NASA contact with lost Voyager 2 spacecraft

Multimedia

5-08-2023, 22:59

INA - SOURCES

NASA’s Voyager 2 was lost in space because of a mixed signal, but a command dubbed an “interstellar shout” and beamed across billions of miles has restored contact with the spacecraft after two weeks of silence.

Voyager 2, which left Earth nearly 46 years ago, stopped receiving or transmitting communications in July, when controllers accidentally sent a command that shifted its antenna 2 degrees away from Earth.

This week, NASA’s Deep Space Network, which consists of giant radio antennas around the world, picked up a carrier signal from the spacecraft or what the mission team likened to a “heartbeat” that was too faint to pinpoint the probe but confirmed it was still operating, the U.S. space agency said.

So, engineers tried to send the spacecraft a command to orient itself back at Earth, and they used the highest-powered transmitter at NASA’s huge dish in the Australian capital, Canberra, according to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which manages the Voyager missions.