“I imagine there was probably a significant sigh of reduction there,” Mr. Nagle said. “And we have been really happy to be in a position to verify that the spacecraft was even now talking to us.”
The function got substantial marks from NASA officers in the United States.
“The DSN people in Canberra did a exceptional occupation beneath the pandemic disorders just to update DSS 43,” mentioned Suzanne Dodd, the Voyager mission undertaking manager and director of the Interplanetary Community Directorate at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “I’ve obtained 100 per cent self-confidence in that antenna, that it will function just good for a couple of additional many years. Long past when the Voyagers are finished.”
Each Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 maintain the data for the farthest a spacecraft has ever traveled and for the longest running mission. Voyager 2 has experienced a number of hiccups in excess of the decades, but it is still feeling its way around in the darkish, generating discoveries about the boundaries that independent our photo voltaic technique from the relaxation of the Milky Way galaxy.
“I’ve seen scientists whose backgrounds are in astrophysics now searching at Voyager facts and striving to match that up with facts they have from ground-based telescopes or other room-centered telescopes,” Ms. Dodd reported. “That’s kind of interesting to go from a planetary mission to the heliophysics mission and now, almost into an astrophysics mission.”
When Voyager 2 retains chugging together, Ms. Dodd and her colleagues are planning to switch off one of its scientific sensors, the Lower Electricity Charged Particle instrument. Executing so will ensure that the spacecraft’s limited electric power source can retain its other units, specifically its communications antenna, warm adequate to operate.
While that will decrease the spacecraft’s scientific output, the primary intention now is longevity.
“The obstacle is not in the new know-how, or the great discoveries,” Ms. Dodd explained. “The obstacle is in trying to keep it functioning as extensive as doable, and returning the science information as prolonged as possible.”
The staff estimates that both equally spacecraft can operate for another 4 to eight many years, and NASA final calendar year granted the workforce a few much more many years of traveling time.