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.
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.
This assumes their understanding of what caused the problem is accurate.
Should it be ever so slightly imprecise, it could mean we lose contact forever.
This is one of those things that sounds meaningful, but can be said about literally any problem in any system. Not all knowledge requires the same level of precision for confidence.
If the engineers at NASA who are familiar with the system say this is a known error state that will be fixed the next time the system designed to correct it fires on its set schedule, there’s not a whole lot added by saying sure, but what if they’re wrong?
It’s just restating the table stakes of existence.
You’re right, internet stranger. I bet they have not considered the possibility that Voyager 2 might have been eaten by a space whale. Like why aren’t the lame-stream fake news channels even discussing the space whale theory. Voyager 2 might even be intact inside the belly of the beast, and if NASA engineers haven’t factored this new data into their calculations about how fast a space whale would float through space with the additional mass and inertia of a functional probe, the signal could be lost forever.
I challenge Neil Degrass Tyson to a debate about space whales and how much they would theoretically be able to swallow whole.
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.
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.
~181,400,000,000 American football fields
~97,930,000,000,000 bananas (assuming 8 inch 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.
It’ll reconnect and align back the next time it pings back to Earth. It was designed for this kind of contingency. It’s very unlikely its lost forever.
