NASA has once again reconnected with its Voyager spacecraft, marking a continuation of the American space agency’s longest mission in history.
The two spacecraft – Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 – launched within weeks of each other in 1977.
In 2013, NASA announced Voyager 1 had crossed over the border dividing our solar system from interstellar space.
The term “interstellar” means “between stars.” Scientists say interstellar space begins where the sun’s continuous flow of particles and its magnetic field stop.
Suzanne Dodd is the current project manager for the Voyager mission at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.
The longest mission in the history of the American space agency has continued with the reconnection of NASA’s Voyager spacecraft.
In 1977, the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft launched a few weeks apart. They have thus been in business for over 47 years.
NASA officials have recently reported a number of challenges with the spacecraft, primarily related to communication. The spacecraft Voyager 1 was the subject of the most recent issues. In an April statement, NASA claimed that it had not communicated with the spacecraft for the preceding five months.
Later, agency officials said, they discovered that the issue was caused by a chip in one of the computers aboard Voyager 1. The problem rendered the spacecraft’s transmitted data unintelligible. NASA said that by altering how the spacecraft stores and reads data, its engineers were able to resolve that issue.
Then, in October, NASA announced that there had been a brief delay in receiving data from Voyager 1 due to another communication problem. It turned out that the spacecraft’s radio transmitter system was the cause of that issue.
According to the agency, Voyager 1’s fault protection system was triggered when NASA instructed the spacecraft to switch on one of its heaters. Due to this power-saving activation, Voyager 1 began transmitting signals to a different radio transmitter system than it typically does.
As a result, NASA had to use the S-band rather than the customary X-band to listen for signals. They were able to resume receiving data after completing this. According to NASA, engineers were working to restore the X-band radio communication system online for extended use because the S-band is far weaker than the X-band.
NASA stated that since 1981, the agency has not utilized the S-band.
NASA’s most distant spacecraft currently in operation are Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. According to the agency, Voyager 2 is functioning from a distance of roughly 20 to 5 billion kilometers, while Voyager 1 is exploring space from a distance of about 24 billion kilometers.
Due to this enormous distance, NASA estimates that it takes around a day to send information back from Earth and another day to receive data from the two Voyagers.
The original plan for the two Voyagers was to investigate Jupiter and Saturn. Studies of those planets were successfully conducted by both spacecraft. In 1989, Voyager 2 conducted the first-ever up-close observations of Neptune and Uranus.
After that, the two spacecraft set out on a new mission to investigate far-off regions of space. NASA declared in 2013 that Voyager 1 had passed through the frontier between interstellar space and our solar system. “Interstellar” literally translates to “between stars.”. According to scientists, interstellar space starts where the sun’s magnetic field and constant particle flow end.
In 2018, Voyager 2 made its first interstellar flight. According to NASA, the spacecraft was then more than 11.7 billion kilometers away from the sun. The two Voyagers are the only spacecraft that have explored interstellar space thus far.
According to the space agency, the Voyagers are investigating the interactions between the solar wind and the interstellar medium. The constant stream of charged particles that the sun releases is known as the solar wind. Information about the heliosphere, a sort of protective bubble that surrounds our solar system, has also been made available by the spacecraft.
The Voyager project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California is currently Suzanne Dodd. As long as the two Voyagers are still in contact with mission members on Earth, the agency has no plans to retire them, she recently stated in a statement. Dodd stated that the current focus of the spacecraft is to observe the interactions between the heliosphere and interstellar space.
She went on to say, “If Voyager wasn’t collecting science data, we wouldn’t be doing it.”. Dodd pointed out that the engineers who built the Voyagers included several backup systems to prevent issues in the future, which is one reason they have been in operation for so long.
She said that some of the people who worked on Voyager in its early days have even returned from retirement to teach the upcoming generation of engineers and scientists.
Dodd stated, “As a project manager, I find it incredibly thrilling to witness young engineers’ enthusiasm for working on Voyager.”. “To take on the challenges of an old mission and work side by side with some of the masters, the people who built the spacecraft—they want to learn from each other.”. “,”.
My name is Bryan Lynn.
This article was written by Bryan Lynn for VOA Learning English and was based on NASA reports.
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