On July 21, a series of instructions sent by NASA to the Voyager 2 space probe caused its antenna to deviate by mistake by about 2 degrees. As a consequence, the antenna was misaligned with Earth and contact with the spacecraft was lost.
Although Voyager 2 continues to function and transmit data, the data cannot reach NASA’s tracking network. And the ship can’t receive communications either, so it’s not possible to send it a sequence of instructions to correct the problem.
However, not all hope is lost, since after several days of silence, NASA’s Deep Space Network antenna network has captured a “heartbeat” from the probe, project manager Suzanne Dodd reported on Tuesday. The ship, launched into space 46 years ago, has shown signs of life, news that has “buoyed up” the team, Dodd said.
Now the perspectives of those responsible for NASA are focused on the proper functioning of the antenna re-orientation mechanism, a procedure that Voyager 2 executes periodically and autonomously several times a year. According to NASA, the next activation of the process will take place on October 15.
The twin Voyager probes are the farthest spacecraft humanity has. Launched into space in 1977 about 2 weeks apart, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are 23.9 and 19.9 billion km away from Earth respectively. Voyager 1 communications take 22 hours and 12 minutes to reach our planet, and those of its twin 18 hours and 28 minutes.
After nearly 46 years, Voyager is still running and sending data back to Earth. Approximately half of its 10 scientific instruments are operational, and from their measurements it is known that both spacecraft have entered what is known as the interstellar region, the space where the solar wind and magnetic field of our star stop be dominant
NASA forecasts suggest that Voyager 1 has enough power to continue operating until the year 2040, and in the case of Voyager 2, reserves are expected to last until 2034.
The Voyager missions represent one of the greatest successes of space exploration. Its main objective was the exploration of the 4 large gaseous planets of the Solar System, taking advantage of a rare alignment that occurs every 175 years and that allowed it to jump from one planet to the next in low-power trajectories. This jumping mechanism is called gravity assist, and takes advantage of the close passage by a planet to correct the trajectory and accelerate it towards the next objective, as if it were a game of billiards.
To design the mission and take advantage of the planetary alignment, NASA engineers analyzed more than 10,000 possible orbits for Voyager. Ultimately the chosen trajectories took Voyager 1 to Jupiter (including a close pass by one of the planet’s most spectacular moons, Io), then to Saturn and its largest satellite, Titan, and finally to the outer reaches of the Solar System.
For its part, Voyager 2 consecutively visited Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune before also heading to the outermost regions of the Solar System. In this way, Voyager 2 became the only mission that, so far, has come close to Uranus (January 1986) and Neptune (August 1989).
The margins of error allowed by Voyager’s trajectories were tiny. For example, the first pass by Jupiter, located 800 million km away, had to be carried out with a precision of 100 km.
The Voyager probes carry a series of messages and information about our world, in what would be a time capsule destined for a potential civilization that, in the future, could capture and analyze them.
Specifically, the ships carry two separate gold records in which music and images of the Earth are recorded, as well as greetings in various languages.
Instructions for decoding the contents appear on the cover of the discs, as well as representations that locate our solar system based on the position of some reference astronomical objects. They also include a uranium-238 element that allows, based on the analysis of its radioactive decay, to calculate the age of the probes.
