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The 70m antenna at the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex (CDSCC)
is the only radio antenna that can command the 43-year-old Voyager 2 spacecraft.
The antenna has been offline since March as it gets new hardware, but
on October 29th, mission operators sent a series
of commands to NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft for the first time since
mid-March. The spacecraft has been flying solo while the 70-meter-wide
radio antenna used to talk to it has been offline for
repairs and upgrades.
Voyager 2 returned a signal confirming it had
received the "call" and executed the commands without issue.
Since the dish went offline, mission operators have
been able to receive health updates and science data from Voyager 2,
but they haven't been able to send commands to the far-flung probe,
which has traveled billions of miles from Earth since its 1977 launch,
leaving the solar system in December 2018.
(Image credit: CSIRO/@CanberraDSN)
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