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NASA just greeted its Voyager 2 probe in interstellar space for the first time in more than seven months.
Voyager 2 operators transmitted a series of test commands to the spacecraft on Thursday (Oct. 29) using the Deep Space Station 43 (DSS43) radio antenna in Canberra, Australia. Voyager 2 confirmed that he had recorded the instructions and carried them out without incident, NASA officials said in an update on Monday (Nov.2).
The commands were the first NASA had transmitted to Voyager 2 since mid-March, when the 70-meter (230-foot) wide DSS43 went offline for repairs and updates. This ongoing maintenance work is extensive and involves, among other things, the addition of two new radio transmitters, including one used to communicate with Voyager 2.
Voyager at 40:40 pics of NASA’s epic “grand tour” mission
That particular transmitter hadn’t been replaced in more than 47 years, NASA officials said.
“What makes this task unique is that we are working at all levels of the antenna, from the pedestal at ground level to the feedcones in the center of the dish that extend above the edge,” Brad Arnold, of Jet Propulsion Lab at NASA in Southern California, he said in Monday’s update.
“This test communication with Voyager 2 definitely tells us that things are in line with the work we are doing,” said Arnold, the NASA project manager. Deep Space Network (DSN).
The work, which will benefit communications with a wide range of NASA spacecraft, is expected to conclude in February 2021, agency officials said.
The DSN is a network of radio antennas in three different locations more or less equidistant: Canberra; Madrid, Spain; and Goldstone, California, which NASA uses to communicate with its distant spaceship. The Canberra site includes three smaller antennas that together can receive spacecraft relays, so the Voyager 2 team was able to keep the distant probe in check even as the work of the DSS43 prevented them from sending commands.
And Voyager 2 cannot be recalled using DSN equipment in Spain and California – the spacecraft is moving downward from the Earth’s orbital plane and can only be reached from the southern hemisphere.
Voyager 2 and its twin, Voyager 1, launched a few weeks later in 1977 to conduct an epic “grand tour” of the giant planets of the solar system. The two probes have completed this unprecedented task; Voyager 1 flew to Jupiter and Saturn and Voyager 2 had close encounters with Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. (Neptune’s flyby, which included a close look at the planet’s largest moon, Triton, is what sent Voyager to head “south,” by the way.)
And then the Voyagers kept flying. Voyager 1 entered interstellar space in August 2012, becoming the first man-made object to do so. Voyager 2 followed suit in late 2018.
Both spacecraft are still going strong, giving scientists their first close look at the interstellar medium, the huge expanse of deep space beyond the sun’s sphere of influence. However, the nuclear-powered Voyagers are running out of juice, so mission team members have shut down several instruments on the probes in recent years to maximize their operational lives. Both spacecraft should have enough power to maintain data collection until 2024mission team members said.
Voyager 1 is currently approximately 14.1 billion miles (22.7 billion kilometers) from Earth and Voyager 2 is 11.7 billion miles (18.8 billion km) from us. Therefore, a command from mission control takes approximately 21 hours to get to Voyager 1 and almost 17.5 hours to reach Voyager 2.
Mike Wall is the author of “Out there“(Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.
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