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Voyager 2 completes 12,000 days of continuous operations

This image of the official Voyager clock, taken today, June 28, 2010 at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, shows that NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft in continuous operation for 12,000 days since launch. The Voyager clock is kept at JPLOn June 28, 2010, Voyager 2 completed 12,000 days of continuous operations since its launch on August 20, 1977. For nearly 33 years, the venerable spacecraft has been returning unprecedented data about the giant outer planets, the properties of the solar wind between and beyond the planets and the interaction of the solar wind with interstellar winds in the heliosheath. Having traveled more than 21 billion kilometers on its winding path through the planets toward interstellar space, the spacecraft is now nearly 14 billion kilometers from the sun. Traveling at the speed of light, a signal from the ground takes about 12.8 hours to reach the spacecraft.

Voyager 1 reached this milestone on July 13 after having traveled more than 22 billion kilometers. Voyager 1 is currently more than 17 billion kilometers from the Sun. (click image to see Voyager trajectory)

 

Engineers Diagnosing Voyager 2 Data System

Voyager Celebrates 20-Year-Old Valentine to Solar SystemVoyager 2 is now returning properly formatted data at 160 bits per second. Commands to reset the incorrect bit were uplinked on 19 May and we confirmed via downlink on 20 May that the bit change was successful and that the Checksum was now correct. On Saturday, 22 May we commanded back to the nominal cruise mode and confirmed on Sunday that we could frame-sync on the data. All experimenters report that their data looks normal except for a timing offset. The timing offset is a result of the "wait 10 msec" FDS instructions that were executed during the anomaly. Our next action is to correct the FDS timing. We have also begun to investigate a software patch to bypass the affected memory location.

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NASA-Voyager Makes an Interstellar Discovery

NASA-Voyager Makes an Interstellar DiscoveryDecember 23, 2009: The solar system is passing through an interstellar cloud that physics says should not exist. In the Dec. 24th issue of Nature, a team of scientists reveal how NASA's Voyager spacecraft have solved the mystery.

"Using data from Voyager, we have discovered a strong magnetic field just outside the solar system," explains lead author Merav Opher, a NASA Heliophysics Guest Investigator from George Mason University. "This magnetic field holds the interstellar cloud together and solves the long-standing puzzle of how it can exist at all."

Right: Voyager flies through the outer bounds of the heliosphere en route to interstellar space. A strong magnetic field reported by Opher et al in the Dec. 24, 2009, issue of Nature is delineated in yellow. Image copyright 2009, The American Museum of Natural History. [larger image]

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Voyager Enters the Heliosheath (cc)
 
 

 

 

 

 
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