NASA loses contact with Voyager 2 spacecraft after mildly embarrassing case of human error

After days of silence, NASA has heard again a spacecraft it misplaced contact with following a mildly embarrassing case of human error.

The area company hadn’t heard a peep from Voyager 2 since final week, when flight commanders by accident pinged throughout an incorrect command that noticed it tilt its antenna away from Earth.

But NASA‘s assortment of large radio satellites around the globe, referred to as the Deep Space Network, has now picked up a “heartbeat signal”.

Project supervisor Suzanne Dodd stated it meant the 46-year-old craft was alive and working.

Given the spacecraft is billions of miles from our planet, it was feared it would take till October to re-establish contact, as that is when it is due for an computerized reset.

Commanders now have an opportunity to vary that by shifting Voyager 2’s antennas again in direction of Earth, though they aren’t assured of success.

Voyager 2 definitely is aware of its approach across the cosmos – it was launched approach again in 1977.

It’s managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California and is the one spacecraft to have visited both Neptune or Uranus – our Solar System’s ice large planets.

It’s additionally visited fuel giants Jupiter and Saturn.

Its an identical twin, Voyager 1, can also be nonetheless in area and in contact with Earth from a whopping 15 million miles away. It’s humanity’s most distant spacecraft.

Both craft are to be powered down over the following few years, potentially as soon as 2025.