About a week ago, operators of the Voyager 2 spacecraft sent a series of commands that inadvertently caused the distant probe to point its antenna slightly away from Earth. As a result, NASA has lost contact with the spacecraft, which is nearly half a century old and presently 19.9 billion km away from the planet.
Usually itβs accomplished with gyroscopes, not RCS fuels. It has a schedule where it auto-orients itself to point back toward Earth, that next scheduled self-fix is in October.
As for how it knows what exact point to look at, Iβm not sure! Maybe weβre constantly streaming a radio signal for it to see
At 19 billion kilometers away, it takes about 18 hrs for a signal from Voyager 2 to be intercepted by Earth. Pretty crazy how long it takes at this distance.
But then again this isn't even that far. For comparison a message from Alpha Cenauri, the closest star system, would take four years for it to be intercepted...
If we ever become an species spanning multiple solar systems I wonder how communication tech will evolve to help reduce ~4 years down to well anything else lol