The only antenna that allows you to transmit requests has gone about a year without doing this

The farthest human beings have come to with one of their creativity is through the twin probes Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. The two elements that were sent into deep space have already left the solar system and are without a doubt. One of the greatest landmarks of humanity. Voyager 2, even though it’s in its final years after 44 years of its release, it continues to fight. In these last days NASA called her again to continue giving orders to her What are you doing there in interstellar space.

In March of last year, NASA announced that it would not have contact with the probe for at least 11 months. They basically trusted their technology four decades ago to allow them to Survive on its own and in automatic mode During all that time. And she did.

One antenna is able to talk to the Voyager 2

But why didn’t they call her? Because There was no antenna to do this. Because of the flight Voyager 2 took, it is only possible to communicate with it from one point on the planet, in Australia. The only antenna available that is able to do this is DSS 43, which is a Deep Space Network (DSN) infrastructure antenna. DSN is a network of three stations located in the United States, Australia and Spain. They are not random locations, but have been specially chosen to cover 360 degrees of space from Earth.

However, DSS 43 required a series of fixes and improvements. In addition to, They took advantage of the communications cuts to be used in other missions Where it has been useful, especially on the missions to Mars that we’re seeing in recent weeks.

Now that all of this is over, NASA decided to re-sync the DSS 43 antenna with the Voyager 2 probe. In this way it regains its connection to the probe, which is a connection. It will take another 17 hours 35 minutes to send a message and another 17 hours and 35 minutes to receive a response. Why? Because the probe is so far away (more than 18 billion kilometers), the messages simply couldn’t travel faster.

It must be said, during this time NASA received information from the probe through the use of the other antennas of the Australia station. however Messages cannot be sent again Because it didn’t have a powerful enough antenna to do that. Likewise, last October, they had a minimal amount of connections just to tell Voyager 2 “all is well” and not to go into eternal hibernation.

Via | Currently