After months of challenging trouble-shooting and suspenseful waiting, Voyager 1 is once again talking to Earth.
The aging NASA spacecraft, about 24 billion kilometers from home, began transmitting garbled data in November. On April 20, NASA scientists got the probe back online after uploading new flight software to work around a chunk of onboard computer memory that had failed. They’re now receiving data about the spacecraft’s health and hope to hear from its science instruments again in a few weeks,
It is humanity’s second most distant spacecraft, trailing only its twin in how far it has ventured from Earth.
But the legendary Voyager 2 gave NASA engineers a scare last month when an embarrassing case of human error saw the US space agency lose contact with the 46-year-old probe.
A wrong command was sent to the spacecraft, causing it to point its antenna just two degrees away from Earth but enough for NASA to ‘lose’ Voyager 2’s position in space.
Almost exactly 46 years after it was launched, NASA has lost contact with its legendary Voyager 2 space probe – but it hopes it’s only temporary.
Voyager 2, which launched in August 1977 to study the outer planets – Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune – is more than 12 billion miles from Earth.
But communications were lost late last month when flight controllers accidentally sent a wrong command that tilted its antenna away from Earth.
The change has interrupted communication
“Man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.”
With this declaration in The Order of Things (1966), the French philosopher Michel Foucault heralded a new way of thinking that would transform the humanities and social sciences. Foucault’s central idea was that the ways we understand ourselves as human beings aren’t timeless or natural, no matter how much we take them for granted. Rather, the modern concept of “man” was invented in the 18th century, with
Directed energy is “the ability to create a high amount of energy in a controlled volume at a given distance in order to trigger physical reactions to study the interaction between the energy and the matter,” says Dr. Chaouki Kasmi, who is the Chief Researcher at DERC, which is part of the Abu Dhabi government’s Advanced Technology Research Council.
The research at DERC reflects the multitude of applications that are possible using directed energy, but the research projects have at
