Reply To: Voyager 2: contact lost after wrong command sent

Forums Spacecraft Voyager 2: contact lost after wrong command sent Reply To: Voyager 2: contact lost after wrong command sent

#618495
Nick James
Participant

The spacecraft antenna pointing would be based on on-board sun and star tracker data so I assume they have a stored ephemeris for offsetting the pointing from the Sun to get peak gain towards the Earth. Voyager 2 is currently around 160au away so the Earth is always within 0.35 deg of the Sun anyway but this is what will happen in mid-October when it executes its next pointing update.

Voyager 2’s antenna is a 3.7-m diameter paraboloid and at S-band (2 GHz) a 2 degree pointing error would imply a link budget loss of around 6dB which is huge. It is probable that the 70-m DSN antenna at Canberra will be able to detect and lock to the residual downlink carrier but unlikely that they will be able to decode any data. They could decide to array lots of antennas to improve the downlink SNR but the main problem would be getting commands up to the spacecraft to reset the pointing.

Given the low science return from Voyager now it is probably easiest just to wait until the next antenna pointing update.