Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic’s digest of essential sci-tech news. DART Receives First Flight Guidance and Control Sensor. NASA’s Plan to Stop an Asteroid Headed for Earth. Voyager 1 is nearly 24bn kilometres away from Earth, the furthest of any human-made spacecraft, and is still sending data back home.ġ0 things you need to know direct to your inbox every weekday. NASA’s First Planetary Defense Mission Readies for Integration and Testing at APL. Voyager 2, as its name suggests, is the second of two Voyager missions that were launched by NASA in 1977 to study the plants in what is known as the outer solar system: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.Īfter making significant discoveries about the gas giants and their moons, the two Voyagers continued their journeys and eventually reached interstellar space – meaning they are out of our solar system. Meet Betsy Congdon, DART's mechanical systems engineer at APL. So, we know the spacecraft is alive and operating. As NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) undergoes integration and testing at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, hear from various team members with diverse roles on the first ever planetary defense test mission. “This was successful in that we see the ‘heartbeat’ signal from the spacecraft. “We enlisted the help of the DSN and Radio Science groups to help to see if we could hear a signal from Voyager 2,” said Suzanne Dodd, Voyager’s project manager on Tuesday. In case this does not work, the team will revert to the original plan and wait for the spacecraft to reorient. A DSN antenna will be used to “shout” a command to Voyager 2 to turn its antenna. In an update yesterday (1 August), NASA said there is a plan for the interim period. In the meantime, I'm out here, almost 15 billion miles (24 billion km) from Earth and doing fine! – V1 You might have heard… Voyager 2 is taking a break from sending data until October. “The mission team expects Voyager 2 to remain on its planned trajectory during the quiet period,” NASA wrote in its announcement last week. However, the agency confirmed that the probe is programmed to reset its orientation multiple times each year to keep its antenna pointing at Earth and that the next reset will occur on 15 October, which should enable communication to resume. This means that NASA is no longer receiving data from Voyager 2, which has been in operation for nearly 46 years, and the spacecraft is also unable to receive commands from ground control. The space agency revealed last week that a “series of planned commands” sent on 21 July to the Voyager 2 nearly 20bn kilometres away “inadvertently” caused the antenna to point 2 degrees away from Earth, causing a pause in communications between the spacecraft and DSN antennae. While the signal, technically known as a carrier signal, is too faint for data to be extracted from it, its detection by the NASA Deep Space Network (DSN) confirms that the spacecraft is still operating. NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft has sent home what is being called a heartbeat signal after losing communication with Earth more than a week ago. From a whopping 20bn km away, the Voyager 2 is still sending out signals from its interstellar journey after a brief mishap caused a blip in communications.
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