We're back: Voyager 2 communication is resumed
Even if Voyager 2 is more than 18 hours away from home, it can still make phone calls.
It turns out that even when a spacecraft is one of the farthest away objects humanity has ever made, shouting incredibly loudly at it with radio waves can still be effective.
That, I suppose, didn't take long. By Friday, NASA had resumed communications after detecting what they referred to as Voyager 2's "Heartbeat" on Wednesday. Voyager 2 is unquestionably one of the best spacecraft, and it seems impossible to keep a good one down.
Voyager 2 has continued to leave the Solar System after exploring Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune and returning possibly the largest cache of scientific data from a single space mission.
Even though it may have seen better days, being one of the few spacecraft to have ever crossed the heliopause into interstellar space and the second farthest of humanity's messengers, it continues to provide vital data.
Voyager 2's main antenna was reoriented by 2 degrees on July 11 as a result of the wrong instructions being transmitted to it, which prevented it from communicating with Earth. The alignment is supposed to be reset every few months, but the next one isn't until October, and waiting until then was deemed unfavorable.
On August 2, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) reported that despite Voyager 2's carrier signal no longer being directed directly at Earth, radio telescopes had collaborated to find it. This was described as "A little like hearing the heartbeat of the spacecraft."
NASA was able to determine the specific location of Voyager 2 (which was, ironically, where expected) and that it was still in operation thanks to carrier signal detection. With the expectation that the craft would still be able to pick them up despite the antenna being out of alignment, it was stated that the strongest radio signals possible would be beamed at it. The engineers in charge at the moment didn't seem very confident, and it appeared plan B—waiting until October—might need to be used.
However, JPL's website monitoring the situation said on Friday that "NASA has reestablished full communications with Voyager 2."
According to the page, "The agency's Deep Space Network facility in Canberra, Australia, delivered Voyager 2 the equivalent of an interstellar "shout" at a distance of more than 12.3 billion miles (19.9 billion km), telling the spacecraft to realign itself and turn its antenna back to Earth. It took 37 hours for mission controllers to learn whether the command was successful because of a one-way light time of 18.5 hours for the command to reach Voyager.
Voyager 2 is losing the ability to maintain all of its instruments in operation due to the gradual loss of power from its radioactive sources. NASA has discovered a means to keep everything crucial running until 2026 when it will be required to choose which instrument to shut off first. This was accomplished by taking the relatively risky step of shutting off a regulator.
As power output decreases, each instrument will need to be put aside until the last one eventually fails and one of humanity's greatest achievements fails, but today is not that day.
All of Voyager 2's scientific instruments will continue to operate until 2026 thanks to a small supply of backup power that has been activated to delay a planned shutdown this year.
By carrying out the operation, humanity will be able to keep two eyes on the universe outside of the heliosphere, where the solar wind dominates interstellar space.
This was just 470 Watts even at launch, which is less than the typical household in a developed nation consumes. With a half-life of 88 years, enough plutonium has decayed for this power to be around 30% lower at this time.
NASA has been able to keep the others running by gradually turning down heaters, moving to backup thrusters, and turning off other no-longer-needed equipment, but that procedure can't continue indefinitely. It was anticipated that at least one instrument would cease to function this year, but Spilker and colleagues discovered that a voltage regulator needed a little amount of power to keep the instruments safe from power surges.
The five scientific instruments are all slightly in danger when the regulator is turned off, but this was deemed better than shutting down one to make room for the others. The operators decided to make the change permanent after a few weeks of testing operations without the regulator.
By 2026, it will still be necessary to decide which instrument to play first, barring any additional miracles.
Compared to its twin, Voyager 1 uses a little less energy because one of its instruments malfunctioned early on. If removing the regulator from Voyager 2 proves successful, Voyager 1 will likely follow suit in a year.
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