On Friday 30th October, we sent those commands & after a 34hour 48 min round trip time, a "hello" came back! #DSS43 /qyMEc9Jkxc has been waiting for us to be able to send it commands once again. Last week, mission operators sent their first communications to Voyager 2 since March, issuing a series of commands, and NASA reports that Voyager 2 returned a signal confirming it had received the instructions, and executed the commands without issue.įor the past 8-months, Deep Space Station 43 has been undergoing upgrades. In March, NASA announced that Deep Space Station 43 (DSS-43) in Australia, the only antenna on Earth that can send commands to Voyager 2, required critical upgrades and would need to shut down for approximately 11 months for the work to be completed.ĭuring this window, Voyager 2, which is currently over 18.7 billion kilometres (11.6 billion miles) away from Earth and getting farther all the time, wouldn't be able to receive any communications from Earth, although its own broadcasts back to us would still be received by scientists.Īs it stands, DSS-43's renovation is still underway and on track to be finalised in February 2021, but enough of the upgrades have been installed for preliminary testing to start. And yet, when you're one of the farthest-flying spacecraft in history – leaving Earth and even the entire Solar System behind you – nothing much is ever truly routine. In this instance, it was more a case of routine maintenance. The breakdown in communications – lasting since March, almost eight months and a whole pandemic ago – wasn't due to some rogue malfunction, nor any run-in with interstellar space weirdness ( although there's that too).
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