The two-week outage was believed to be the longest NASA had gone without hearing from Voyager 2.
Launched two weeks later, its twin, Voyager 1, is now the most distant spacecraft — 15 billion miles away — and still in contact.
The two-week outage was believed to be the longest NASA had gone without hearing from Voyager 2, Dodd said. As long as their plutonium power holds, the Voyagers may be alive and well for the 50th anniversary of their launch in 2027, according to Dodd. Among the scientific tidbits they’ve beamed back in recent years include details about the interstellar magnetic field and the abundance of cosmic rays.
“We’ve been very clever over the last 10 years to eke out every single little watt,” Dodd said. “Hopefully, one of them will make it to 50. But they are old and certainly events like this one that just happened scare the dickens out of me, as far as making that type of a milestone.”
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