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When Suzanne Dodd’s group transmitted a routine command to Voyager 2 on July 21, the unthinkable occurred: They unintentionally despatched the improper model, which pointed the interstellar probe’s antenna barely away from Earth. After they subsequent anticipated to obtain knowledge, they heard nothing in any respect. The small error virtually made humanity lose its reference to the favored spacecraft, which is now 12.4 billion miles from residence. Together with its twin, Voyager 1, it’s humanity’s farthest-flung spacecraft that’s nonetheless amassing knowledge.
Right here’s what occurred: Dodd’s group at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory had truly noticed the error within the command and corrected it—however then mistakenly despatched out the flawed model. “It felt terrible. It was a second of panic, as a result of we have been 2 levels off level, which was substantial,” says Dodd, the challenge supervisor of the Voyager interstellar mission.
The group settled on an answer: Blast a “shout” command within the probe’s path, telling it to regulate the antenna again towards Earth. If the sign was robust sufficient, the craft might nonetheless obtain it, although its antenna was offset.
On the morning of August 2, they despatched the highest-power sign they may, utilizing the high-elevation, 70-meter, 100-kilowatt S-band transmitter on the communication station in Canberra, Australia. The station is a part of NASA’s Deep House Community, a global system of big antennas managed by JPL. (Due to Voyager 2’s trajectory, one can solely talk with it through telescopes in Earth’s southern hemisphere.)
There was no assure of success, and it could take 37 hours to see if the answer had labored: The time it could take for his or her sign to ping the craft, after which—in the event that they have been fortunate—for a sign from Voyager 2 to ping them again.
The group spent a sleepless night time ready. After which, aid: It labored. Contact was restored on August 3 at 9:30 pm Pacific time. “We went from ‘Oh my gosh, this occurred’ to ‘It’s fantastic, we’re again,’” says Linda Spilker, Voyager’s challenge scientist at JPL.
Had the try failed, the group would have solely had a single backup choice left: the onboard flight software program’s fault safety routine. A number of fail-safes have been programmed into the Voyagers to routinely take actions to cope with circumstances that would hurt the mission. The subsequent routine was anticipated to kick in in mid-October. If it labored, it could have generated an accurate pointing command, hopefully adjusting the antenna in the correct path.
The Voyagers have been flying for the reason that late Seventies—they’re turning 46 in a pair weeks—and as Spilker factors out, “that was a two-week interval with no science knowledge, the longest time period with out it.” Within the 2010s, they crossed the heliopause, the boundary between the photo voltaic wind and the interstellar wind. Since then, they’ve been taking knowledge on the sting of the heliosphere, the protecting bubble of particles and magnetic fields generated by the solar, which interacts in unknown methods with the interstellar medium.
Nonetheless, that two-week interval with out contact didn’t interrupt the group’s scientific work. “The Voyager science isn’t one thing you should monitor always,” Calla Cofield, a JPL spokesperson, advised WIRED through e-mail. “They’re finding out this area of area over lengthy distances, so a spot of some weeks gained’t damage these research.”
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