NASA hears Voyager 2 ‘beats’ after blackout – 8/1/2023 – Science

The Voyager 2 probe, sent into space in 1977 and located 19.9 billion kilometers from Earth, sent a signal of its “heartbeat”, said NASA on Tuesday (1st), which mistakenly interrupted contact with his mythical spaceship.

A series of commands sent to Voyager 2 on July 21 “inadvertently caused the antenna to point two degrees from Earth,” a NASA laboratory said in a recent update.

This caused it to stop receiving orders and transmitting data to mission control, a situation with no prospect of resolution until October 15, the date of a programmed automatic reorientation maneuver.

However, the team made a last-ditch effort to re-establish contact as quickly as possible with the help of the Deep Space Network — an international set of giant radio antennas and others that orbit Earth —, he told AFP on Tuesday. Suzanne Dodd, Voyager project director.

And, to everyone’s surprise, it worked. The answer is yes “because we see the ‘heartbeat’ signal from spacecraft” launched to explore exoplanets and serve as a beacon for humanity, Dodd said.

“So we know the spacecraft is alive and working,” he said. She added that they have given new instructions for the spacecraft’s antenna to point at Earth, but there is a “low probability” that it will work.

As October 15th is far away, NASA will continue to try to transmit orders.

In 2018, Voyager 2 left the Sun’s protective bubble, called the heliosphere, to enter interstellar space.

Before leaving the solar system, it was the only probe to pass by Uranus and Neptune.

Its sister ship, Voyager 1, also launched in 1977, became the first spacecraft to enter interstellar space in 2012. It is currently about 24 billion kilometers from Earth.

The two probes carry recordings of sounds and images of Earth on gold and copper plates.