2023-08-02 12:46:14
Voyager 2 is not lost in interstellar space, NASA announced yesterday. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) of the US space agency confirmed on Twitter that it has detected weak radio signals of the veteran probe, “something like listening to the heartbeat of the ship”, and that this confirms that the ship is still in good condition and issuing information from outside the Solar System. What happens is that this information no longer reaches Earth correctly, due to human error that occurred two weeks ago.
On July 21, a series of routine commands sent to Voyager 2 inadvertently caused its main antenna to drift 2 degrees. As the probe is almost 20,000 million kilometers from Earth, a small error is enough for the signal not to reach Earth and is lost in a vacuum: that is why communication between the probe and the antennas of the Network has been interrupted. of Deep Space, which receive their signals at various points on the planet. “Voyager 2 is currently not capable of receiving instructions or transmitting information back to Earth,” as NASA had explained in a statement last Friday.
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Finally, late this Tuesday, the Canberra (Australia) antenna picked up a weak signal from the Voyager 2 beacon. This confirmed that the disconnection was not due to a fault and that the on-board equipment continues to transmit. Although the situation has not changed, since the waves detected are so weak that they do not allow information to be transmitted, this novelty opens the hope of recovering contact in the coming days.
The Canberra antenna has continued issuing commands in the general direction of Voyager 2 (launched in 1977, it is the oldest active). After all, its course hasn’t changed: it continues to recede at the impressive speed of almost 1.5 million kilometers per day (it is one of the fastest human ships ever built). The idea is that if the ship hears any of those signals, perhaps it could regain orientation. But it’s still too early to tell if that emergency maneuver will work. Although they are very short command sequences, traveling at the speed of light they take 18 hours to reach Voyager 2; and should the reorientation work, it would take another 18 hours for the signals from the space probe to travel back to Earth, again correctly.
If the contact does not recover like this in the next few days, we would have to wait until October 15. For that date, an automatic maneuver was already programmed, which is carried out several times a year, so that the probe itself can autonomously reestablish its position facing the Sun. And about 20,000 million kilometers away, the Earth looks so near the Sun, that will allow the link to be reacquired (provided Voyager 2 completes its autocorrect successfully).
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