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February 12, 2021 07:30 pm

Earth To Voyager 2: After a Year in the Darkness, We Can Talk To You Again

necro81 writes: Back in March 2020, NASA shut down the Australia dish in its Deep Space Network for repairs and upgrades. For the duration of the outage, NASA had no means for communicating with Voyager 2. From the NYTimes:On Friday, Earth's haunting silence will come to an end as NASA switches that communications channel back on, restoring humanity's ability to say hello to its distant explorer. Because of the direction in which it is flying out of the solar system, Voyager 2 can only receive commands from Earth via one antenna in the entire world. It's called DSS 43 and it is in Canberra, Australia. It is part of the Deep Space Network, or DSN, which along with stations in California and Spain, is how NASA and allied space agencies stay in touch with the armada of robotic spacecraft exploring everything from the sun's corona to the regions of the Kuiper belt beyond the orbit of Pluto. (Voyager 2's twin, Voyager 1, is able to communicate with the other two stations.) A round-trip communication with Voyager 2 takes about 35 hours --17 hours and 35 minutes each way.... While Voyager 2 was able to call home on the Canberra site's smaller dishes during the shutdown, none of them could send commands to the probe.... NASA ... did send one test message to the spacecraft at the end of October when the antenna was mostly reassembled.

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