As these “senior citizens” continue exploring the cosmos, the team has slowly turned off instruments to conserve power and extend their missions. It’s not the first time that the aging twin probes, both launched in 1977, have experienced issues. “But that is a long time to wait, so (we) will try sending up commands several times prior to that date,” Dodd said. How the Voyager probes keep going and going decades after launch The next reset was already scheduled for October 15, and the team is hopeful that this program will allow communications to resume with Voyager 2. If the Earth-based signals don’t reach Voyager 2, the spacecraft is already programmed to reorient itself multiple times a year to keep its antenna pointing in Earth’s direction.

Given the distance between Voyager 2 and Earth, it takes about 18.5 hours for the signal to travel one way across the solar system to the spacecraft. The signal, sent via the Deep Space Network, is basically an attempt to “shout” at Voyager 2 and try to get its attention, despite the fact that its antenna isn’t oriented in a way to receive the radio signal, according to NASA. “There is a low probability that this will work.” “We are now generating a new command to attempt to point the spacecraft antenna toward Earth,” Dodd said. Now, the mission team will attempt to send a signal back to the spacecraft. One radio antenna is located at Goldstone near Barstow, California, the second near Madrid, and the third near Canberra, Australia. The mission team was pleasantly surprised to be able to detect the spacecraft’s “carrier signal” using the Deep Space Network, an international array of massive radio antennas that allows NASA to communicate with missions across the cosmos.Įach of the three giant dishes are equidistant, meaning that one is always in communication with different spacecraft as Earth rotates. The miniscule shift means that Voyager 2 can’t receive any commands from mission control or send data back to Earth from its location more than 12.3 billion miles (19.9 billion kilometers) in interstellar space.

One of the most iconic pieces of space exploration history goes up for auctionĬommands sent to Voyager 2 on July 21 accidentally caused the spacecraft’s antenna to point 2 degrees away from Earth.

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