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(MENAFN – Gulf Times) Here are some interesting news recently from deep space (starting from a distance of 2mn km from the earth’s surface). Voyager 2, the oldest working and operational spacecraft launched 43 years ago, broke its radio silence of nearly eight months last week. This has been the longest radio silence in the past three decades as the only radio antenna capable of controlling Voyager 2 has been offline since March as it receives new hardware.
The record-breaking interstellar space probe, launched on August 20, 1977 and which is expected to remain operational until at least 2025, is gathering data from the frontiers of our solar system as it traverses interstellar space, which it reached in November 2018. It carries a message to the cosmos: a gold record with music and other sounds from Earth, just like its twin, Voyager 1.
On October 29, mission operators sent a series of commands to NASA’s Voyager 2 space probe for the first time since mid-March. The spacecraft flew by itself while the 70-meter-wide Deep Space Station 43 (DSS43) radio antenna in Canberra, Australia was offline for repairs and upgrades. Voyager 2 returned a signal confirming that it received the call and executed the commands without any problems.
The call to Voyager 2 was a test of the new hardware recently installed on DSS43, part of NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN), a collection of radio antennas around the world used primarily to communicate with spacecraft operating beyond the moon. Since the antenna went offline, mission operators have been able to receive health updates and scientific data from Voyager 2, but have not been able to send commands to the distant probe, which has traveled billions of kilometers from the Earth since its launch. The success of the call to Voyager 2 is just an indication that the dish will be back online in February 2021.
The DSN consists of radio antenna structures equally distributed throughout the world 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. Voyager 2 is the rare exception. 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 18.8 billion km from Earth, the spacecraft is so far south that it has no line of sight to radio antennas in the Northern Hemisphere. DSS43 is the only dish in the southern hemisphere that has a powerful enough transmitter and that transmits the right frequency to send commands to the distant spacecraft.
Voyager 2’s faster twin, Voyager 1, took a different route after Saturn and can communicate via antennas at the two DSN facilities in the Northern Hemisphere. The antennas must uplink commands to both Voyagers in a radio frequency range called the S-band, and the antennas downlink the data from the spacecraft in a range called the X-band. Although mission operators were unable to command Voyager 2 Since DSS43 went offline, the three 34 m (111 ft) wide radio antennas at the Canberra facility can be used together to capture the signals that Voyager 2 sends Earth to. The spacecraft is sending scientific data from interstellar space, or from the region outside the heliosphere of our Sun, the protective bubble of particles and magnetic fields created by the Sun that surrounds the planets and the Kuiper belt (the collection of small icy bodies beyond the orbit of Neptune).
Repairs to DSS43 will benefit other missions, including the Mars Perseverance rover, which will land on the Red Planet on February 18, 2021. The network will also play a pivotal role in Moon-to-Mars exploration efforts, ensuring communication and navigation support for both the Moon and Mars precursor missions and the manned Artemis missions.
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