Voyager 2 completes 12,000 days of continuous operations
On 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
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
December
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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