NASA gets back in contact with Voyager 2 after seven months offline

The 42-year-old spacecraft is currently in deep space but still beaming back data to Earth

American space agency NASA said yesterday that it was able to make contact with Voyager 2 for the first time since March.

The agency revealed that it sent a series of commands to the probe on 29^th October using the recently upgraded Deep Space Station 43 (DSS43) Network dish in Canberra, Australia. The spacecraft then beamed back a signal to Earth, confirming that it had received all the commands and executed them without issue.

The 70-meter-wide radio antenna DSS43 is one of the three radio dishes that form part of the larger Deep Space Network. These facilities have been established in Madrid, Spain; Goldstone, California; and Canberra, in such a way that their positioning ensures that any spacecraft beyond the Moon is able to get in touch with at least one of the facilities as long as there is a line of sight to Earth.

Voyager 2 is currently more than 18.8 billion kilometres from Earth and is so far south that Madrid and Goldstone facilities can't get in touch with the spacecraft. That means DSS43 is the only dish on Earth that can send commands to this spacecraft.

However, DSS43 is currently undergoing upgrades and repairs, and will not resume normal operations until February 2021.

As part of the upgrades, the dish is getting two new radio transmitters. One transmitter of the DSS43 has not been replaced in the last 47 years, and engineers are now upgrading various components to ensure the new transmitters run smoothly.

The dish went offline in mid-March, making the mission team unable to send commands to Voyager 2, although they were able to receive some scientific data from Voyager 2.

On 29^th October, the NASA team was finally able to send commands to the spacecraft using the new hardware recently installed on DSS43.

"This test communication with Voyager 2 definitely tells us that things are on track with the work we're doing," said Brad Arnold, the DSN project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) in California.

Voyager 2 was launched in 1977, sixteen days before its twin probe Voyager 1. The primary aim of the Voyager mission was to collect information about two planets, Jupiter and Saturn. The two spacecraft were designed to function for just five years, but their missions were extended after they flew past the two planets. The twin probes then continued their journey to explore Uranus and Neptune.

While Voyager 1 became inoperative several years ago, the Voyager 2 probe is still serving data to NASA nearly 42 years after its launch, providing scientists with a glimpse of what might lie beyond the solar system.

The Voyager missions are a part of the NASA Heliophysics System Observatory. The twin crafts were built by JPL, which continues to operate Voyager 2.