Voyager 2 is completely alone in interstellar space
!About to lose touch with home
It's all alone out there in deep space, especially when a spacecraft is traveling deep into the vast void, when we can say that interstellar space is home for the spacecraft.
Voyager 2 launch
Of course, that was always the inevitable fate of Voyager 2 — launched more than 40 years ago and now atop NASA's longest mission — designed to venture far beyond the limits of the solar system. For decades the journey has been going this way, but the amazing journey is about to face a challenge it has never encountered before on such a long and isolated journey.
?How do we contact Voyager 2
NASA announced that Deep Space Station 43, known as DSS-43 - the only antenna on Earth that can transmit commands to the spacecraft - will be turned off, and it won't be for a short time. The agency says: The antenna and giant dish located in Australia, which is the size of a twenty-story office building, is in dire need of maintenance and development, and it has been in operation for more than fifty years, and therefore it is not surprising that the old equipment needs maintenance.
?Does Voyager 2 need maintenance and steering
However, this maintenance comes at a price. For about 11 months - Voyager 2 will be all on its own, scurrying into the unknown in a quiet operating mode designed to conserve power and keep the spacecraft on course until DSS-43 is up and running again.
“We got the spacecraft back to the state where it's going to be fine, assuming everything goes normally with it during the antenna outage, and if things don't run normally — Which is always a possibility, especially with an older spacecraft – the onboard failover protection can handle the situation.”
Communication with Voyager 2 is lost
During the period of radio silence, which is nearly a year, the silence will be one-way, meaning that the rest of the antennas in the CDSCC communications complex will be tuned to receive any signals that will be transmitted from Voyager 2 to Earth, it is just that we cannot send any commands to Voyager 2 in case we need to. And while NASA did everything it could to prepare Voyager 2 for the disconnect phase, it's still a gamble — certainly a calculated one — but also an unprecedented deadlock in the long duration of this historic space mission.
?Will Voyager 2 stop working
According to the space agency, the biggest unknown is whether the automated propulsion control systems will work accurately for that long. Especially since it fires several times a day to ensure the spacecraft's antenna is pointed toward Earth, and also whether the power systems designed to keep Voyager 2's fuel lines hot enough will do their job.
The new challenge comes just days after NASA confirmed that the spacecraft had resumed normal operations after a scare in January, when Voyager's fault protection procedures went wrong. This means that the spacecraft failed to perform a flight maneuver scheduled for January 25th. Careful evaluations from NASA engineers on the ground eventually fixed the problem, as controllers had to wait 34 hours for each individual response from Voyager 2, given the 17-hour !transmission time for signals traveling to and from the distant probe
2Restart Voyager
Here we hope that the next 11 months will prove a success for the only Voyager 2 spacecraft, which is currently located at a distance of more than 17 billion kilometers from Earth, and the spacecraft has now been scientifically confirmed that it has entered interstellar space, like its twin before it, Voyager 1 (the only other man-made object that He traveled so far to that region).
Upon completion of development and maintenance of DSS-43, the development will not only enhance our communications with Voyager 2, but may be used in the future for other upcoming missions, including future Mars missions.
Before that, perhaps the most pressing issue is to re-establish ties with this iconic flagship of decades ago as Voyager 2 sails away, on its one-way voyage to the stars.
Source : websites