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Whenever I think of this, I also feel a little sad for it... out there all on its own, leaving the Solar System and heading into the unknown...

I prefer to think of it as 'heading out AS an unknown' ...

Our species' Voyager could eventually become some other species' Oumuamua.
 
Curious. Unless it's just me....

The almost-live data from Voyager 1 and 2...

https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/status

My reading of it is that they're both showing as getting >closer< to Earth....which makes no sense whatsoever. They're meant to be interstellar, heading away from us at 38,000 miles-per-hour.

At 0341UTC this morning (Sun 3 Mar 2019) the distance from Earth for Voyager 1 was 13,481,932,956....just ten minutes later, that had reduced to 13,481,922,095, that is
10,861 miles closer.....and travelling home at a speed of nearly 66,000 miles an hour!!!

What gives? Has somebody (or something) sent them back?

2019-03-03 04.03.48.png

2019-03-03 04.04.27.png
 
Curious. Unless it's just me....

The almost-live data from Voyager 1 and 2...

https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/status

My reading of it is that they're both showing as getting >closer< to Earth....which makes no sense whatsoever. They're meant to be interstellar, heading away from us at 38,000 miles-per-hour.

At 0341UTC this morning (Sun 3 Mar 2019) the distance from Earth for Voyager 1 was 13,481,932,956....just ten minutes later, that had reduced to 13,481,922,095, that is
10,861 miles closer.....and travelling home at a speed of nearly 66,000 miles an hour!!!

What gives? Has somebody (or something) sent them back?

View attachment 15362
View attachment 15363

It's coming home, it's coming home. Voyager's coming home!

...... or, it's that time of the year when Earth's orbit brings us temporarily closer to Voyager.
The distance from Sol is a better measure (which is also why Voyager's velocity is given from Sol, not Earth) and that is increasing steadily.

https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/satellites/a26118/voyager-1-and-earth-get-closertemporarily/
 
Still boldly going...
A New Plan for Keeping NASA's Oldest Explorers Going
voyager20190708b-16.jpg
This artist's concept depicts one of NASA's Voyager spacecraft, including the location of the cosmic ray subsystem (CRS) instrument. Both Voyagers launched with operating CRS instruments. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
› Unannotated version
UPDATED on July 12, 2019: Voyager 2 successfully fired up its trajectory correction maneuver thrusters on July 8, 2019, and will be using them to control the pointing of the spacecraft for the foreseeable future. Voyager 2 last used those thrusters during its encounter with Neptune in 1989. The spacecraft's aging attitude control thrusters have been experiencing degradation that required them to fire an increasing and untenable number of pulses to keep the spacecraft's antenna pointed at Earth. Voyager 1 switched to its trajectory correction maneuver thrusters for the same reason in January 2018.
With careful planning and dashes of creativity, engineers have been able to keep NASA's Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft flying for nearly 42 years - longer than any other spacecraft in history. To ensure that these vintage robots continue to return the best science data possible from the frontiers of space, mission engineers are implementing a new plan to manage them. And that involves making difficult choices, particularly about instruments and thrusters.
One key issue is that both Voyagers, launched in 1977, have less and less power available over time to run their science instruments and the heaters that keep them warm in the coldness of deep space. Engineers have had to decide what parts get power and what parts have to be turned off on both spacecraft. But those decisions must be made sooner for Voyager 2 than Voyager 1 because Voyager 2 has one more science instrument collecting data - and drawing power - than its sibling.
etc

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news....bY7SFe7gCMOrSbpeg2frQc03GCMwqv9wABUo28_CROsdA
 
Voyager 2 sending back signals from interstellar space
Nasa's Voyager 2 sends back its first signal from interstellar space
Nasa craft is second to travel beyond heliosphere but will give most detailed data yet
Hannah Devlin Science correspondent
@hannahdev
Mon 4 Nov 2019 16.04 GMTLast modified on Mon 4 Nov 2019 16.10 GMT


Twelve billion miles (19.3bn km) from Earth, there is an elusive boundary that marks the edge of the sun’s realm and the start of interstellar space. Voyager 2, the longest-running space mission, has finally crossed that frontier 42 years after its launch and beamed back a faint signal from the other side.
etc

https://www.theguardian.com/science...nds-back-first-signal-from-interstellar-space
 
A woman from NASA was on the radio the other day. She said Voyagers nuclear reactor has been losing power at the rate of around 3% per year so it has an estimated 5 - 8 years left of useful life. After that it won't have power to send data back to Earth.
 
A woman from NASA was on the radio the other day. She said Voyagers nuclear reactor has been losing power at the rate of around 3% per year so it has an estimated 5 - 8 years left of useful life. After that it won't have power to send data back to Earth.

It'll be a sad day when that happens but what an achievement - the folks who designed and built the Voyagers must be really proud.
 
That is very significant, I think.
 
Well, they did expect the plutonium batteries to fail eventually. Impressive reliability up to this point.
 
Voyager 2 suffers a glitch ...

... And now we will be losing the ability to communicate with Voyager 2 owing to limitations / obsolescence here on earth. Voyager will be left to survive automatically for almost a year while our sole uplink ground station is undergoing long-overdue maintenance. We'll be able to hear Voyager, but Voyager will get nothing but silence in return until early 2021.
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.

SOURCE: https://www.sciencealert.com/voyage...llar-space-is-about-to-become-even-more-alone
 
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... And now we will be losing the ability to communicate with Voyager 2 owing to limitations / obsolescence here on earth. Voyager will be left to survive automatically for almost a year while our sole uplink ground station is undergoing long-overdue maintenance. We'll be able to hear Voyager, but Voyager will get nothing but silence in return until early 2021.


SOURCE: https://www.sciencealert.com/voyage...llar-space-is-about-to-become-even-more-alone

There's something a tad... ironic, perhaps? That this little 40-odd-year-old spacecraft is happily trundling through the outer reaches of space and yet here on earth the technology for it is needing upgraded.

I still can't help but feel like Voyager is a 'living' thing (no, don't pass me my medication) it just... it's out there, bravely exploring, all alone with only the remote link back to Earth, and now... what if it can sense that we've stopped communicating with it? What if it thinks we've abandoned it?


... what if we can't get contact back again?


Perhaps I think about things too much.
 
There's something a tad... ironic, perhaps? That this little 40-odd-year-old spacecraft is happily trundling through the outer reaches of space and yet here on earth the technology for it is needing upgraded.

I still can't help but feel like Voyager is a 'living' thing (no, don't pass me my medication) it just... it's out there, bravely exploring, all alone with only the remote link back to Earth, and now... what if it can sense that we've stopped communicating with it? What if it thinks we've abandoned it?


... what if we can't get contact back again?


Perhaps I think about things too much.

I completely agree, let me just leave the saddest xkcd strip I've ever seen here. Different explorer, just as poignant.

https://www.xkcd.com/695/
 
Voyager will be left to survive automatically for almost a year while our sole uplink ground station is undergoing long-overdue maintenance.

This disruption makes no sense to me whatsoever.

The NASA Deep Space Network consists of three locations each of which has a cluster of at least four massive high-gain parabolic dish antennas, with each cluster located 120degrees apart around the globe.

NASA Deep Space Network said:
There are DSN locations near Canberra, Australia; Madrid, Spain; and Goldstone, California. Those sites are almost evenly spaced around the planet. That means as the Earth turns, we never lose sight of a spacecraft.
2020-03-17 13.40.41.png


This implies that all transmitted commands can only be originated from DSS43 in Canberra. That's crazy. A single 70m dish would have a tiny slot aperture.

And Nasa appears to have had plans to replace it

In order to meet the current and future needs of deep space communication services, a number of new Deep Space Station antennas need to be built at the existing Deep Space Network sites. At the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex the first of these was completed October 2014 (DSS35), with a second becoming operational in October 2016 (DSS36).

In fact, that last link explicitly-clarifies my point, and states that there ARE 70m (presumably transmit-capable) dishes at the other two global locations.

By 2025, the 70 meter antennas at all three locations will be decommissioned and replaced with 34 meter BWG antennas that will be arrayed

So is the actual reason that they won't be able to telecommunicate/command Voyager because they ARE normally transmitting from all three 70m dishes, globally, and they now can't manage that using just two of the three sites?

But they've *already completed* the 34m composite array in Australia, which was intended to replace the 70m dish....yet they're sorting/upgrading that, causing an inexplicable hiatus in Voyager contact?!

Somethings wrong: either my interpretations are flawed, or inaccurate information is being published, or there's a casual and poorly-executed conspiracy going on. That's listed in order of probability. And aliens are not on that list (currently)
 
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Did NASA plan this far in advance?

Yes - at least on a contingency basis ...

The ultimate boundary condition on the Voyager mission planning was the lifespan of the on-board power generation unit. All other planning and re-planning was subject to this ultimate limit.

The original Voyager mission was programmatically limited to a 2-planet exploration of Jupiter and Saturn. However, the course planning was done so as to permit continuation to the extended 4-planet exploration (including Uranus and Neptune) that had been proposed but wasn't originally funded.

The success of the initially approved 2-planet exploration motivated approval of a mission extension to cover the 4-planet agenda.

The success in accomplishing the extended 4-planet agenda similarly motivated approval of the agenda to continue using the spacecraft to send back data as they reached or passed the outer reaches of the solar system, heading ever outward until their power units would inevitably die.

For more details, see:

https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/
(... and associated webpages linked from there ... )
 
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This implies that all transmitted commands can only be originated from DSS43 in Canberra. That's crazy. A single 70m dish would have a tiny slot aperture. ...

Yes, there are 3 antennas capable of uplinking to something as far away as Voyager 2, but only one that can target the probe.

Voyager 2, which launched in 1977, is currently more than 11 billion miles (17 billion kilometers) from Earth. It is flying in a downward direction relative to Earth's orbital plane, where it can be seen only from the southern hemisphere and thus can communicate only with the Australian site.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=7611
 
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