zlacker

Actually there's a couple of work arounds for this problem as they anticipated it all along. My father was Director of Operations at Tidbinbilla deep space tracking station which ran most of the comms to Voyager 1.

I am paraphrasing what he said as a non-technical person: Voyager has both a dish receiver, and a pole antenna. The dish is the usual mechanism for comms but in an emergency such as this they would send commands to the other antenna. To do this they would turn the main tracking station dish up to max, and send a "TURN AROUND!" signal out.

But prior to that they had to alert the local electricity grid, and the local air traffic control to not have any planes flying over at the time!

I guess the Voyagers are too far away for this manoeuvre now.