NASA hears 'heartbeat' from Voyager 2 after blackout

WASHINGTON

NASA's distant Voyager 2 probe has sent a "heartbeat" signal to Earth after mission control mistakenly cut contact, the U.S. space agency said Tuesday Aug. 1.

Launched in 1977 to explore the outer planets and serve as a beacon of humanity to the wider universe, it is currently more than 12.3 billion miles (19.9 billion kilometers) from our planet - well beyond the solar system.

A series of planned commands sent to Voyager 2 on July 21 "inadvertently caused the antenna to point two degrees away from Earth," NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) said in a recent update.

This left it unable to transmit data or receive commands to its mission control, a situation that was not expected to be resolved until it conducted an automated re-orientation maneuver on Oct. 15.

But on Aug. 1, Voyager project manager Suzanne Dodd told AFP the team enlisted the help of the Deep Space Network - an international array of giant radio antennas, plus a few that orbit Earth - in a last-ditch effort to re-establish contact sooner.

To their surprise, "this was successful in that we see the 'heartbeat' signal from the spacecraft," she said. "So we know the spacecraft is alive and operating. This buoyed our spirits."

But while engineers can now see a heartbeat - in technical terms, the carrier wave associated with Voyager 2 - they can't yet read the information signal that shapes the carrier wave, which conveys all the data collected by the spacecraft.

"We are now generating a new command to attempt to point the spacecraft antenna toward Earth," Dodd added, although she said there is only a "low probability" it will work.

Still, given Oct. 15 is a long way away, NASA will keep trying to send up these commands.

While JPL built and operates Voyager spacecraft, the missions are now part of the NASA Heliophysics System Observatory.

Voyager 2 left the protective magnetic bubble provided by the Sun, called the heliosphere, in December 2018, and is currently traveling through the space between the stars.

Before leaving our solar system, it explored Jupiter and Saturn, and became the first and so far only spacecraft to visit Uranus and Neptune.