this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2023
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NASA’s Voyager 2 has lost communication with Earth due to an unintentional shift in its antenna direction. The next programmed orientation adjustment on October 15 is expected to restore communication, while Voyager 1 continues to operate as usual.

A series of scheduled commands directed at NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft on July 21 led to an unintentional change in antenna direction. Consequently, the antenna moved 2 degrees off course from Earth, causing the spacecraft to lose its ability to receive commands or transmit data back to our planet.

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[–] Astrealix@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago (13 children)

Wonder if we could ping it off one of the other satellites we have around other planets to get a message out to it. Fingers crossed it's back in contact by October and we don't have to try weird shit though

[–] helpimnotdrowning@lemmy.sdf.org 19 points 1 year ago (11 children)

I would imagine 2° at 12 billion miles means it's almost certainly not pointing at anything man-made anymore, but I'm also not an astrophysicist so ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

Being that far out I don't even think we could go out and fix it anymore

[–] Astrealix@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Oh absolutely not. I'm just wondering if we could get stupidly lucky XD maybe it happens to be pointing at Voyager 1 (honestly idk how the trigonometry works out but maybe New Horizons?? Lol)

[–] TheAndrewBrown@lemmy.world 9 points 1 year ago

A shift of 2° at 12.3 billion miles means it’s now pointing about 430 million miles away from the earth. The likelihood that it would be pointing at one of the small handful of man made objects that are out that far is infinitesimally small. Imagine being in a filed 100 miles wide and spinning a bottle with a laser pointer on it and hoping it lands pointing at a single bottle cap at the edge of the field. That would be magnitudes more likely than this pointing at one of our objects. And even if it did, those also would have antennas pointed at Earth so they couldn’t receive the message without turning which might cause the same issue for them.

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