NASA reconnects with Voyager, longest serving mission in history

NASA has once again reconnected with its Voyager spacecraft, marking a continuation of the American space agency’s longest mission in history.

The two spacecraft – Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 – launched within weeks of each other in 1977. So they have been operating for more than 47 years.

NASA officials have reported several difficulties with the spacecraft in recent years, mainly communication issues. The most recent problems involved the Voyager 1 spacecraft. NASA said in a statement in April it had remained out of touch with the spacecraft for the previous five months.

Agency officials said they later learned the problem was linked to a chip inside one of Voyager 1’s onboard computers. The issue made data being sent by the spacecraft unreadable. NASA said its engineers were able to fix that problem by making changes to how the spacecraft stores and reads data.

Then, in October, NASA reported another communication issue that resulted in a brief delay in receiving data from Voyager 1. That problem turned out to be linked to the spacecraft’s radio transmitter system.

The agency said that, for some reason, Voyager 1’s fault protection system was activated when NASA sent a command for the spacecraft to turn on one of its heaters. This activation – meant to save power – led Voyager 1 to start sending signals to a different radio transmitter system than it normally uses.

This meant NASA had to listen for the signals on the S-band instead of the usual X-band. Once they did this, they were able to start receiving data again. NASA has said the S-band is much weaker than the X-band, so engineers were seeking to get the X-band radio communication system back online for long-term use.

NASA said the agency had not used the S-band since 1981.Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are NASA’s most distant operating spacecraft. The agency has reported Voyager 1 is exploring space from about 24 billion kilometres from Earth, while Voyager 2 is operating from about 20.5 billion kilometres away.

Because of this great distance, NASA says its communication with the two Voyagers takes about one day to receive data, and another day to send information back from Earth. The two Voyagers were first designed to explore Jupiter and Saturn. Both spacecraft successfully carried out studies of those planets. Later, Voyager 2 made the first-ever close observations of Uranus and Neptune in 1989.

The two spacecraft then began a new mission to explore distant areas of space. In 2013, NASA announced Voyager 1 had crossed over the border dividing our solar system from interstellar space. The term ‘interstellar’ means ‘between stars’. Scientists say interstellar space begins where the sun’s continuous flow of particles and its magnetic field stop. (VOA)

The post NASA reconnects with Voyager, longest serving mission in history appeared first on DailyNews.