Voyager 2 is the second spacecraft to travel beyond the confines of the heliosphere. It was launched in 1977 and is identical to its sister Voyager 1. Originally, both probes were conceived as part of the Mariner program and their goal was to study the outer planets. However, Voyager 2 took a different path when it encountered Saturn, coming closest to Uranus and Neptune in 1986 and 1989, respectively. Let’s take a brief tour of the history of Voyager 2, the probe that has exceeded the projections of NASA engineers.
Both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 became the only human-made objects to travel beyond the borders of our solar system. Voyager 2 reached interstellar space in 2018.
Voyager 2 trajectory
Since its launch on August 20, 1977 from Cape Canaveral, in the darkness of space and thousands of kilometers from Earth, NASA’s Voyager 2 marked a milestone in space exploration by becoming the second probe to enter space. interstellar in November 2018. A year later, the probe’s findings were detailed in five studies published in Nature Astronomy . Studies that revealed that it was the first time that a probe took direct samples of the plasmas that are found, both in interstellar space and in the most remote outskirts of the solar system.
Voyager 2 was also a pioneer in flying over, for the first and only time, the so-called icy giants Uranus and Neptune and was responsible for confirming that the heliopause is a permeable border. In addition, he has also observed a trickle of low-energy particles that extended more than 160 million kilometers from the heliopause.
Thanks to this probe, scientists were able to map Jupiter’s moons Ganymede and Callisto. He also provided vital information about a storm that devastated this planet, known as the Great Red Spot. The good results motivated NASA engineers to assign it a much more ambitious mission: to approach Uranus and Neptune, the planets farthest from the Sun and that had never before been visited by a spacecraft.
After passing by Saturn, the space probe took four years to approach Uranus, reaching 81,500 kilometers in 1986. Voyager 2 was able to send unprecedented images , measurements of Uranus, in addition to discovering ten moons and two new rings .
Voyager 2 real-time location
Voyager 2 shows signs of life in 2021
In March 2020 it was announced that the Deep Space Station 43 radio antenna, known as DSS43 and located in Canberra, Australia, was beginning a maintenance period. Due to its location and power, DSS43 is the only antenna in the world capable of maintaining communication with Voyager 2. Therefore, while maintenance work was being carried out, communication with the probe was cut off.
Scientists were afraid that after so long contact could not be resumed, but after 11 months, in February 2021, Voyager 2 showed signs of life. On the NASA page you can check the time it has been traveling without interruption, its current position and the state in which it is. NASA estimates that both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 will be able to maintain contact until 2032 , when their batteries may run out.
