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.
Not disagreeing with you. *They* were just a smidge off.
I was wondering that, too.
Inclusion Quotas = Smoke and Fire
We found the problem wires were in the pipes.
“Slide rule” accuracy.
The original programing was such that an error of this nature would self correct. It is programed to realign every two weeks if contact is lost.
Those engineers (now mostly dead) knew what they were doing 45 years ago.
Got it. In astronomical terms missing by a few hundred million miles is missing by a hair !
And click bait
Maybe they thought they were putting it on hold.
There have been ways to design antennas to self-realign for years. I used to work on one device that auto-aligned periscopes to targets. Designed back in the 60s.
Like I stated a few days ago:
Somewhere, there’s a retired NASA scientist reading this and yelling at the computer,
“DUMBASSES!”
https://freerepublic.com/focus/chat/4172105/posts?page=62#62
Explore strange new worlds; seek out new life and new civilizations......with this one neat trick.............
What’s interesting is realizing just how primitive our space travel is... With all the talk of light speed, it’s kinda a reality check realizing that traveling the speed of light, that 12.3 billion miles would equate to a little over 18 hours at the speed of light... Crazy....
and Steve urkel says “did I do that?”
The speed of light is too slow by a factor of a million...................
Lol... Baby steps my man... Baby steps!!
A hundred thousand times the speed of light would still limit your exploration radius to just this galaxy...................
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