NASA has temporarily lost contact with the Voyager 2 spacecraft after an error occurred.
The US space agency lost contact with the probe around a month ago, it revealed late last week.
NasaNasa has temporarily lost contact with the Voyager 2 spacecraft[/caption]
Communication between Nasa and the craft was severed due to a wrong command.
As a result, the commands rotated the spacecraft’s antenna two degrees away from our planet.
“This change has interrupted communication between Voyager 2 and the ground antennas of the Deep Space Network (DSN),” Nasa explained.
“Data being sent by the spacecraft is no longer reaching the DSN, and the spacecraft is not receiving commands from ground controllers.”
Nasa said it hopes communication will fire up once more when the probe is due to reset on October 15.
VOYAGER 2
Voyager 2 launched in 1977 and is currently around 12.4billion miles from Earth.
It was launched as part of Nasa’s Voyager program, which consists of two robotic interstellar probes along with Voyager 1.
Initially, the mission was only meant to last five years, however, the instruments have endured in deep space for nearly 46 years.
And since their launch, the probes have traveled a remarkable 14.46billion miles from Earth – further than any man-made object.
Voyager 1 has been used to study conditions on Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, according to Nasa.
Meanwhile, Voyager 2 was the first human-made object to fly past Uranus.
Last year, Nasa announced that the Voyager program was coming to an end, and the two spacecraft began entering their final phases.
“We’re at 44 and a half years, so we’ve done 10 times the warranty on the darn things,” Nasa physicist Ralph McNutt told Scientific American.
By 2025, both vehicles, which run via radioisotope thermoelectric generators, are expected to run out of power.
In the meantime, Nasa has been eliminating features to keep the machines operating until then.
“Because of this diminishing electrical power, the Voyager team has had to prioritize which instruments to keep on and which to turn off,” Nasa said on its Voyager webpage.
“Heaters and other spacecraft systems have also been turned off one by one as part of power management.”
After careful assessment, the Voyager team has chosen to keep operating the instruments that are “most likely to send back key data about the heliosphere and interstellar space,” Nasa added.
“If everything goes really well, maybe we can get the missions extended into the 2030s,” Linda Spilker, who started working on the Voyager missions before they launched, told Scientific American in 2022.
Nasa said last week that “Voyager 1, which is almost 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, continues to operate normally.”