NASA reestablishes communication with Voyager 2 following an error that led to several weeks of silence

After several weeks of silence, communication with NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft was successfully restored on Friday when ground controllers rectified an error that had disrupted the communication.

Traveling deeper and deeper into interstellar space billions of miles away, Voyager 2 lost contact with Earth two weeks prior due to a faulty command which resulted in the misalignment of its antenna.

Hoping to realign the antenna, a new command was sent by NASA’s Deep Space Network on Wednesday using the most powerful transmitter at the massive radio dish antenna in Australia. The adjustment required for Voyager 2’s antenna was minor, a mere 2%.

The command took over 18 hours to reach Voyager 2, which is located more than 12 billion miles (19 billion kilometers) away. It then took another 18 hours to receive a response.

Finally, their gamble paid off. On Friday, Voyager 2 began transmitting data once more, as confirmed by officials at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.

Relieved, project manager Suzanne Dodd stated to The Big Big News, “I breathed a sigh of relief. It was as if I melted into the chair.”

“Voyager is back,” added project scientist Linda Spilker.

Since its launch in 1977 to explore the outer solar system, Voyager 2 has been propelling through space. Its counterpart, Voyager 1, which was launched two weeks later, now holds the record for being the furthest spacecraft — 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) away — and it continues to communicate with Earth.

According to Dodd, the two-week communication gap is the longest that NASA had experienced without receiving any communication from Voyager 2.

Dodd stated that as long as the spacecraft’s plutonium power supply lasts, the Voyagers could still be operational by the time of their 50th launch anniversary in 2027. The scientific data they have transmitted over recent years include insights into the interstellar magnetic field and the prevalence of cosmic rays.

“For the past decade, we’ve managed to maximize every single watt,” said Dodd. “We are hopeful that at least one of them will reach the 50-year mark. However, they are aging, and incidents like this recent one certainly concern me in terms of achieving such a milestone.”

The Big Big News Health and Science Department is supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is exclusively responsible for all content.

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