NASA’s Voyager 2 has lost communication with Earth due to an unintentional shift in its antenna direction. The next programmed orientation adjustment on October 15 is expected to restore communication, while Voyager 1 continues to operate as usual.
A series of scheduled commands directed at NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft on July 21 led to an unintentional change in antenna direction. Consequently, the antenna moved 2 degrees off course from Earth, causing the spacecraft to lose its ability to receive commands or transmit data back to our planet.
As a software engineer I feel for the person who accidentally sent the wrong value and caused an icon to be offline, potentially forever.
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They’re going to have a very tough time sleeping between now and mid-October.
It’s not going to be offline forever. It’ll reorient in a couple months. It was designed to do this when comms are lost. Still a little scary though.
Unmonitored, it will slowly evolve into V’ger now!
At 38,000mph, it will be approximately 80 billion miles away from Earth in 2271. That’s .013 light years from Earth. Future generations may pass it by while staring out the window and laugh at how archaic our technology was.
No may, they will definitely laugh at most of it. “What do you mean they had to use their eyes to watch videos? It wasn’t just beamed directly into their head?”
V’GINY
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🥲
There’s actually a group of alien teenagers following it and occasionally giving it a spin or nudge, just to fuck with us. They think its hilarious.
Have you tried shouting at it?
Or turning it off, waiting a bit, and back on again?
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~181,400,000,000 American football fields
~97,930,000,000,000 bananas (assuming 8 inch bananas)For those using the metric system, that’s 97930 gigabananas.
97.9 TB(anana)
For those using imperial units, that’s 1 bananalamadingdong.
You mean 9793e10 bananas?
The weird thing to me is that that’s only about 23 football fields per person on earth. In other words, if each of us walks a mile and a half, all together we will have moved further than Voyager 2.
Doesn’t the average person like walk a mile and a half everyday? That’s around 4,000 steps which apparently I do without even knowing about it.
Doing my part to lower the average!
assuming 8 inch
My, we are feeling bold aren’t we?
it’s a warm day!
What a great project. Really puts perspective on what can be accomplished with public funds and vision. Meanwhile shit like Starlink exists and lasts maybe a couple of years. I wonder whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy???
As much as I hate Musk and most of his idiot projects, Starlink isn’t that bad of an idea. Traditional SATCOM internet is more expensive for shittier service. From what I’ve read, Starlink has been fairly reliable, not overly expensive, and performance is pretty solid. Sure, in areas that already have “excellent” terrestrial internet providers available, it is pretty useless. But for rural areas, it’s a godsend.
It’s 100% a good idea, it just shouldn’t be privately owned
But private companies can do things public companies can’t do!1
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Because private companies don’t have the GOP actively sabotaging them whenever they are in power so that they can argue that private companies work better than public ones.2
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Unless your private company supports groups that the GOP hates.
Please don’t help infect this place with partisan politics. This is my safe haven.
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As much as I’d like to agree, those projects have very different goals and constraints.
It isn’t apple to apples. I saw a doc once on it where they interviewed the engineers involved and one was honest how he didn’t really follow orders and padded it. If there were two options for a given component he picked the one that would last longer not the cheaper one. While other systems are designed to use as little material and cheap material as possible because they are intended to die after a few months and be mass produced.
Additionally it didn’t have vision. The original plan was to do the whole solar system. NASA was concerned about overpromising and budget issues so they told their staff to set the goal of up to Saturn only.
I personally think there is plenty of room for both commercial and public. Ideally I would like to see public take on this very scientific no practical application stuff and projects that are too risky while commercial brings down the cost.
Commercial brings down the cost
That is just another way of saying imposes negative externalities.
I am wary of commercial anything, I don’t really trust any company. We are still having major pollution events, some being planned to this day. And even some of the smallest, most seemingly benevolent startups sometimes turnout out to be so evil they are literally scamming people out of life.
Maybe once we have real jail time for executives and the corporate death penalty by destruction of charter and a little bit of a time period without an event of awful corporate negligence, maybe then space commercialization might be a net benefit.
Wonder if we could ping it off one of the other satellites we have around other planets to get a message out to it. Fingers crossed it’s back in contact by October and we don’t have to try weird shit though
If I read it correctly, the probe checks periodically, and if it loses contact, it uses the location of known stars to point its antenna back towards the Earth. If that doesn’t work, it’s gone.
I would imagine 2° at 12 billion miles means it’s almost certainly not pointing at anything man-made anymore, but I’m also not an astrophysicist so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Being that far out I don’t even think we could go out and fix it anymore
Lol no we most certainly cannot go out and fix it.
yet
But by the time we could there would be zero reason to anyway
And even if it was pointed at random human equipment it’s so far away that you need a very special radio and antenna; not just any old satellite is necessarily going to do the trick. I think the signal strength is around -196db iirc so incredibly faint, and The antennas they use to communicate with voyager are massive.
Oh absolutely not. I’m just wondering if we could get stupidly lucky XD maybe it happens to be pointing at Voyager 1 (honestly idk how the trigonometry works out but maybe New Horizons?? Lol)
We’re talking about the most proverbially gone shit in human history. Not only is it too far away, it is going faster than any man-made object has ever gone.
…And we once launched a massive metal disc out of a giant bore hole with a nuclear explosion.
Edit: actually Operation Plumbbob sent the steel bore cap nearly 4x as fast as Voyager. Suck it, nerds.
The fastest man-made object would be the NASA Parker Solar Probe spacecraft which reached a speed of 535,000 kilometers per hour…0.05% of the speed of light
Holy shit, that’s significantly faster than a steel plate that was launched by a nuke and subsequently vaporized. Insane. Thank you
A shift of 2° at 12.3 billion miles means it’s now pointing about 430 million miles away from the earth. The likelihood that it would be pointing at one of the small handful of man made objects that are out that far is infinitesimally small. Imagine being in a filed 100 miles wide and spinning a bottle with a laser pointer on it and hoping it lands pointing at a single bottle cap at the edge of the field. That would be magnitudes more likely than this pointing at one of our objects. And even if it did, those also would have antennas pointed at Earth so they couldn’t receive the message without turning which might cause the same issue for them.
Communication wasn’t “lost”, it was thrown away through malpractice.
What? My guy it temporary. In a couple of months it will reorient itself automatically
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