NASA detects the “heartbeat” of ‘Voyager 2’ and is confident that it can regain contact with the ship

Voyager 2 is not lost in interstellar space, NASA announced yesterday. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) of the US space agency confirmed on Twitter that it has detected weak radio signals of the veteran probe, “something like listening to the heartbeat of the ship”, and that this confirms that the ship is still in good condition and issuing information from outside the Solar System. What happens is that this information no longer reaches Earth correctly, due to human error that occurred two weeks ago.

On July 21, a series of routine commands sent to Voyager 2 inadvertently caused its main antenna to drift 2 degrees. As the probe is almost 20,000 million kilometers from Earth, a small error is enough for the signal not to reach Earth and is lost in a vacuum: that is why communication between the probe and the antennas of the Network has been interrupted. of Deep Space, which receive their signals at various points on the planet. “Voyager 2 is currently not capable of receiving instructions or transmitting information back to Earth,” NASA explained in a statement last Friday.

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Finally, late this Tuesday, the Canberra (Australia) antenna picked up a weak signal from the Voyager 2 beacon. This confirmed that the disconnection was not due to a fault and that the on-board equipment continues to transmit. Although the situation has not changed, since the waves detected are so weak that they do not allow information to be transmitted, this novelty opens the hope of recovering contact in the coming days.

The Canberra antenna has continued issuing commands in the general direction of Voyager 2 (launched in 1977, it is the oldest active). After all, its course hasn’t changed: it continues to recede at the impressive speed of almost 1.5 million kilometers per day (it is one of the fastest human ships ever built). The idea is that if the ship hears any of those signals, perhaps it could regain orientation. But it’s still too early to tell if that emergency maneuver will work. Although they are very short command sequences, traveling at the speed of light they take 18 hours to reach Voyager 2; and should the reorientation work, it would take another 18 hours for the signals from the space probe to travel back to Earth, again correctly.

If the contact does not recover like this in the next few days, we would have to wait until October 15. For that date, an automatic maneuver was already programmed, which is carried out several times a year, so that the probe itself autonomously reestablishes its position facing the Sun. And about 20,000 million kilometers away, the Earth looks so near the Sun, that will allow the link to be reacquired (provided Voyager 2 completes its autocorrect successfully).

Recreation of the space probe ‘Voyager 2’Photo: ASSOCIATED PRESS | Video: EPV

Into the interstellar void

At that far distance there isn’t much to see. Only darkness, barely mitigated by the twinkling of thousands of stars and the diffuse luminosity of the Milky Way that divides the celestial vault into two halves. The Sun is one more star, a little brighter. The Earth, the Moon, and the inner planets are hard to make out, hidden in their glow. The only tangible things are waves of plasma, subatomic particles; some come from the distant Sun, guided by invisible magnetic lines of force; others, from the interstellar vacuum.

NASA technicians inspect one of the ‘Voyagers’ before its launch, in 1977.NASA/JPL-Caltech

That is the scenario in which the Voyager 2 probe moves, a robot launched on August 20, 1977 with the aim of investigating Jupiter and Saturn, on a mission that was to last about 12 years. It has quadrupled that lifetime, and its discoveries include details not only of its two original targets, but also of the other two giant planets (Uranus and Neptune) and their respective families of satellites: it is the only spacecraft to have visited them. Interestingly, Voyager 2 was launched a few weeks before its twin, which bears the number 1. It was done this way because it would follow a faster trajectory that would make it reach Jupiter before. Saturn would be its next stopover, with special interest in studying its satellite Titan, which forced it to adopt a course that made it impossible to reach Uranus. Its exploration and that of Neptune would be reserved for Voyager 2.

The three antennas of the deep space network have been following the journey of the two Voyager probes ever since. They no longer do it continuously, but only from time to time. Orders are sometimes sent to it to adjust its orientation, check its low hydrazine reserves for position control motors, or try techniques to reduce power consumption.

On November 5, 2018, after 41 years of travel, Voyager 2 officially left the Solar System. That day, when she was at a distance of approximately 18,000 million kilometers from Earth, her sensors registered a kind of jump. The probe had gone from being enveloped in the hotter, fainter plasma generated by the solar wind to a cooler, denser plasma bathing interstellar space beyond the borders of our space neighborhood.

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Technicians at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) know that their venerable Voyagers have little life left. In reality, they continue to track them almost as a challenge, to see how long they are capable of transmitting and the antennas are able to listen to them. The two probes are powered by two small plutonium nuclear reactors. At those distances, solar panels would have been useless. But 46 years of operation have used up almost all the nuclear fuel. For this reason, after completing its mission, most of the on-board instruments were disconnected, as a measure to reduce consumption and extend the useful life of the generators as much as possible.

The television cameras were disconnected first. Past Neptune there was nothing to photograph. Then others fell, turning off even the heaters that keep them at a controlled temperature. Today only half a dozen teams continue to send data, all referring to the abundance of plasma and cosmic rays in the interstellar medium.

With these cost-saving measures, it is possible that the two probes will remain active until 2030. After that, the isotope generators will cool down and stop producing enough energy to activate the radio. The Voyagers will fall silent and continue their journey towards infinity. Its very long-term destiny is to orbit the galaxy among the other stars. When our Sun is extinguished, those pieces of metal could be the only memory of our existence.

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