Space

Voyager 2 comes back online, 11.5 billion miles from home

Artist's concept showing Voyager 2 entering interstellar space
NASA
Artist's concept showing Voyager 2 entering interstellar space
NASA

Plenty can go wrong when you're floating through interstellar space, billions of miles from Earth, running on a radioisotope thermoelectric generator and coming up on 43 years since the last time anyone laid a spanner on you. Last week, Voyager 2 shut itself down into a safe mode after an unexplained delay in a calibration maneuver caused two high-powered systems to come on at the same time, overdrawing the power supply.

Figuring out what went wrong and deciding what to do next was a laborious process, mainly because communications to and from Voyager, traveling at the speed of light, take 17 hours each way. So, any time you give this extraordinary spacecraft a command, you need to wait about 34 hours before you know if it had the desired effect.

Now, NASA has announced that it's turned Voyager 2's scientific instruments back on and resumed collection of scientific data. The rest of the craft is still under review, and the team is slowly running diagnostics to determine when everything else can be switched back on.

Such are the foibles of working with humanity's earliest interstellar machines, particularly given that the twin Voyager spacecraft left Earth back in 1977, and their incredible journey thus far and the observations they have sent back to us from the outer reaches of the solar system have been achieved using technology from before the age of the personal computer.

These kinds of problems will eventually become more common. Their power supplies relies on the decay of densely-packed radioactive plutonium oxide spheres, which at the time of launch were able to supply a constant 470 watts of power. That figure has been slowly dropping over time as the fuel has decayed; its half-life of 87.7 years means Voyager 2 is losing about 4 watts a year right now.

By mid-2019, power was down to about 280 watts, and NASA decided to turn off one of the onboard heaters, which was designed to keep its cosmic ray subsystem instrument within its optimal operating conditions. Remarkably, that system has continued to operate despite dropping to temperatures well below what it was ever tested for, and despite the reduced power available, Voyager is still sending back data from five instruments, many years after anyone expected we'd still be in touch with it. The original Voyager team did an exceptional job on this machine, building in failsafes like this safe mode that have kept it in terrific condition.

At some point, it'll no longer have enough power to heat up its own fuel lines, and it'll lose the ability to aim its antenna back at Earth to speak or listen. Then, off it'll soar into the vastness of interstellar space as a lonely record of our civilization. That'll do, Voyager 2, that'll do. You've done us proud.

Source: NASA

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17 comments
paul314
The people who started working on Voyager control as graduate students or undergraduate interns are getting ready to retire. It's almost like an earthbound first draft of one of those scifi generation ships.
Alok
Wow. This is great achievement. We talk of so much UFOs on earth. I wonder, did Voyager met any of them on its long journey.
bwana4swahili
The Energizer Bunny of spacecraft!
Christoph Weiss
It will return as V'Ger!
ljaques
Congrats to NASA for the things you do =right=! // Does anyone remember the space vehicle 'AGER' in Star Trek: The Motion Picture?
Montrose
That's what Christoph mentioned in the post before yours. "It will return as V. GER. It's VOYGER but the O and Y got covered up over time.
Stephen66
When people wonder how we could put a man on the moon without personal computers this article reminds us Just how capable the engineers of the sixties and seventies were.
Russell Clark
Didn’t ´Viger’ showup in a Star Trek episode from a number of decades ago but way in the future ?
Zac Lee
What battery lasts for 43 years?
That was made 43 years ago?
Olga Andonović
Thank you kindly Sir Voyager 2! You entered the deep hyperspace and now we all might know how enlightened you are as you should be. Shine on you, our new soon to be deep space star! Lot of love to all team! Who wouldn't love the seventies! :)