zlacker

I think we can answer this exactly. To visualize this think about the plane shared by the satellite and Earth. We'll imagine this as a 2D unit circle. In this graph Earth is at (1,0) and the satellite is at (0,0). So we end up with a scale where the radius is the same as the distance from the Earth to the satellite. But instead of pointing at (1,0), the satellite is now pointing at (cos(2), sin(2)) or (0.9994, 0.0349).

The distance from Earth (1,0) to the new location (0.9994, 0.0349) is about 0.0349. We need to scale that back up to "real" units so multiplying it by 15 billion miles. And we get about 520 million miles. The earth is about 93 million miles from the Sun, so its max positional shift (under extremely improbable absolutely perfect conditions) would be ~180 million miles.

So there's no way we could regain contact with just yearly movement, even before we account for the fact that it's getting further and further away. 2 degrees intuitively sounds small, but on an astronomical scale it's huge and this sounds like a pretty major flub by NASA.

>>somena+(OP)
Great explanation. Thank you!