NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft, currently in interstellar space, has lost ground communication with Earth due to an antenna misalignment issue. This occurred when a series of planned commands sent to Voyager 2 on July 21 unintentionally caused the antenna to point 2 degrees away from Earth.
The spacecraft is currently located over 12.3 billion miles (19.9 billion kilometers) from Earth, and this change has interrupted communication between Voyager 2 as well as the ground antennas of NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN). This means data transmitted by the spacecraft is no longer being received by the DSN, and the spacecraft is not receiving commands from ground controllers. The good news is that the next orientation reset will occur on October 15th, which should hopefully fix the issue.
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The mission team expects Voyager 2 to remain on its planned trajectory during the quiet period. Voyager 1, which is almost 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, continues to operate normally. A division of Caltech in Pasadena, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory built and operates the Voyager spacecraft,” said NASA.
