Posted on 08/03/2023 12:27:32 PM PDT by Red Badger
At present, the Voyager 2 space probe is the second-most distant man-made object from Earth; at about 12.3 billion miles from our planet, its distance is seconded only by Voyager 1.
You would think, at those immense lengths — and with its 45-year-old onboard technology to boot — that we wouldn't be hearing much from ol' Voyager 2 anymore.
But it's still out there, and still talking:
NASA has detected a signal from Voyager 2 after nearly two weeks of silence from the interstellar spacecraft.
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said on Tuesday that a series of ground antennas, part of the Deep Space Network, had registered a carrier signal from Voyager 2 on Tuesday.
"A bit like hearing the spacecraft's 'heartbeat,' it confirms the spacecraft is still broadcasting, which engineers expected," JPL wrote in a tweet.
The space agency had lost contact with the craft last week after engineers "inadvertently caused the craft to turn its antenna 2 degrees away from the direction of its home planet." That's enough over those immense distances to cut off contact with the little guy.
NASA had originally thought they wouldn't hear from Voyager 2 until at least October, when an automated process was expected to turn the antenna back toward Earth.
About that...
Jamie Renkin was hired in December 2022 to lead the decades-old project, and I'm sure it had nothing to do with "inclusion" quotas, virtue signaling, and the like!
DIVERSITY IS OUR STRENGTH!
And there's a lot of "strength" happening in all our agencies and institutions.
NASA may yet have to wait until the October automated reset for regular communication to resume, the agency said.
Voyager 2 was originally launched to study the outer gas planets (Jupiter and Saturn) and ice giants (Uranus and Neptune). It remains the only spacecraft to have visited the latter two. As with Voyager 1, it is currently exploring and studying interstellar space.
Ping!....................
New DEI hires are probably monkeys.
Annoyed janitor turns off super-cold freezer, destroying decades of scientific work and causing at least $1M in damages: lawsuit
NY Post ^ | 06/26/2023 | Steve Janoski
If V’GER is going to return and destroy the carbon based infestation, now might be a good time.
2 deg at that distance is HUUGE.
If this is the truth, I have to wonder how the craft got the antenna realigned.
If it was enough to lose contavct, it wouldn't receive a new command to realign.
Unless separate transmit and receive antennas that are not slaved.
2 degrees at 12 billion miles means the antenna was pointed very roughly at a target 400 million miles away from where it should have (tan x ).
Do they get some sort of binary report to the effect of “It’s pretty empty out here...but we’re still looking. If we see anything, will phone home ASAP”
They get a ‘weather report’ and a ‘health’ report..............
-PJ
The fact that anyone could send a command signal without it being checked and rechecked by many people is just a sign of how far things have fallen.
They should have used 50+ year-old white guys, instead of some wet-behind-the-ears recent college grad know-it-all ..............
s = r * theta where theta is in radians. Works well for small theta which in this case is 0.0349 radians.
I came up with ~432 million miles. Just a smidge off.
The r*theta is only for small values of theta. 2 degrees should qualify as small. I did a lot of rounding, that’s how I got 400m
Darn female drivers!
I really hate that guy. Worst parts of the movie were the ones he was in.
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