A tiny command glitch nearly cut humanity's cosmic chat with Voyager 2, our farthest spacecraft at 12.4 billion miles away. 📸: Nasa/JPL-Caltech //🔗
team transmitted a routine command to Voyager 2 on July 21, the unthinkable happened: They accidentally sent the wrong version, which pointed the interstellar probe’s antenna slightly away from Earth. When they next expected to receive data, they heard nothing at all. The small error almost made humanity lose its connection with the popular spacecraft, which is now 12.4 billion miles from home.
The team settled on a solution: Blast a “shout” command in the probe’s direction, telling it to adjust the antenna back toward Earth. If the signal was strong enough, the craft could still receive it, even though its antenna was offset. There was no guarantee of success, and it would take 37 hours to see if the solution had worked: The time it would take for their signal to ping the craft, and then—if they were lucky—for a signal from Voyager 2 to ping them back.
Had the attempt failed, the team would have only had a single backup option left: the onboard flight software’s fault protection routine. Multiple fail-safes were programmed into the Voyagers to automatically take actions to deal with circumstances that could harm the mission. The next routine was expected to kick in in mid-October. If it worked, it would have generated a correct pointing command, hopefully adjusting the antenna in the right direction.
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