Voyager Status, What is it? Options

[Bernard1963]

I should have noted that around the 7th September there was a sun sensor calibration and ASCAL which does appear to have fixed the pointing issue and the signal into the DSN has been as expected since then. However as this was the 2nd such incident in the past 6 months I wonder if the sun sensor is having trouble keeping a lock on the sun, now at 147AU.

[Bernard1963]

With info taken from one of the controllers at Canberra on twitter and my observations from https://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html, Voyager 2 was lost for a period of 5-10minutes in the early hours of 26/01/20 while attempting a MAGROL. It looks like an attitude control issue occurred causing the S/C to go off point from the earth. I'm assuming the fault protection kicked in and got the S/C back on point fairly quickly. The S/C was then in engineering mode 40bps rather than the usual 160bps. Even though the Voyager tracking schedule showed no further tracking, later in the day Canberras DSS43 70m dish was tracking and the Canberra website showed a horizon to horizon track was taking place. Its therefore reasonable to assume a spacecraft emergency had been declared with other missions being moved off of DSS43. Checking the most recent track earlier today Voyager 2 remains at 40bps (engineering mode).

[stevesliva]

My brain is hurting because morning in Canberra is so many hours before here, but it sounds like the most recent tracking was to determine whether the commands sent "later in the day" were received. Round trip time is so slow that this seems fast.
DSN antenna DSS-43 at @CanberraDSN opening a 3-1/2 hour listening window to see if recent emergency XMIT was received

[Bernard1963]

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=7587

[Roby72]

Canberra still tracking VGR2 at 39bits/sec as of February 2nd, 21h30UT as seen in DSN NOW
Now one week gap of science data.
Any thoughts ?

[stevesliva]

Canberra still tracking VGR2 at 39bits/sec as of February 2nd, 21h30UT as seen in DSN NOW
Now one week gap of science data.
Any thoughts ?

Data rate should be back all the way up to 160 now.

[stevesliva]

There was a post from climber in a another thread about the Canberra DSN 70m 11mo shutdown, but this one continues discussion about the V2 anomaly... so, here is an informative now 5-months-old article from the paywalled NY Times:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/04/science/...ce-network.html

It is spurred by the DSN maintenance, but has some interesting commentary about the anomaly. Nice to see reporters finding who to ring up, and talking to them.

[Explorer1]

Voyager 2 is doing well! DSN maintenance has progressed to the point that they have commanded (and heard back) from it after the hiatus.
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/nasa-conta...ce-network-dish