It was this last move that would eventually make Voyager 2 completely dependent on Canberra for communications. There, in the mirror of the trick its twin used to explore Titan, Voyager 2 flew over the north pole of Neptune, which put it on a path to fly close to its moon Triton and on in the general direction of the constellation Sagittarius. Voyager 2, however, continued on in the ecliptic, using its gravitational assist to shoot first to Uranus, and eventually to Neptune. The gravitational assist put it on a trajectory aimed above the ecliptic plane, in the general direction of the constellation Ophiuchus. To get a good look at Saturn’s moon Titan, Voyager 1 approached the planet from below the ecliptic, coming under the south pole. Both probes remained very close to the plane of the ecliptic for the first part of their journey before intersecting the orbit of Jupiter and picking up speed for the trip to Saturn.Īt Saturn, the twin probes would part to carry on very different missions. Launched to take advantage of a quirk in orbital alignment of the outer planets that occurs only once every 175 years, the Voyager probes were able to complete their Grand Tour because each planetary encounter was planned to give the probes a gravitational assist, flinging them on to their next destination. The Earth is pretty much always in the ecliptic, and therefore anything that leaves Earth is pretty much going to stay in that plane too, unless provisions are made to alter its orbit.Īnd that’s exactly what happened with the Voyager twins. The only major body in the solar system that varies appreciably from the ecliptic is Pluto, whose orbit is inclined about 17° to the ecliptic. The ecliptic plane is likely a remnant of the early disk of dust and debris that eventually congealed into our Sun and the planets. ESO.orgĪlmost everything that orbits the Sun does so in a pretty well-defined plane called the ecliptic. But space travel is not necessarily only two-dimensional, and that’s where the geographic oddities of Earth and curiously, the birth of the solar system itself, play into the recent Voyager blackout. This means that each site’s view of the sky overlaps the other about 300,000 km into space, thus providing round-the-clock coverage for every space probe. Looking down on Earth from the north pole, the DSN sites are spaced almost exactly 120° apart. What’s interesting about the DSN sites is their geographic arrangement. The three sites work together to provide a powerful communication infrastructure that has supported just about every spacecraft that has been launched in the last 50 years or so. Each site has an array of dish antennas ranging from 26 meters in diameter to a whopping 70-meter dish. The DSN is comprised of three sites: Madrid in Spain, Goldstone in California, and the site in Canberra, Australia. I discussed this in detail in the past, but here’s a quick summary. To understand the outage, one needs to know a little about the Deep Space Network and how it works. But that left me with a question: What about the rest of the DSN? Could they have not picked up the slack and kept us in touch with Voyager as it sails through interstellar space? The answer to that is an interesting combination of RF engineering and orbital dynamics. Upgrades and maintenance were performed on the Deep Space Network antennas that are needed to talk to Voyager. It turns out that the recent blackout to our most distant outpost of human engineering was completely expected, and completely Earth-side. According to these headlines, Voyager 2 had stopped communicating for eight months - could this be a quick nap before the final sleep? I’ve literally been following the Voyager missions since the twin space probes launched back in 1977, and I’ve been dreading the inevitable day when the last little bit of plutonium in their radioisotope thermal generators decays to the point that they’re no longer able to talk to us, and they go silent in the abyss of interstellar space. When the news broke recently that communications had finally been re-established with Voyager 2, I felt a momentary surge of panic.
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