NASA temporarily loses contact with one of its most distant spacecraft | Ars Technica

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NASA temporarily loses contact with one of its most distant spacecraft

Science Fiction @kbin.social

inkican @kbin.social

2y ago

NASA temporarily loses contact with V'ger

arstechnica.com /space/2023/07/nasa-temporarily-loses-contact-with-one-of-its-most-distant-spacecraft/

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About a week ago, operators of the Voyager 2 spacecraft sent a series of commands that inadvertently caused the distant probe to point its antenna slightly away from Earth. As a result, NASA has lost contact with the spacecraft, which is nearly half a century old and presently 19.9 billion km away from the planet.
Testing in production, ultimate edition
- Let me push this simple change to production real quick… Ooopsie! 🙃
- its cool... call up the remote hands to power cycle it. no worries!
It should come back online around October 15th, when it auto-corrects it’s own orientation
- How is it able to do that? Wouldn't that use up it's limited RCS mass? How does it know where to point?
  
  Usually it’s accomplished with gyroscopes, not RCS fuels. It has a schedule where it auto-orients itself to point back toward Earth, that next scheduled self-fix is in October.
  As for how it knows what exact point to look at, I’m not sure! Maybe we’re constantly streaming a radio signal for it to see
- Its* own orientation.
  
  I seriously hate autocorrect doing that. It also loves to make “were” into “we’re”.
- If the aliens don’t get to it first 👽
At 19 billion kilometers away, it takes about 18 hrs for a signal from Voyager 2 to be intercepted by Earth. Pretty crazy how long it takes at this distance.
But then again this isn't even that far. For comparison a message from Alpha Cenauri, the closest star system, would take four years for it to be intercepted...
- If we ever become an species spanning multiple solar systems I wonder how communication tech will evolve to help reduce ~4 years down to well anything else lol
  
  It would take some discovery that required rewriting the laws of physics, and a lot of what we currently think we know would have to be revisited.
  
  Id assume if we have figured faster than light travel, we'd also figured out FTL communication.
  Hopefully both are possible.

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