Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire NASA brings Voyager 2 back online over 11 billion miles from earth

An interesting tidbit. It takes 17 hours for a radio signal to reach Voyager 2.

https://www.inverse.com/science/nas...ack-online-11.5-billion-miles-from-earth


In an incredible feat of remote engineering, NASA has fixed one of the most intrepid explorers in human history. Voyager 2, currently some 11.5 billion miles from Earth, is back online and resuming its mission to collect scientific data on the solar system and the interstellar space beyond.

By Passant Rabie

On Wednesday, February 5 at 10:00 p.m. Eastern, NASA's Voyager Twitter account gave out the good news: Voyager 2 is not only stable, but is back at its critical science mission.
"My twin is back to taking science data, and the team at @NASAJPL is evaluating the health of the instruments after their brief shutoff," the account tweeted.
Voyager 2 is sister craft to Voyager 1. Both have been traveling through the solar system — and now beyond it — for the last four decades. Together, they have transformed our understanding of our stellar neighborhood and are already revealing unprecedented information about the interstellar space beyond the Sun's sphere of influence.

In a statement, NASA confirmed that Voyager 2 is back in business.
"Mission operators report that Voyager 2 continues to be stable and that communications between the Earth and the spacecraft are good."
"The spacecraft has resumed taking science data, and the science teams are now evaluating the health of the instruments," the agency said.
The fix is no mean feat: It takes 17 hours one-way to communicate with Voyager 2 from Earth, which is the furthest away manmade object in space. That means a single information relay takes 34 hours.

What happened to Voyager 2?
The spacecraft had run into trouble on January 28, when NASA revealed that it had unexpectedly — and for unknown reasons — shut down. The world held its breath.
As Inverse reported at the time, Voyager 2 went black right before it was scheduled for a maneuver in which the spacecraft rotates 360 degrees in order to calibrate one of its instruments onboard.
But the spacecraft didn't make the move. As a result, two of its systems — both of which consume a lot of power — were running at the same time, according to a statement by NASA.
The likeliest problem was that the spacecraft was using up too much of its available power supply, which triggered protection software. The software automatically turns off Voyager 2’s science instruments when there is a power overload to save on power. It only has a finite supply, after all.
As of writing, NASA hasn't confirmed or denied whether that is what actually happened. Only time will tell whether the agency ever gets an answer to what went wrong. But for now, we can all rest assured that Voyager 2's mission is far from over yet. If all goes well, it should have another five years of life left, meaning five more years of data collection from an area of space we humans have no other way of studying.

34 hours for a single communication relay. Wow

remarkable, considering how old the equipment actually is on V2.

Pfft, that nothing. Some couples have longer periods than between speaking to each other.

Lennie: Do any of you "scientific types" know or remember if "radio waves" travel at the speed of light - or not?
I am cornfused/can't remember.
Hold into the wind
VarmintGuy

Radio is speed of sound.
At least I thought so.

Electronic transmissions are S-o-L.

Nyet

Yes they do.

Per wiki which everyone can source:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_wave

"Speed, wavelength, and frequency

Radio waves in a vacuum travel at the speed of light.[6][7] When passing through a material medium, they are slowed according to that object's permeability and permittivity. Air is thin enough that in the Earth's atmosphere radio waves travel very close to the speed of light.

The wavelength is the distance from one peak of the wave's electric field (wave's peak/crest) to the next, and is inversely proportional to the frequency of the wave. The distance a radio wave travels in one second, in a vacuum, is 299,792,458 meters (983,571,056 ft) which is the wavelength of a 1 hertz radio signal. A 1 megahertz radio signal has a wavelength of 299.8 meters (984 ft). "

It’s really incredible how durable voyager 2 is. Decades in the cold and radiation of space and it still works.

I'm pretty sure radio transmission waves travel at the speed of light -- approx. 186,000 miles per sec.

If they traveled at the speed of sound -- approx.1,100 feet per sec, or 766 miles per hour -- they would definitely take a great deal longer measured in years not hours for just a single completed transmission.

One hell of an antenna. And the sunlight must be practically nothing out there

186,000 miles per sec for light and radio waves. Sound is approx 766 miles per hour.

I remember now. It collided with a probe from another system. Repaired itself part way, then spock fixed it. Or was it malevolent by then?
Even a bigger accomplishment than the pluto craft.

Damn, I was just about to make the same reference, but you beat me to it. Yes, one Star Trek (Original Series) episode was based on that concept, and the first Star Trek movie was as well. In fact the first Star Trek movie was based on Voyager itself taking damage somewhere in deep space, then being repaired by a race of sentient robots (or something like that), but with all sorts of improvement (super intelligence and vast powers), and it's mission getting screwed up to where it wanted to return to earth in order to destroy it.

LMAOROF thats a good one

Hmmm Certainly seems a handy coincidence, now that NASA is asking for more funding.

All they did was turn it off for two minutes, then turn it back on again.

In the vacuum of space, Radio waves travel at speed of light. Do a Google search

Radio waves are a type of electromagnetic radiation with wavelengths in the electromagnetic spectrum longer than infrared light. Radio waves have frequencies as high as 300 gigahertz (GHz) to as low as 30 hertz (Hz). At 300 GHz, the corresponding wavelength is 1 mm, and at 30 Hz is 10,000 km. Like all other electromagnetic waves, radio waves travel at the speed of light in vacuum. They are generated by electric charges undergoing acceleration, such as time varying electric currents. Naturally occurring radio waves are emitted by lightning and astronomical objects.

So decades ago they had the tech to make something that will communicate over a billion miles away in space.. and now in 2020 I can't get cell service 5 miles away from a cell tower..

Whatever.