Frantic Search Underway for Deviated Voyager
After NASA accidentally sent the wrong command to the Voyager 2 space probe, an emergency search began for a craft tens of billions of kilometers away. Earth.
An antenna in Australia has been deployed to search for an interstellar spacecraft after mission control pointed its antenna away from Earth.
NASA is listening for any signal from Voyager 2, according to The Guardian, after how the US space agency lost contact with a spacecraft billions of miles from our planet.
Drifting deeper into interstellar space, Voyager 2 has been out of sight since more than a week ago, controllers accidentally sent the wrong command, which deflected its antenna away from Earth. The spacecraft's antenna moved only 2%, but it was enough to cut off communications.
Though considered unlikely, NASA said on Monday that its huge dish antenna in Canberra is monitoring any stray signals from Voyager 2″, which is over 12 billion miles (19 billion km) away. It takes more than 18 hours for a signal to reach Earth from that distance.
Voyager 2 was launched from Florida in 1977 to study the outer solar system, as well as Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune — and was launched just a couple of weeks ahead of its identical twin Voyager 1. The space probe entered interstellar space in 2018, finding many new satellites on Uranus and one on Jupiter, recalls The Guardian.
According to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which manages the Voyager missions, next week the Canberra the antenna — part of NASA's Deep Space Network — will also «bombard» the vicinity of Voyager 2 with the right team, in the hope that it will reach its target.
Otherwise, NASA will have to wait until October automatically reset the spacecraft, which officials say should re-establish communications.
Still in contact with Earth, Voyager 1 is now nearly 15 billion miles (24 billion km) away, which makes it the most distant spacecraft of mankind.