Voyager 2 Communications Pause [and resumes]

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https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/nasa-mission-update-voyager-2-communications-pause

By Calla Cofield, Jet Propulsion Laboratory. 

Excerpt: ...Voyager 2 is located more than 12.3 billion miles (19.9 billion kilometers) from Earth...A series of planned commands sent to NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft July 21 inadvertently caused the antenna to point 2 degrees away from Earth. As a result, Voyager 2 [was] unable to receive commands or transmit data back to Earth. The agency’s Deep Space Network facility in Canberra, Australia, sent the equivalent of an interstellar “shout” more than 12.3 billion miles (19.9 billion kilometers) to Voyager 2, instructing the spacecraft to reorient itself and turn its antenna back to Earth. With a one-way light time of 18.5 hours for the command to reach Voyager, it took 37 hours for mission controllers to learn whether the command worked. At 12:29 a.m. EDT on Aug. 4, the spacecraft began returning science and telemetry data, indicating it is operating normally and that it remains on its expected trajectory....

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