NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft is alone drifting through interstellar space after a communications breakdown left it unable to receive commands or transmit data back to Earth.
Communications with Voyager 2, which is currently around 12.4 billion miles (19.9 billion kilometers) from Earth, were severed because of this of planned commands. These commands rotated the spacecraft’s antenna two degrees away from our planet, enough to chop its links to the bottom antennas of NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN).
Because of this, Voyager 2 isn’t any longer sending data back to the DSN, and mission control on Earth cannot send any commands back to the interstellar spacecraft.
Not all is lost, nevertheless. Voyager 2, launched in 1977, is programmed to reset its orientation several times a yr to maintain its antenna directed at Earth. One other reset is scheduled for Oct. 15 this yr, and this could lead to Voyager 2 resuming contact with its ground control. Until that point, operators expect the spacecraft to follow its planned trajectory.
Voyager 2 was launched from Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral, Florida, on August 20, 1977. It made history on Dec. 10, 2018, when it became the second spacecraft to depart the solar system and enter interstellar space.
Six years prior to this, its sister craft Voyager 1 became the primary man-made craft to journey beyond the influence of our star, the sun. Voyager 1 is currently around 15 billion miles (24 billion km) from Earth and stays involved with our planet.
Each Voyager 1 and a pair of were designed to search out and study objects at the sting of the solar system, in keeping with NASA. In the middle of doing this, Voyager 2 has been accountable for plenty of scientific firsts. It’s the only spacecraft that has conducted close-up studies of all 4 giant planets of the solar system — the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn and the ice giants Neptune and Uranus.
In Jan. 1986, Voyager 2 became the primary human-made object to fly past Uranus. During that trip, Voyager 2 discovered 10 latest moons and two latest rings across the ice giant. In Aug. 1989, it also became the primary spacecraft to buzz past Neptune, and while there, it discovered five moons and 4 rings. While studying Neptune, Voyager 2 also discovered an 8,100-mile by 4,100-mile (13,036 km by 6,600 km) cyclonic storm with winds of as much as 1,300 miles per hour (2,092 km/h) raging on the ice giant, which has been dubbed the Great Dark Spot.
In April 2023, NASA announced that Voyager 2 would postpone a planned instrument shutdown by at the least three years, continuing to collect worthwhile deep space data until at the least 2026.
“We’re definitely fascinated with keeping as many science instruments operating so long as possible,” Voyager project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in southern California, Linda Spilker, said in a press release issued on Wednesday, April 26.