cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/64197087

Meanwhile, a powerful antenna in Australia — the only one capable of sending instructions to Voyager 1 now 15.5 billion miles from Earth — was about to go offline for critical upgrades.

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As of May 4, the Australian antenna — part of NASA’s Deep Space Network, a system of three enormous radio dish arrays on Earth — is offline. It’ll remain dark until February 2026, with only brief periods of operation in August and December.

The antenna upgrades are necessary for Artemis astronaut moon landings and will increase communication capacity for deep space robotic missions, said Suzanne Dodd, who oversees Voyager and the Deep Space Network.