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Space exploration: Where do we go from here?

Think you had a bad day at work?

NASA has temporarily lost contact with Voyager 2 space probe, the second-farthest man-made object sent into space. It is currently located more than 12.3 billion miles (19.9 billion kilometres) from Earth. In a statement, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) said that scientists lost contact with the space probe on July 21 after a series of planned commands inadvertently caused Voyager 2 to angle its antenna away from Earth. Though the spacecraft's antenna shifted a mere 2 per cent, it was enough to cut communications.
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Apparently it has a protocol where it resets its orientation relative to Earth after some interval, so hopefully this is not a fatal mistake. But that's not going to be a great performance review.
 
So early October is when Voyager was scheduled to execute its "let's make sure the antennas point home" command, but once the Deep Space Network located the heartbeat signal, JPL scientists scrambled to undo their mistake.

Using the Deep Space Network signals to broadcast, they basically blasted a wide angle "adjust your antenna now" signal out in the direction of Voyager, and waited 37 hours to see if it worked.

And it did!

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasa-m...ications-pause

The JPL are some miracle workers.

Also, the aliens are gonna be getting a weird text from an unknown caller soon.
 
The aliens are probably annoyed that the neighbors are yelling at their kid again, ha ha ha...

In all seriousness, this seems like a fairly routine failsafe method. It doesn't seem like something that would have people going in full-on panic mode, at least initially after losing the original signal.
 
RaceBoarder said:
It doesn't seem like something that would have people going in full-on panic mode, at least initially after losing the original signal.
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Can you imagine being the person who sent the set of commands and realized that after 46 years you might have accidentally killed the whole program with a misplaced decimal?



Images you can hear:

f459e018-4044-43c4-bb5a-0254ff43ffbb_200_10.gif
 
Sure, it's not low orbit or really even "space" proper. However, 85km is still quite a view that most people will never see in person.
 
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