Incorrect instructions recently resulted in Voyager 2’s antenna pointing 2 degrees away from the line moving toward Earth, and NASA lost contact with the spacecraft. Twelve days have passed since this incident, and now the first step has been taken to re-establish communication.
Voyager 2 is now almost 20 billion kilometers, or 18.4 light-hours, from Earth. This makes communication difficult even under normal conditions, and considering the devices on Voyager are almost 50 years old, the situation is probably much worse than you might imagine. Even the fact that the spacecraft is still doing research for us can be seen as almost miraculous.
These factors also mean there isn’t much room for error, so contact with the spacecraft was lost on July 11 when a signal was sent to the spacecraft that moved the main antenna slightly away from Earth. NASA engineers were aware of such risks, and so Voyager 2 was scheduled to change course several times a year to try to find Earth, with the next effort in October.
But because no one wanted to wait that long and leave the vehicle on its own for two months, NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN) is trying to restore communications at an earlier date. On August 1, Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced that it had detected Voyager 2’s carrier signal in what it described as “like hearing the ‘heartbeat’ of the spacecraft.”
“The signal is too weak to receive data, but the detection confirms that the spacecraft is still operating,” says JPL. Unsurprisingly, the spacecraft continues on its expected path into interstellar space, as there is no obvious force that can steer it.
Instead of waiting until October, DSN will try to communicate again by sending Voyager 2 instructions telling it to re-orient its antenna now.
Voyager 2 stands out as the only spacecraft to visit four planetary systems (five if you count Earth), and the only space mission to still reach Uranus and Neptune, despite the growing appeals of the astronomy world.
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