CNN Indonesia
Saturday, 05 Aug 2023 07:30 WIB
Voyager 2 finally communicated smoothly. (nasa.gov web screenshot)
Jakarta, CNN Indonesia —
Spaceship Voyager 2 finally able to communicate smoothly with Earth having previously only sent a weak signal after losing contact.
“Can you hear me now?” tweeted the Voyager Twitter account in a statement on its X account, Saturday (5/8) early morning WIB.
“Last night, I restored full communication with Earth thanks to some quick thinking and lots of collaboration. I’m operating normally and staying on the expected trajectory. It’s great to finally be able to call home,” he continued.
NASA’s long-term Voyager 2 mission, which launched from Earth in 1977 and is currently about 19.9 billion kilometers from Earth, previously lost contact with the planet.
It comes in the aftermath of a series of commands that accidentally moved Voyager 2’s antenna 2 degrees from Earth on July 28.
Luckily, the US space agency NASA accidentally caught a signal like the “heartbeat” of Voyager 2 by accident during a routine sky scan on Tuesday (1/8).
That weak signal at least told mission control that probe is still alive although not yet fully able to communicate.
Voyager 2 is actually programmed to automatically reorient itself a few times a year if something goes wrong like this. The next reset window is in October.
The latest development, Friday (4/8) US time or Saturday (5/8) WIB, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) announced that NASA’s Deep Space Network facility in Canberra, Australia, can send commands to interstellar space, where Voyager is located.
The command redirected the spacecraft and made its antennae point back toward Earth. Mission controller waited 37 hours to see if the command was successful.
“The spacecraft has begun returning science and telemetry data, indicating that it is operating normally and remains on the expected trajectory,” JPL said in a statement. his statement.
Voyager 2 flew into space from Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral, Florida, August 20, 1977. After passing by the four gas giant planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune) in the 1970s to 1990s, Voyager 2 entered interstellar space in December 10, 2018.
Its twin spacecraft, Voyager 1, is also still operating and flying up to 24 billion km from Earth. It was the first object to move outside the gravitational pull of our star, the Sun, in 2012.
The Voyager missions were slowly losing power from their nuclear radioisotope generators. However, engineers have made some changes to maintain the system.
The heaters were turned off, for example, and in April 2023 engineers disabled Voyager 2’s surge protector (or voltage regulator).
(team/ar)
2023-08-05 00:30:00
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