They thought it was gonna be a protracted, very long time.
NASA has successfully “reestablished full communications” with Voyager 2, an interstellar deep space probe which the agency sent offline with a faulty command two weeks ago.
The excellent news comes far ahead of schedule as experts at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab in California recently expressed worry that they would want to attend until October for Voyager 2 to do a scheduled full-system reset.
Voyager 2 — which was off kilter by 2% — had finally been reached when NASA’s Deep Space Network facility in Canberra, Australia, successfully sent a “shout” signal equivalent beyond 12.3 billion miles to the probe.
Upon receipt, Voyager 2 was given instructions “to reorient itself and switch its antenna back to Earth,” the Jet Propulsion Lab announced.
“With a one-way light time of 18.5 hours for the command to succeed in Voyager, it took 37 hours for mission controllers to learn whether the command worked,” NASA added.
This system also noted that the spacecraft “began returning science and telemetry data” just before 12:29 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time.
Such information is a serious indicator that Voyager 2 “is working normally and that it stays on its expected trajectory.”
Voyager 2 — together with counterpart Voyager 1 — had initially been launched in 1977 to flyby our solar system’s outer, jovian planets as a technique to collect information on the gas giants.
In 2018, Voyager 2 reached a serious threshold by exiting the sun’s protective belt, generally known as the heliosphere, and crossed into the void of interstellar space.
Recently, the Jet Propulsion Lab has been reanalyzing Eighties data obtained by Voyager 2 which points to potential life on several moons surrounding Uranus.
