Amid a national craze about UFOs flying among us, NASA engineers at Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory picked up the signal of a more homegrown spacecraft this week.
After losing signal with the Voyager 2 space probe for more than a week, scientists received a faint signal Tuesday, indicating that the 46-year-old satellite is still operating in deep space.
According to JPL spokesperson Calla Cofield, the crew lost contact with Voyager 2 on July 21 following an erroneous command that moved the satellite’s antennas off by 2 degrees, making signal transmission to and from Earth difficult.
“Obviously, we’re discouraged that they lost contact. At the same time, it’s a spacecraft that’s been around for 46 years so it’s proven itself to be very durable,” she said.
“So they’re hopeful as long as nothing goes wrong on board between now and (reconnecting), they’re anxious to get back in touch, but this is a pretty durable spacecraft. These are not spacecraft that are doing maneuvers or anything crazy. Their job is to sort of just keep going straight and hopefully that’s what it’ll keep doing.”
Cofield described the weak signal — which was only able to be picked up using the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex in Australia — almost like seeing a distant school bus. While the transmission is too faint for scientists to retrieve the real data they’re looking for inside — which would be the children — they can still recognize the unmistakable bright yellow design sent by Voyager 2.
Now that they know contact is possible, in the next they’ll try to command the satellite to reorient its antennas. Scientists will have a few tries at getting Voyager 2 to catch the signal as it speeds toward the edge of the solar system before the craft is scheduled to follow on-board, pre-programmed commands that will reposition the antennas back toward Earth on Oct. 15.
Should that fail, the satellite has another fault protection mechanism called the Reset Timer, which searches for a signal from Earth if it hasn’t received a command from Earth for a certain period and would be activated in December.
However with very little onboard memory, until the antennas are repositioned the scientific community will be losing out on the valuable data Voyager 2 will livestream as it moves through a research-rich part of space known as the heliosphere.
“The further it gets out into interstellar space, the more we get to see about this environment where the heliosphere — which is this protective bubble of particles and magnetic fields created by the sun — bumps up against interstellar space, which is this big ocean of you know material that fills the space between all the stars in the galaxy,” Cofield explained. “It’s a really interesting part of space and one that we can’t study remotely.”
However the communication blip likely won’t lead to missing any major discoveries, as the benefit of the Voyager 2 probe is really about the longevity of its mission — which began Aug. 1977 — which is still pushing the boundaries of space exploration.
In 2020 the crew lost contact with the satellite for more than eight months due to critical maintenance it required before connection was reestablished in November 2020.
Voyager 2, which is currently 12 million miles away from the Earth, is operated by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.