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.

>>Dylan1+zO1
Is that signal not drowned out by the sun? Or are these bands where the sun doesn't do anything?

>>mcv+2J3
If I can trust arbitrary estimates on stack exchange, the deep space network transmitters will be about equal brightness to the sun at frequencies near 2GHz when the 20signal is 10 Hertz wide. That would put the transmission rate in the ballpark of 10 bits per second, and the real number is 16 bits per second, so that seems to work out.

Being drowned out is harder than you might think. The maximum data rate of a weak signal is 1.4 x [bandwidth] x [signal-to-noise ratio]. If you transmit across a 200MHz band, and your signal is a million times weaker than the noise, you can do hundreds of bits per second.