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“Voyager 2, this is the call of the Earth. Read?”
Last week, the answer was finally “yes”. And thankfully, after eight months of no communications, Voyager2 appears to be fine.
On October 29, NASA’s Deep Space Network communicated with the Voyager 2 spacecraft for the first time since March of this year. The only radio antenna powerful enough to send and receive the weak signals from the 43-year-old spacecraft is the antenna of the Deep Space Station 43 in Canberra, Australia, which is 70 meters (230 feet) wide. But the giant’s radio dish has been offline for repairs and updates.
Last week’s communications were part of a test of the new hardware, but the updates are not finished yet.
“The work was not completed on DSS43,” he said Richard Stephenson on Twitter. Stephenson works in operations at the Canberra space communications complex. “Shortly after confirming a good command link with Voyager 2, the engineering team returned to work on further structural updates. The antenna has yet to be optimized for X-Band which needs clear skies and a couple of weeks of work. “
NASA said it expects work to be completed in February 2021. Currently, it takes about 17 hours and 25 minutes for a signal to reach Voyager 2, and then the same amount of time before the spacecraft sends a signal to the Earth (You can see current data on the two Voyager spacecraft here.)
During repairs, the Voyager 2 was “flying by itself,” based on final commands received before the Canberra dish was taken offline. Voyager 2 returned a signal confirming that it received the “call” and executed the commands without problems.
Among the updates to DSS43 are two new radio transmitters. One of them, which is used to talk to Voyager 2, hasn’t been replaced for over 47 years. The engineers also upgraded the heating and cooling equipment, power equipment, and other electronic components needed to operate the new transmitters.
“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 over the edge,” said Brad Arnold, project manager DSN. at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab. “This test communication with Voyager 2 definitely tells us that things are in line with the work we are doing.”
The Deep Space Network is made up of radio antenna structures equally distributed around the world. They are located in Canberra; Goldstone, California; and Madrid, Spain. The placement of the three structures ensures that almost any spacecraft with a line of sight to Earth can communicate with at least one of the structures at any time.
However, the dish in Canberra is the only one capable of communicating with Voyager 2. To make a close flyby of Neptune’s moon Triton in 1989, the spacecraft flew over the planet’s north pole. That trajectory deflected it south from the plane of the planets, and it has been heading in that direction ever since. Now more than 11.6 billion miles (18.8 billion kilometers) from Earth, the spacecraft is so far south that it has no line of sight with radio antennas in the Northern Hemisphere.
The updates for DSS43 will also be useful for other deep space missions, notably the Perseverance rover landing on Mars on February 18, 2021.
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