this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2023
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NASA temporarily loses contact with V'ger (arstechnica.com)
submitted 2 years ago by inkican@kbin.social to c/scifi@kbin.social
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The Voyagers were launched nearly half a century ago.

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[โ€“] RheingoldRiver@kbin.social 1 points 2 years ago (3 children)

About a week ago, operators of the Voyager 2 spacecraft sent a series of commands that inadvertently caused the distant probe to point its antenna slightly away from Earth. As a result, NASA has lost contact with the spacecraft, which is nearly half a century old and presently 19.9 billion km away from the planet.

For the time being, NASA and the mission's scientists aren't panicking. In an update posted Friday, the space agency said Voyager 2 is programmed to reset its orientation several times a year to keep its antenna pointing at Earth.

Can someone ELI5 then why it's possible to make this mistake then? Like, why didn't they make that possible for someone to adjust in the first place?

[โ€“] mack123@kbin.social 4 points 2 years ago

In this case I doubt it would be as simple as a mistake. That poor little spaceship is really old and baked by solar and cosmic radiation. There would just be no way to perfectly simulate the impact of your commands on the ground. Coupled with unstable power from a dying nuclear battery. I would not want to be the programmer responsible for that one. The fact that it works at all is amazing.

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