2018.
Although mission operators could not give orders to Voroger 2 for the duration of the coronavirus epidemic, they have continued to receive sensor data from the investigation. Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are both just outside the heliosphere, a bubble of magnetic field and particles formed by the sun.
“We’ve always been talking to the spacecraft,” said Suzanne Dode, director of JPL’s Interplanetary Networks Directorate and project manager for the Voyager Interstellar mission. We are doing that every day. “We can see his health. If he wasn’t healthy, we would have known.”
However, during repairs, If there was even a problem issue with the craft, NASA had no way of telling him quickly to adjust the course.
Because the Voyager 1 and 2’s onboard systems are very old, they have 200,000 times less memory than smartphones, she explained. That ancient technique, with less complexity, could be a boon to the longevity of the probe, strong for more than four decades.
“This is one of the reasons they last so long, just because they’re so easy,” he said. “The Voyagers have an excellent track record. The spacecraft is remarkably resilient.”
That resilience enables humanity to keep getting new information about the outer edges of our solar system. And that data is a reminder that beyond tribe and class and ideology and political party, we are all part of something infinitely glorious.
From Voyager 2’s point of view, all our struggles are endless, turning to us, waiting for the election results.
As he wrote in 1994 in his book “Pale Blue Dot”, “there is probably no better display of the folly of human imagination than this distant image of our small world.”
“For me it shows our responsibility to treat each other more kindly and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dots, which is the only home we know of.”
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