The Voyagers nearing the edge of the heliospheric bubble carved out by the solar wind. Art Credit: JPL / NASA

Voyager 2 was launched on August 20, 1977 and has since traveled 8,600 million miles from mother Earth.

The four-year mission to Saturn has lasted 33 years and Voyager 2 enjoys the distinction of being one of two man-made objects at the very edge of the solar system.  Voyager 1 is a little further out than Voyager 2, if  1 or 2 billion miles can be called “a little further”.

Both Voyagers, built and operated by JPL, have been returning data.  On April 22 changes in the return of data packets was noticed.  At the time there was a moratorium on sending commands and a planned roll-maneuver and engineers were not able to send commands to the spacecraft until April 30th.    Radio protocols are understandable, imagine, it takes 13 hours for a radio command to reach the spacecraft and another 13 hours to get return data.  The returning signal must be astonishingly weak, being a ham radio operator, it boggles my mind.

At the moment we know by the preliminary engineering data from May 1, the spacecraft is basically healthy and the problem is in the flight data system which formats the data sent back.  The change in the pattern of the returning data is being evaluated.