Nasa picks up ‘heartbeat’ signal from Voyager 2 after losing contact with probe

Nasa has reportedly picked up a ‘heartbeat’ signal from the Voyager 2 probe after it accidentally lost contact with the spacecraft billions of miles away from Earth.

Last month, the craft- which has been exploring the universe for 46 years- lost contact with the space agency after a wrong command resulted in its antenna pointing two degrees away from Earth.

Following the error, the probe stopped sending data or receiving commands from its location more than 12.3 billion miles away in interstellar space.

But on Tuesday, Nasa said a signal from Voyager 2 was picked up during a regular scan of the sky.

The mission team will now attempt to send a signal back to the spacecraft in an attempt to re-establish contact.

‘We enlisted the help of the Deep Space Network and Radio Science groups to help to see if we could hear a signal from Voyager 2,’ Suzanne Dodd, Voyager’s project manager, told CNN. 

‘This was successful in that we can see the ‘heartbeat’ signal from the spacecraft. So, we know the spacecraft is alive and operating. This buoyed our spirits.’

Voyager 2 is programmed to reset its orientation multiple times each year to ensure its antenna is pointing Earthward, and is expected to do so again on October 15 – after which the team hopes communications will be restored.

‘We are now generating a new command to attempt to point the spacecraft antenna toward Earth,’ Dodd added. ‘There is a low probability that this will work.’

According to Nasa, the new signal is effectively an attempt to ‘shout’ at Voyager 2 and try to get its attention, despite the fact that its antenna isn’t oriented in a way to receive the radio signal.

Voyager 2 and its twin probe Voyager 1 blasted off from Cape Canaveral in 1976, having been launched in order to take advantage of a rare planetary alignment that allowed engineers at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) to fly past Jupiter and use its gravity to bend their trajectories to visit Saturn, repeating the process to also visit Uranus, Neptune and Pluto.

In addition to sending back thousands of images of our neighbouring planets over the years, the pair have also visited a number of their moons – and discovered many more. Voyager 2 identified a 14th moon around Jupiter, discovered 10 new moons at Uranus and five new moons at Neptune.

Voyager 2’s flypast of Neptune’s large moon, Triton, was the last solid object it explored before continuing its lonely journey from Earth, travelling at 9.6 miles per second.

On November 5, 2018, Voyager 2 officially left the solar system, crossing the threshold into interstellar space.

In 1998, Voyager 1 became the most distant human made object in space, passing the Pioneer 10 spacecraft.

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