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
Amazing that someone thought up a solution to a hypothetical problem 46 years ago, then fired it 30 billion km away

>>swarni+Ti
It's not really hypothetical: losing communication with stuff in space is a very common failure mode and a huge amount of the system design is focused on making it as unlikely as possible (generally the radio system gets a huge priority in almost everything and there are a lot of failsafes built at every level to make it possible to reestablish communication if anything disrupts it).

>>rcxdud+pC
I was amused to learn that if modern satellites lose contact with earth, they go into "safe mode": pointing towards sun, solar panels fully deployed, everything else except telemetry, radio, and temperature management disabled, waiting for further instructions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safe_mode_in_spacecraft

Imagine deploying a billion dollar piece of hardware and hoping that it has enough intelligence to keep itself from burning up before you can reestablish contact!