zlacker

>>belter+(OP)
In short, it was remote bricked, by giving it commands to rotate a bit. After successfully executing those commands - no further commands could be received, as now the antennas are not facing earth anymore.

But luckily it automatically readjust itself to earth automatically every half year exactly for these events. So on 15.10 we will know, if it is really lost. In either case, the end of its mission is near anyway, because the nuclear batteries are near its end.

edit: Nasa has a blog post on this https://blogs.nasa.gov/sunspot/2023/07/28/mission-update-voy...

>>hutzli+79
How the heck does it know where earth is?

That's some impressive science there, not like there is a deep-space GPS.

Does it look for the sun and figure out from there?

>>ck2+P61
So other people talked about how it does track, but there's another thing to note here.

"The high-gain antenna has a beamwidth of 0.5° for X-band, and 2.3° for S-band."

At 130-150 AU, the earth is always within about 0.4° of the sun. Since commands are sent on S-band, pointing directly at the sun gets a pretty good signal.