This is so awesome, I cannot phantom a piece of tech that has stayed working for half a century. Imagine using a TV from 1977, let alone a flying computer powered by a nuclear battery.
I read that sometime in 2025 it’s likely the Voyagers’ nuclear batteries won’t have enough power left to operate their instruments.
It will be kind of weird not to get occasional updates anymore. I graduated high school in 1977, and I’ve been hearing news about the Voyager probes for my entire adult life.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
NASA lost contact with its Voyager 2 spacecraft—the second-most distant object ever built by humans and flung into space—nearly two weeks ago due to an errant command sent to the probe.
The mission’s scientists believed they had several options to restore communications with the half-century-old probe.
NASA’s Deep Space Network facility in Canberra, Australia, was able to send a “shout” command to Voyager instructing the spacecraft to reorient itself into a proper position to facilitate communication with Earth.
Shortly after midnight on Friday morning, at 12:29 am ET, Voyager 2 started streaming back science and telemetry data.
Prior to the launch of Voyager 1 and 2 in 1977 on two different rockets, humans had been gazing at fuzzy blobs in the outer Solar System for hundreds of years.
The Voyagers uncovered complex planetary systems and incredible moons, such as volcano-covered Io, icy Europa, and Titan, with its methane seas.
I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Echoing Ton,
Wow this is so exciting!
For the controls team to suggest they have “multiple options” to re-establish comms on a satellite launched in the 70s that is appx. 133AU from earth is truly astounding.
And of those options that a “shout” worked is so neat.
Makes me giddy to think about satellites launched recently and in the near future and how well they may fair in comparison.
I’m so pleased about this. With all the bleak news lately it’s brightened my day
Hello, fellow kids