NASA shared that the Voyager 1 team has moved the spacecraft to a lower-powered transmitter after something triggered its fault protection system. NASA and JPL are still evaluating what caused the loss of communication and the fault system to trigger.
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NASA announced Wednesday that Voyager 1, its furthest operating spacecraft, is no longer able to send usable data back to Earth. The issue has been happening since November and teams on the ground are still working on a solution that could take weeks more to solve.
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Talk about dedication to your job! While the average employee only stays at their company for four years, Edward Stone stuck around for 50. On Tuesday, he finally retired from JPL, where he served as Voyager’s Project Scientist.
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NASA announced that Voyager 1 engineers are starting to get some weird data back from one of the probe components. All seems well for Voyager 1 so far, but engineers are confused by the data they are getting.
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NASA’s Deep Space Station 43 (DSS43)was put under construction back in mid-March. Because of that, the Voyager 2 spacecraft was left in the dark, with no way to receive communications from Earth. This is due to DSS43 being the only antenna on the planet that is capable of sending communications out to Voyager 2.
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NASA’s Voyager 2 space probe will soon spend 11 months without the ability to receive commands from Earth, according to the agency. That’s because the 48-year-old Australian radio antenna known as DSS43 will undergo much needed hardware upgrades starting this month.
Voyager 2 first launched almost 43 years ago with the task of studying the outer planets in our solar system. While the probe won’t be able to receive instructions from Earth for most of 2020, it will continue to send data to Earth as it enters a quiescent state. DSS43 is the only dish equipped to send data to the space probe in part because it’s only viewable from the southern hemisphere.
NASA’s space probe isn’t the only reason Deep Space Network is upgrading its 20 story office-sized dish either.
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