Historic success from NASA: Communication with Voyager 2 restored

In its statement, NASA announced that full connection was restored with the historical Voyager 2 spacecraft, which was disconnected. As it is known, a routine command sequence sent to the vehicle by NASA caused a 2-degree change in the antenna orientation of the spacecraft and communication was lost. As a result of intense efforts, NASA detected the heartbeat of Voyager 2 and sent new commands to the signal source. This move apparently worked.

Full communication with Voyager 2 established

NASA’s Voyager 2 was lost in space due to a faulty signal, but a command called the “interstellar shout” sent billions of kilometers away restored contact with the spacecraft after two weeks of silence.

Voyager 2, which left Earth about 46 years ago, stopped receiving or transmitting communications in July when the controllers inadvertently sent a command that shifted its antenna 2 degrees away from Earth. The US space agency said this week that NASA’s Deep Space Network, made up of giant radio antennas around the world, had received a weak signal, similar to a heartbeat, from the spacecraft. According to a statement from the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which manages the Voyager missions, engineers tried to send the spacecraft a new command to return to Earth with the most powerful transmitter in its huge dish in the Australian capital, Canberra.

In the statement made, it was determined that the command sent to Voyager 2, which is about 19.9 billion kilometers away, worked 37 hours later. Despite the speed of light, the command signals sent due to the distance of the vehicle to us reach the destination in 18.5 hours. Likewise, it takes that long for signals to reach us.

If these moves had not been successful, the Voyager 2 crew and NASA would have had to wait for the 46-year-old probe to automatically reset its course in October. Voyager 2, which marks its launch anniversary this month, set out to sail through the Solar System in 1977 and entered interstellar space in 2018, the region between the Sun’s heliosphere and the astrospheres of other stars. Voyager’s twin, Voyager 1, which is the only spacecraft to pass near Neptune and Uranus, is currently about 24 billion kilometers away and is the farthest spacecraft from Earth.