2023-08-05 22:45:13
According to the space agency, this was possible thanks to an ‘interstellar scream’ that straightened the direction of its antenna.
Divulgation/NASA Contact with the probe had been lost two weeks ago
A Nasa re-established contact with the Voyager 2 spacecraft lost 19 billion km from Terra. This was possible thanks to an “interstellar scream” that straightened the orientation of its antenna, according to information from the US space agency itself. USA, this Friday, 4. The probe was launched in 1977 with the mission to explore the outer planets and serve as a kind of lighthouse from humanity to the universe. The ship is over 19.9 billion from the planet, far beyond the solar system. On July 21, a series of commands sent to the probe caused the antenna to perform a two-degree deviation. This ended up compromising the sending and receiving of signals from Earth, putting its mission in jeopardy.
The new contact was a surprise. The forecast is that a new contact could occur until October 15th. On this date, it was predicted that Voyager 2 would perform a realignment maneuver. On Tuesday, the 1st, however, the engineers got the help of several terrestrial observatories that form the Deep Space Network and identified a carrier wave from Voyager 2, a kind of “heartbeat” of the spacecraft. The emitted signal was weak, making it impossible to read the data it carried, but it was still of great relevance. On Friday, the 2nd, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) of the space agency said that it was successful in sending instructions that righted the spacecraft. “The Deep Space Network facility at the Canberra agency” in Australia sent out the equivalent of an “interstellar scream,” JPL reported. “With a one-way light time of 18.5 hours for the instructions to reach Voyager, it took mission controllers 37 hours to know if the order had worked,” the lab added. “The Deep Space Network used the highest power transmitter to send the order and timed it to be sent during the best antenna tracking pass conditions in order to maximize the spacecraft’s possible reception of the order,” Suzanne Dodd told AFP. , director of the Voyager project.
As a result, the spacecraft began returning scientific and telemetry data at 12:29 pm Eastern time in the United States last Friday, 4 (11:29 am Brasília time), “indicating that it is operating normally and that it remains on its expected trajectory. ,” he told JPL.
*With information from AFP
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