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NASA Space Science

When Voyager 2 Calls Home, Earth Soon Won't Be Able to Answer (nytimes.com) 59

Posted by msmash from the Shape-of-things-to-come dept.
NASA will spend 11 months upgrading the only piece of its Deep Space Network that can send commands to the prob, which has crossed into interstellar space. From a report: Voyager 2 has been traveling through space for 43 years, and is now 13 billion miles from Earth. But every so often, something goes wrong. At the end of January, for instance, the robotic probe executed a routine somersault to beam scientific data back to Earth when an error triggered a shutdown of some of its functions. "Everybody was extremely worried about recovering the spacecraft," said Suzanne Dodd, who is the Voyager project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. The mission's managers on our planet know what to do when such a fault occurs. Although it takes about a day and a half to talk to Voyager 2 at its current distance, they sent commands to restore its normal operations.

But starting on Monday for the next 11 months, they won't be able to get word to the spry spacecraft in case something again goes wrong (although the probe can still stream data back to Earth). Upgrades and repairs are prompting NASA to take offline a key piece of space age equipment used to beam messages all around the solar system. The downtime is necessary because of a flood of new missions to Mars scheduled to leave Earth this summer. But the temporary shutdown also highlights that the Deep Space Network, essential infrastructure relied upon by NASA and other space agencies, is aging and in need of expensive upgrades. On any given day, NASA communicates with an armada of spacecraft in deep space. These long distance calls require the most powerful radio antennas in the world. Luckily NASA has its own switchboard, the Deep Space Network or DSN.
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When Voyager 2 Calls Home, Earth Soon Won't Be Able to Answer More

When Voyager 2 Calls Home, Earth Soon Won't Be Able to Answer

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  • We lost Voyager, not able to send them order ....

  • Incoming message... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Comboman ( 895500 ) on Friday March 06, 2020 @12:57PM (#59803526)
    Greetings people of planet Earth. By sending a probe outside your solar system, you have qualified to join the Galactic Union. As a member you would have access to the combined scientific and medical knowledge of thousands of worlds. However, the choice is up to you. Please respond to this message within one rotation of your planet, otherwise we will respect your wish for isolation and leave you in peace.

    • Re:Incoming message... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by jellomizer ( 103300 ) on Friday March 06, 2020 @01:10PM (#59803564)

      Do you think that we would be able to respond to that in 1 day.

      Political opinion aside, It would probably take at least 12 hours to get this information up to the President. But Most of the time would be to determine if it would be a hoax or not.

      • Not only that, but it wouldn't just be up to the President; this would be a global wide phenomenon and decision to make. The UN would get involved.
        It would more sense for them to say "one revolution of your planet (around your star)" as the logistics and deliberation would take months and months.

        But I also can't help but chuckle and think of the Danny DeVito meme, "So anyway, I just started blasting..."

      • Reminds me of my argument about the differences in Scripture surrounding the trial and death of Jesus Christ: No bloody court in the world can fit something into the agenda in less than 3 hours, and yet we are meant to assume that Jesus had Passover, was arrested later that same night, was tried the next day, was sent to a different court, was returned to the original court, was exhibited before the people, was convicted by popular mob rule, and executed by 3pm? WHAT court system has EVER worked that quic

        • The different books in the bible have many of these events with different timelines of events.
          In terms of tradition it doesn't make sense to extend the holiday too long nitpicking all the legal details.
          Roman Occupation was the big problem in that area, where they didn't necessarily wanted it. To have the holiday to be based around Roman Law would seem disingenuous.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Tablizer ( 95088 )

        T: "This planet rotates? Why the fuck didn't anybody notify me!"

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by twms2h ( 473383 )

        And the current president would simply call it fake news and go golfing.

    • Your planet has been scheduled for demolition to make way for a new Galactic Hyperspace bypass. Please respond to this message within one rotation of your planet, otherwise we will assume all preparations are complete and commence demolition. Thank you.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by caseih ( 160668 )

        "Thereâ(TM)s no point in acting surprised about it. All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display at your local planning department in Alpha Centauri for 50 of your Earth years, so youâ(TM)ve had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint and itâ(TM)s far too late to start making a fuss about it now. ⦠What do you mean youâ(TM)ve never been to Alpha Centauri? Oh, for heavenâ(TM)s sake, mankind, itâ(TM)s only four light years away, you know. I

    • And every IT manager in the world screams "You get the new system online, at least in testing, before you take the old system offline". Standard operating procedure. Why isn't NASA following this basic practice?

    • We will proceed with the construction of the hyperspace bypass shortly.

    • Please respond to this message within one rotation of your planet

      Did you not know that the earth is flat? dumb alien..

  • Next time we want to send something on such a long mission, we should probably send several somethings with redundant infrastructure, and expect some, but not all of them to fail/be offline at once. Perhaps it could even reduce costs to build e.g. 5 nearly perfect probes vs trying to build 1 absolutely perfect probe.

    • Re:Redundancy (Score:5, Informative)

      by enigma32 ( 128601 ) on Friday March 06, 2020 @01:22PM (#59803592)

      Next time we want to send something on such a long mission, we should probably send several somethings with redundant infrastructure

      According to Wikipedia, Voyager 2's primary mission ended on Oct. 2, 1989. I think it is doing pretty well, considering its original mission was about 12 years and it's still running over 40 years after it was launched.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Next time we want to send something on such a long mission, we should probably send several somethings with redundant infrastructure, and expect some, but not all of them to fail/be offline at once. Perhaps it could even reduce costs to build e.g. 5 nearly perfect probes vs trying to build 1 absolutely perfect probe.

      You mean like "Better, Cheaper, Faster" which NASA started doing in the 90's?

    • Re:Redundancy (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Headw1nd ( 829599 ) on Friday March 06, 2020 @01:58PM (#59803734)

      The Voyagers have quite a bit of redundancy, it's how they have survived this long. The problems with your "more probes" line of thinking are many-fold, but the foremost is this: Having redundancy and backups on your main probe helps not just with accidents, it helps you avoid the real hazard of space probes: Unexpected design flaws. These flaws would be replicated across all of your "nearly-perfect probes", which would then all fail in the same manner. If they were cheaper and simpler, they might not have the ability to work around these issues.

      Not to mention you are multiplying your launch costs (around half of Voyager's budget were the launches themselves), dividing your instrumentation budget up giving you worse sensors on each probe, increasing your operations budget because there are more probes to keep in contact with... In short it is a more difficult equation than "Just send more cheaper probes."

      • The way around this is to develop probes using completely different teams. I think was done with the Space Shuttle code, the failover code was built and tested in isolation.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by twms2h ( 473383 )

      What made these probes expensive was not building the probe itself but launching it into space. Building several but less expensive probes won't solve that problem, just require more money to launch them.

  • Because we will all be dead of the Coronavirus?

  • I'd rather us spend more on the next extra-solar mission or mars or the moon. Voyager I and II is a great accomplishment but it's time to let go.

    Oh and Pluto is a planet dammit!

    • The Voyagers are still gathering valuable data on space that far out, and is not a big ticket item.

      The RTGs on the Voyagers are running down, and can only keep the scientific instruments running for about 5 more years. So we'll be letting them go soon enough.

      Agreed on Pluto!

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by hey! ( 33014 )

      Fun fact: we've been through this before. Ceres was originally counted as a planet, and Ceres was discovered 129 years before Pluto. So at the 1801, there were considered to be eight planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Ceres, Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus (discovered in 1781). In the 1850s so many solar system bodies had been discovered that they changed the definition of a planet and Ceres go kicked out of the club.

      Face it: if your education wasn't defective when you received it, it's probably obsolete

  • But the temporary shutdown also highlights that the Deep Space Network, essential infrastructure relied upon by NASA and other space agencies, is aging and in need of expensive upgrades

    Ah yes, it's some what comforting knowing that the United States' lack of care to maintain jack shit isn't just something that happens on this planet.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by hey! ( 33014 )

      Sometimes I think landing on the Moon was the worst thing that ever happened to US science. Ever since then people take it for granted that US leadership in science and engineering is a natural state of affairs, a kind of birthright.

      The fact is we're just 5% of the world's population. We'd never have reached our post WW2 preeminence in science without refugees from WW2, and we certainly would have taken longer to get to the Moon without a bunch of ex-Nazi scientists whose personal histories we whitewashed

      • we certainly would have taken longer to get to the Moon without a bunch of ex-Nazi scientists

        Probably more accurate to say we'd have taken longer to get to the Moon without Lee Harvey Oswald. If Kennedy hadn't been offed, the Congress would never have been willing to pay for Apollo....

  • Voyager 2 will be like "thank god they've shut up. I'm a PROBE, honestly, they've even politicized my bloody updates. Why do I care about some NY property mogul named Trump? Didn't he just marry Ivana ZelnÃÄkovÃ?"

  • ..launched a deep space relay in orbit around jupiter (well not jupiter, because of radiation issues, just saying) to extend that mission. Maybe that could still be done in time?

  • NASA DSN App (Score:5, Informative)

    by LandOfConfu$ion ( 1277550 ) on Friday March 06, 2020 @02:21PM (#59803840)
    If you want to see what spacecraft the DSN is communicating with in real time you can!
    https://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.... [nasa.gov]
    As I type this comment Dish #34 in Canberra is communicating with Voyager 2.
    NASA has a bunch of cool data visualization apps available at https://eyes.nasa.gov/ [nasa.gov]

    Enjoy.

  • Deep space pockets (Score:3)

    by thunderclees ( 4507405 ) on Friday March 06, 2020 @05:22PM (#59804634)

    Perhaps NASA can ask SpaceX for some of that tax money back?
    They could also start charging for the advancement of everyone elses space program.

  • When we launched these probes, we knew we'd have to upgrade the DSN to keep talking to them over the years. In fact, we've updated the DSN multiple times since Voyager was launched, increasing the dish size, replacing bearings and electronics in efforts that took weeks at a time.

    Where the loss of communications with the probes means we cannot immediately fix them if errors arise, the chances of having a fixable fault at this point in the mission is pretty slim. If it does happen, the mission would be a h

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