NASA lost contact with its Voyager 2 probe and potentially may not hear from it until October. Voyager 2 is located 12.4 billion miles from the Earth and is no longer able to receive commands or send data, CBS News reported. This is because a “series of planned commands” sent to the probe “inadvertently caused the antenna to point 2 degrees away from Earth,” according to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).
NASA’s Deep Space Network has picked up a heartbeat signal from the probe indicating that Voyager 2 is alive and well, per The Associated Press. The probe is set to reorient itself on October 15, which it is programmed to do multiple times a year to keep the antenna pointed at Earth. However, “that is a long time to wait, so we’ll try sending up commands several times” before then, JPL project manager Suzanne Dodd told AP.
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Voyager 2 was launched in 1977 along with Voyager 1 and became the first human-made probe to travel past Uranus in 2018. It is currently traversing interstellar space, or the space between stars, BBC wrote. Voyager 1 is being used to study Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, and is still in contact with NASA.
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