Launched from Cape Canaveral in 1977, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 have been in space for 42 years. Together, these robotic vehicles have changed our understanding of the solar system, and are now revealing unprecedented information about interstellar space beyond the solar sphere of influence. However, on January 28 of this year, NASA reported Voyager 2 malfunctions, the reasons for which were not known. Right now, the device is 18.4 billion km from Earth and, according to Inverse, citing the official NASA Voyager account on Twitter, it was able to return to service and resumed a mission to collect scientific data about the solar system and interstellar space beyond it.
What happened to Voyager 2?
On February 5, on their Twitter account, NASA announced that Voyager 2 was not only stable, but also returned to its scientific mission. At the moment, the connection between him and the Earth is set up and working fine. As a reminder, the device ran into a problem on January 28, and the connection with it was interrupted for unknown reasons. Then Voyager 2 turned off the power and software designed to automatically protect the spacecraft. The day before, the probe had to rotate 360 degrees to calibrate one of the instruments on board. However, the turnaround did not take place. As a result, two of his systems - both of which use a lot of power - worked simultaneously. The most likely problem, according to the researchers, is that the spacecraft was using too much power, which triggered the security software. The software automatically shuts down Voyager 2's scientific instruments when an overload occurs to conserve power.
42 years of spacecraft with gold plates on the hull ply space
As of this writing, NASA has neither confirmed nor denied whether this has actually happened. Only time will tell if we ever get an answer to the question of what went wrong. But for now, we can all be sure that the Voyager 2 mission is far from over. If all goes well, it will have five more years of life left, which means that for another five years the device will collect valuable scientific data from that area of space that we cannot study in any other way.
In the meantime, both vehicles have been in space for four decades, so their wear is a matter of time. However, even if we lose contact with these space travelers, they will continue to roam space, carrying on board gold plates on which information about our civilization is recorded.