Washington, Aug 1 (AFP\/APP): NASA’s distant Voyager 2 probe has sent a “heartbeat” signal to Earth after mission control mistakenly cut contact, the US space agency said Tuesday.<\/p>\n
Launched in 1977 to explore the outer planets and serve as a beacon of humanity to the wider universe, it is currently more than 12.3 billion miles (19.9 billion kilometers) from our planet — well beyond the solar system.<\/p>\n
A series of planned commands sent to Voyager 2 on July 21 “inadvertently caused the antenna to point two degrees away from Earth,” NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) said in a recent update.<\/p>\n
This left it unable to transmit data or receive commands to its mission control — a situation that was not expected to be resolved until it conducted an automated re-orientation maneuver on October 15.<\/p>\n
But on Tuesday, Voyager project manager Suzanne Dodd told AFP the team enlisted the help of the Deep Space Network — an international array of giant radio antennas, plus a few that orbit Earth — in a last-ditch effort to re-establish contact sooner.<\/p>\n
To their surprise, “this was successful in that we see the ‘heartbeat’ signal from the spacecraft,” she said. “So we know the spacecraft is alive and operating. This buoyed our spirits.”<\/p>\n
But while engineers can now see a heartbeat — in technical terms, the carrier wave associated with Voyager 2 — they can’t yet read the information signal that shapes the carrier wave, which conveys all the data collected by the spacecraft.<\/p>\n
“We are now generating a new command to attempt to point the spacecraft antenna toward Earth,” Dodd added, although she said there is only a “low probability” it will work.<\/p>\n
Still, given October 15 is a long way away, NASA will keep trying to send up these commands?<\/p>\n
– Golden Record –<\/p>\n
While JPL built and operates Voyager spacecraft, the missions are now part of the NASA Heliophysics System Observatory.<\/p>\n
Voyager 2 left the protective magnetic bubble provided by the Sun, called the heliosphere, in December 2018, and is currently traveling through the space between the stars.<\/p>\n
Before leaving our solar system, it explored Jupiter and Saturn, and became the first and so far only spacecraft to visit Uranus and Neptune.
\nVoyager 2’s twin Voyager 1 was mankind’s first spacecraft to enter the interstellar medium, in 2012, and is currently almost 15 billion miles from Earth.<\/p>\n
Both Voyager spacecraft carry “Golden Records” — 12-inch, gold-plated copper disks intended to convey the story of our world to extraterrestrials.<\/p>\n
These include a map of our solar system, a piece of uranium that serves as a radioactive clock allowing recipients to date the spaceship’s launch, and symbolic instructions that convey how to play the record.<\/p>\n
The contents of the record, selected for NASA by a committee chaired by legendary astronomer Carl Sagan, include encoded images of life on Earth, as well as music and sounds that can be played using an included stylus.<\/p>\n
For now, the Voyagers continue to transmit back scientific data, though their power banks are expected to be eventually depleted, sometime after 2025.<\/p>\n
They will then continue to wander the Milky Way, potentially for eternity, in silence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Washington, Aug 1 (AFP\/APP): NASA’s distant Voyager 2 probe has sent a “heartbeat” signal to Earth after mission control mistakenly cut contact, the US space agency said Tuesday. Launched in 1977 to explore the outer planets and serve as a beacon of humanity to the […]<\/p>\n
\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":85623,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-85622","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-latest-technology-news"],"yoast_head":"\n