All Alone in Interstellar Space, Voyager 2 Is About to Lose Contact With Home
It's lonely out there in deep space. Especially when a spacecraft has travelled so far into the vast emptiness, interstellar space is now all it can truly call home.
Of course, this was always Voyager 2's fate. The spacecraft – which launched over 40 years ago and now stands as NASA's longest-running space mission – was designed to venture out to the boundaries of our Solar System. For decades, it's done just that, but the incredible voyage is about to encounter a challenge it hasn't faced in all that long, lonesome journeying.
NASA has announced that Deep Space Station 43 (DSS–43) – the only antenna on Earth that can send commands to the Voyager 2 spacecraft – is going silent, and not for a short time.
The giant dish, located in Australia, and roughly the size of a 20-storey office building, requires critical upgrades, the space agency says. The Canberra facility has been in service for almost 50 years, so it's not surprising that the ageing hardware needs maintenance.
Nonetheless, the work comes at a cost. For approximately 11 months – until the end of January 2021, when the repairs are expected to be complete – Voyager 2 will be totally alone, coasting into the unknown in a quiescent mode of operation designed to conserve power and keep the probe on course until DSS–43 comes back online.
"We put the spacecraft back into a state where it will be just fine, assuming that everything goes normally with it during the time that the antenna is down," explains Voyager project manager Suzanne Dodd from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
"If things don't go normally – which is always a possibility, especially with an ageing spacecraft – then the onboard fault protection that's there can handle the situation."
During this almost year-long period of radio silence, the silence will only be one-way. Other antennas in the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex (CDSCC) will be configured to receive any signals Voyager 2 broadcasts to Earth; it's just that we won't be able to say anything back, even if we need to.