Collaborate Disseminate
The Voyager 2 spacecraft’s energy budget keeps dropping by about 4 Watt/year, as the plutonium in its nuclear power source is steadily dropping as the isotope decays. With 4 Watt …read more Continue reading Voyager 2’s Plasma Spectrometer Turned Off in Power-Saving Measure
Recently the team at JPL responsible for communication with the Voyager 1 spacecraft noticed an issue with the data it was returning from the Flight Data System (FDS). Although normally …read more Continue reading Voyager 1 In Trouble As Engineers Scramble To Debug Issue With Flight Data System
It’s not every day that you get to update the firmware on a device that was produced in the 1970s, and rarely is said device well beyond the boundaries of …read more Continue reading NASA JPL’s Voyager Team Is Patching Up Both Voyagers’ Firmware
You could practically hear the collective “PHEW!” as NASA announced that they had reestablished full two-way communications with Voyager 2 on Friday afternoon! Details are few at this point — …read more Continue reading Voyager 2: Communication Reestablished with One Big Shout
Anybody who has set up a satellite TV antenna will tell you that alignment is critical when picking up a signal from space. With a satellite dish it’s a straightforward …read more Continue reading Just How Is Voyager 2 Going To Sort Out Its Dish Then?
Important safety tip: When you’re sending commands to the second-most-distant space probe ever launched, make really, really sure that what you send isn’t going to cause any problems. According to …read more Continue reading Voyager Command Glitch Causes Unplanned Pause in Communications
Launched in 1977, the Voyager 1 and 2 space probes have been operating non-stop for over 45 years, making their way from Earth to our solar system’s outer planets and …read more Continue reading NASA’s Voyager Space Probe’s Reserve Power, and the Intricacies of RTG-Based Power Systems
NASA is always keen to highlight the space agency’s many successes, and rightly so — those who pay for these expensive projects have a right to know what they’re getting for their money. And so the news was recently sprinkled with stories of the discovery of electron bursts beyond the …read more
Continue reading Still Working after All These Years: The Voyager Plasma Wave Subsystem
When the news broke recently that communications had finally been re-established with Voyager 2, I felt a momentary surge of panic. I’ve literally been following the Voyager missions since the twin space probes launched back in 1977, and I’ve been dreading the inevitable day when the last little bit of …read more
Continue reading After Eight-Month Break, Deep Space Network Reconnects with Voyager 2
The probe crossed the heliopause, the boundary between the heliosphere and the interstellar medium, on November 5. Continue reading Voyager 2 Joins Its Twin in Interstellar Space