NASA Finally Makes Contact With Voyager 2 After Longest Radio Silence in 30 Years

 There's never been a radio silence quite like this one. After long months with no way of constructing contact with Voyager 2, NASA has finally reestablished communications with the record-setting interstellar spacecraft.

The breakdown in communications – lasting since March, almost eight months and a full pandemic ago – wasn't because of some rogue malfunction, nor any run-in with part weirdness (although there's that too).

In this instance, it absolutely was more a case of routine maintenance. And yet, when you're one in every of the farthest-flying spacecraft in history – leaving Earth and even the whole scheme behind you – nothing much is ever truly routine.

In March, NASA announced that region Station 43 (DSS-43) in Australia, the sole antenna on Earth that may send commands to Voyager 2, required critical upgrades and would want to close up for roughly 11 months for the work to be completed.

During this window, Voyager 2, which is currently over 18.7 billion kilometers (11.6 billion miles) faraway from Earth and getting farther all the time, wouldn't be ready to receive any communications from Earth, although its own broadcasts back to us would still be received by scientists.

As it stands, DSS-43's renovation remains underway and on course to be finalized in February 2021, but enough of the upgrades are installed for preliminary testing to start out.

Last week, mission operators sent their first communications to Voyager 2 since March, issuing a series of commands, and NASA reports that Voyager 2 returned a sign confirming it had received the instructions and executed the commands without issue.

Successful pings between radio antennas and spacecraft aren't usually newsworthy events, but Voyager 2 is such a storied and historic probe (NASA's longest-running space mission in fact), it rightfully gets special attention – especially in situations like this, involving a period of one-way radio silence ciao, it's effectively unprecedented.

According to NASA, DSS-43 hasn't been offline for this long in over 30 years. The old radio aerial that needed replacing – the sole one within the world capable of broadcasting to Voyager 2 – had been in use for over 47 years.

As a part of the refurb, DSS-43 is getting two new antennas, upgraded heating, and cooling equipment, power supply equipment, and other electronics to support the new transmitters. When the work is complete, the upgrades will provide longevity to a cornerstone of a facility that's already legendary.

"What makes this task unique is that we're doing work all levels of the antenna, from the pedestal at ground level all the high to the feedcones at the center of the dish that reaches above the rim," says NASA part Network project manager Brad Arnold.

"This test communication with Voyager 2 definitely tells us that things are on course with the work we're doing."

As for why DSS-43 is that the only dish within the world that may reach Voyager 2, the rationale isn't purely technological. As a result of the probe's flyby of Neptune's moon Triton in 1989, Voyager 2's trajectory steered significantly southward relative to the Solar System's plane of planets, meaning earthbound antennas within the hemisphere don't have any way of reaching it.

For antennas Down Under, though, it's no biggie – unless you get taken offline for nearly a year of critical upgrades. Even then, though, scientists never stopped brooding about Voyager 2, and kept a detailed eye on its vitals.

"We've always been reprehension the spacecraft. We've been doing that daily," Suzanne Dodd, the project manager for the Voyager Interstellar Mission, told CNN.

"We can see the health of it. If it wasn't healthy, we might have known."