CAPE
FLORIDA'S CANAVERAL- NASA has received communication from Voyager 2 in
interstellar space, billions of miles away, after days of silence.
Nearly two
weeks ago, a mistaken command from the flight controllers caused the
spacecraft's antenna to tilt away from Earth, breaking contact.
Project
manager Suzanne Dodd said in an email on Tuesday that NASA's Deep Space Network,
a vast network of radio antennae, detected a "heartbeat signal,"
indicating that the 46-year-old craft is still alive and functional.
The news, according to Dodd, "buoyed our hearts." The flight engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California will immediately turn Voyager 2's antenna back toward Earth.
If the command fails, which the controllers doubt will happen, they will have to wait until October for an autonomous spacecraft reset.
We'll
attempt sending up commands a few times before then because that is a long time
to wait, Dodd added.
Together
with its identical twin, Voyager 1, Voyager 2 was launched into orbit in 1977
on a mission to study the outer planets.
The furthest
distant spacecraft, Voyager 1, is still operating normally and is presently 15
billion miles (24 billion kilometers) beyond Earth.
Voyager 2 is orbiting the Earth at a distance of almost 12 billion miles (19 billion kilometers), following its twin in interstellar space. A signal must travel one
way across that distance for more than 18 hours.
0 Comments