A veteran spacecraft temporarily stopped phoning home earlier this month.
After controllers at NASA鈥檚 Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California,
shut down a set of unused sensors on the Voyager 2 spacecraft on 12 November,
the probe went silent.
鈥淲e don鈥檛 know how it happened,鈥 admits Voyager 2 project manager Ed
Massey.
However, the working theory is that two bits of information in the command
sequence sent from Earth somehow became corrupted. The spacecraft is now
operating normally.
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