voyager 2 mistake

NASA listens for Voyager 2 spacecraft after wrong command cuts contact

Image: The "Sounds of Earth" record is mounted on the Voyager 2 spacecraft in the Safe-1 Building at the Kennedy Space Center, Fla., prior to encapsulation in the protective shroud on Aug. 4, 1977.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — NASA is listening for any peep from Voyager 2 after losing contact with the spacecraft billions of miles away.

Hurtling ever deeper into interstellar space, Voyager 2 has been out of touch ever since flight controllers accidentally sent a wrong command more than a week ago that tilted its antenna away from Earth. The spacecraft’s antenna shifted a mere 2%, but it was enough to cut communications.

Although it’s considered a long shot, NASA said Monday that its huge dish antenna in Canberra, Australia, is on the lookout for any stray signals from Voyager 2, currently more than 12 billion miles (19 billion kilometers) distant. It takes more than 18 hours for a signal to reach Earth from so far away.

In the coming week, the Canberra antenna — part of NASA’s Deep Space Network — also will bombard Voyager 2’s vicinity with the correct command, in hopes it hits its mark, according to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which manages the Voyager missions.

Otherwise, NASA will have to wait until October for an automatic spacecraft reset that should restore communication, according to officials.

Voyager 2 was launched in 1977 to explore the outer planets, just a couple weeks ahead of its identical twin, Voyager 1.

Still in touch with Earth, Voyager 1 is now nearly 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) away, making it humanity’s most distant spacecraft.

NASA restores contact with Voyager 2 spacecraft after mistake led to weeks of silence

The "Sounds of Earth" golden record is mounted on the Voyager 2 spacecraft at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida in 1977.

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NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft was back chatting it up Friday after flight controllers corrected a mistake that had led to weeks of silence.

Hurtling ever deeper into interstellar space billions of miles away, Voyager 2 stopped communicating two weeks ago. Controllers sent the wrong command to the 46-year-old spacecraft and tilted its antenna away from Earth.

On Wednesday, NASA’s Deep Space Network sent a new command in hopes of repointing the antenna, using the highest powered transmitter at the huge radio dish antenna in Australia. Voyager 2’s antenna needed to be shifted a mere 2 degrees.

It took more than 18 hours for the command to reach Voyager 2 — more than 12 billion miles (19 billion kilometers) away — and another 18 hours to hear back.

PASADENA, CA - AUGUST 02: Suzanne Dodd worked on the Voyager mission in 1986 before moving onto Cassini and later returning to Voyager. Voyager 1, launched in 1977, is the most distant human-created object in space. Photographed on Tuesday, Aug. 2, 2022 in Pasadena, CA. (Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

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The long shot paid off. On Friday, the spacecraft started returning data again, according to officials at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge.

“I just sort of sighed. I melted in the chair,” said project manager Suzanne Dodd .

“Voyager’s back,” project scientist Linda Spilker chimed in.

Voyager 2 has been hurtling through space since its launch in 1977 to explore the outer solar system. Launched two weeks later, its twin, Voyager 1, is now the most distant spacecraft — 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) away — and still in contact.

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The two-week outage was believed to be the longest NASA had gone without hearing from Voyager 2, Dodd said.

As long as their plutonium power holds, the Voyagers may be alive and well for the 50th anniversary of their launch in 2027, according to Dodd. Among the scientific tidbits they’ve beamed back in recent years include details about the interstellar magnetic field and the abundance of cosmic rays.

“We’ve been very clever over the last 10 years to eke out every single little watt,” Dodd said. “Hopefully, one of them will make it to 50. But they are old and certainly events like this one that just happened scare the dickens out of me, as far as making that type of a milestone.”

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NASA restores contact with Voyager 2 spacecraft after mistake led to weeks of silence

Black and white photo of men near satellite

NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft is back chatting it up after flight controllers corrected a mistake that had led to weeks of silence.

Key points:

Voyager 2 stopped communicating two weeks ago, after the wrong command tilted its antenna away from earth
Contact was re-established with a command sent using the highest powered transmitter of a giant radio dish in Canberra
Its the longest time without communication with the spacecraft, which was launched into the solar system in 1977

Hurtling ever deeper into interstellar space billions of miles away, Voyager 2 stopped communicating two weeks ago.

Controllers sent the wrong command to the 46-year-old spacecraft and tilted its antenna away from Earth.

NASA's Deep Space Network sent a new command in hopes of repointing the antenna, using the highest powered transmitter at the huge radio dish antenna in Canberra .

Voyager 2's antenna needed to be shifted a mere 2 degrees.

It took more than 18 hours for the command to reach Voyager 2 — more than 19 billion kilometres away — and another 18 hours to hear back.

The long shot paid off.

The spacecraft started returning data again, according to officials at California's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

"I just sort of sighed. I melted in the chair," project manager Suzanne Dodd told The Associated Press.

"Voyager's back," project scientist Linda Spilker chimed in.

Voyager 2 has been hurtling through space since its launch in 1977 to explore the outer solar system.

Launched two weeks later, its twin, Voyager 1, is now the most distant spacecraft — 24 billion kilometres away — and still in contact.

The two-week outage was believed to be the longest NASA had gone without hearing from Voyager 2, Ms Dodd said.

As long as their plutonium power holds, the Voyagers may be alive and well for the 50th anniversary of their launch in 2027, according to Ms Dodd.

Among the scientific tidbits they've beamed back in recent years include details about the interstellar magnetic field and the abundance of cosmic rays.

"We've been very clever over the last 10 years to eke out every single little watt," Ms Dodd said.

"Hopefully, one of them will make it to 50. But they are old and certainly events like this one that just happened scare the dickens out of me, as far as making that type of a milestone."

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Voyager 2 enters into interstellar space, but it's still in the solar system

An artist's impression of the Voyager spacecraft in space

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An image of Triton, satellite of Neptune, taken in 1989 by Voyager 2 during its flyby

Nasa detects signal from Voyager 2 after losing contact due to wrong command

‘Heartbeat’ signal from probe, now 12bn miles away, picked up after flight control mistakenly pointed its antenna away from Earth

Efforts to re-establish contact with Nasa’s Voyager 2 probe have received a boost after the space agency detected a “heartbeat” signal from the far-flung probe.

Mission controllers stopped hearing from Voyager 2 more than a week ago after sending a faulty command that tilted its antenna to point two degrees away from Earth. The small change in orientation was enough to cut all contact with the probe.

The signal from Voyager 2, which is now more than 12bn miles from Earth, was detected during a routine scan of the sky, Nasa said, and confirms that the spacecraft is still broadcasting and in “good health”.

Voyager 2 is one of a pair of spacecraft that launched in 1977 to capture images of Jupiter and Saturn, but continued on a journey into interstellar space to become the farthest human-made objects from Earth.

“We enlisted the help of the [Deep Space Network] and Radio Science groups to help to see if we could hear a signal from Voyager 2,” said Suzanne Dodd, Voyager’s project manager on Tuesday. “This was successful in that we see the ‘heartbeat’ signal from the spacecraft. So, we know the spacecraft is alive and operating. This buoyed our spirits.”

Nasa engineers working on the Voyager 2 spacecraft before its launch in 1977.

The twin probes were launched within a couple of weeks of one another to explore the planets and moons of the outer solar system. Voyager 1 is still in contact with Earth and nearly 15bn miles away. In 2012, it became the first probe to enter interstellar space and is now the most distant spacecraft ever built.

Voyager 2 hurtled into interstellar space in 2018 after discovering a new moon around Jupiter, 10 moons around Uranus and five around Neptune. It remains the only spacecraft to study all four of the solar system’s giant planets at close range.

While the heartbeat signal has reassured Nasa that the probe is still working, it is not yet responding to new commands. The next hope of making contact with the spacecraft will come this week when the Canberra dish, part of Nasa’s deep space network, beams the correct command in the direction of Voyager 2 in the hope of reaching the probe’s antenna, according to the space agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

The spacecraft is so far away that even at the speed of light, software commands sent from Earth take 18 hours to reach the probe.

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Nasa concedes that the attempt to make contact through the huge dish antenna in Canberra is a long shot. If that effort comes to nothing, as engineers expect, mission controllers will have to wait until October, when the spacecraft should reset automatically and restore communications.

The Voyager probes have faced numerous glitches in more than 40 years in space. Voyager 1 was still on the way to Jupiter when it wrongly switched to a backup radio receiver, only to have the primary receiver burn out when engineers switched it back. After its fly-by of Saturn, Voyager 2’s camera platform got stuck because of a lack of lubricant. Much later, in 2010, the probe suffered a glitch that temporarily affected its science data.

Keeping the probes flying became an art as much as a science after many engineers moved on to other Nasa missions, leaving a dwindling number of ageing staff familiar with the probe and its software. Though state-of-the art in the 1970s, the Voyager spacecraft have only four kilobytes of storage onboard and computing power thousands of times slower than a modern smartphone.

The spacecraft entered interstellar space after leaving what astronomers call the heliosphere – a protective bubble of particles and magnetic fields that are created by the sun. But neither Voyager probe has yet left the solar system. The edge of the solar system is beyond the Oort cloud where smaller cosmic bodies are still under the influence of the sun’s gravitational pull. Nasa estimates that it could take 300 years for Voyager 2 to reach the Oort cloud and perhaps 30,000 years to cross it.

NASA hears signal from Voyager 2 spacecraft after mistakenly cutting contact

FILE - In this Aug. 4, 1977, photo provided by NASA, the “Sounds of Earth” record is mounted on the Voyager 2 spacecraft in the Safe-1 Building at the Kennedy Space Center, Fla. On Wednesday, Aug. 2, 2023, NASA’s Deep Space Network sent a command to correct a problem with its antenna. It took more than 18 hours for the signal to reach Voyager 2 _ more than 12 billion miles away _ and another 18 hours to hear back. On Friday, Aug. 4, the spacecraft started returning data again. (AP Photo/NASA, File)

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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — After days of silence, NASA has heard from Voyager 2 in interstellar space billions of miles away.

Flight controllers accidentally sent a wrong command nearly two weeks ago that tilted the spacecraft’s antenna away from Earth and severed contact.

NASA’s Deep Space Network , giant radio antennas across the globe, picked up a “heartbeat signal,” meaning the 46-year-old craft is alive and operating, project manager Suzanne Dodd said in an email Tuesday.

The news “buoyed our spirits,” Dodd said. Flight controllers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California will now try to turn Voyager 2’s antenna back toward Earth.

If the command doesn’t work — and controllers doubt it will — they’ll have to wait until October for an automatic spacecraft reset. The antenna is only 2% off-kilter.

“That is a long time to wait, so we’ll try sending up commands several times” before then, Dodd said.

Voyager 2 rocketed into space in 1977, along with its identical twin Voyager 1, on a quest to explore the outer planets.

Still communicating and working fine, Voyager 1 is now 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, making it the most distant spacecraft.

This cover image released by Avid Reader shows "Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space" by Adam Higginbotham. (Avid Reader via AP)

Voyager 2 trails its twin in interstellar space at more than 12 billion miles (19 billion kilometers) from Earth. At that distance, it takes more than 18 hours for a signal to travel one way.

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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After a 12.3 billion-mile 'shout,' NASA regains full contact with Voyager 2

Emily Olson

Ayana Archie

A NASA image of one of the twin Voyager space probes. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory lost contact with Voyager 2 on July 21 after mistakenly pointing its antenna 2 degrees away from Earth. On Friday, contact was fully restored. NASA/Getty Images hide caption

Talk about a long-distance call.

NASA said it resumed full communications with the Voyager 2 on Friday after almost two weeks of silence from the interstellar spacecraft.

The agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said a series of ground antennas, part of the Deep Space Network, registered a carrier signal from Voyager 2 on Tuesday. However, the signal was too faint.

A Deep Space Network facility in Australia then sent "the equivalent of an interstellar 'shout' " to the Voyager 2 telling it to turn its antenna back toward Earth. The signal was sent more than 12.3 billion miles away and it took 37 hours to get a response from the spacecraft, NASA said.

Scientists received a response at about 12:30 a.m. ET Friday. Voyager 2 is now operating normally, returning science and telemetry data, and "remains on its expected trajectory," NASA said.

NASA said Friday that it lost contact with Voyager 2 on July 21 after "a series of planned commands" inadvertently caused the craft to turn its antenna 2 degrees away from the direction of its home planet.

NASA is keeping Voyager 2 going until at least 2026 by tapping into backup power

What might seem like a slight error had big consequences: NASA previously said it wouldn't be able to communicate with the craft until October, when the satellite would go through one of its routine repositioning steps.

"That is a long time to wait, so we'll try sending up commands several times" before October, program manager Suzanne Dodd told The Associated Press.

These are the 4 astronauts who'll take a trip around the moon next year

Even if Voyager 2 had failed to reestablish communications until fall, the engineers expected it to stay moving on its planned trajectory on the edge of the solar system.

Voyager 2 entered interstellar space in November 2018 — more than 40 years since it launched from Cape Canaveral, Fla. To this day, Voyager 2 remains one of only two human-made objects to ever operate outside the heliosphere, which NASA defines as "the protective bubble of particles and magnetic fields generated by the Sun."

Its primary mission was to study the outer solar system, and already, Voyager 2 has proved its status as a planetary pioneer . Equipped with several imaging instruments, the spacecraft is credited with documenting the discovery of 16 new moons, six new rings and Neptune's "Great Dark Spot."

Voyager 2 Bids Adieu To The Heliosphere, Entering Interstellar Space

Voyager 2 is also carrying some precious cargo, like a message in a bottle, should it find itself as the subject of another world's discovery: a golden record containing a variety of natural sounds, greetings in 55 languages and a 90-minute selection of music.

Last month's command mix-up foreshadows the craft's inevitable end an estimated three years from now.

"Eventually, there will not be enough electricity to power even one instrument," reads a NASA page documenting the spacecraft's travels . "Then, Voyager 2 will silently continue its eternal journey among the stars."

Meanwhile, Voyager 2's sister spacecraft, Voyager 1, is still broadcasting and transmitting data just fine from a slightly farther vantage point of 15 billion miles away.

Correction Aug. 3, 2023

A previous version of this article implied that Voyager 2 flew past Uranus in 2018 when, in fact, the spacecraft concluded its encounter with the planet and started heading toward Neptune in 1986. Voyager 2 entered interstellar space in November 2018.

Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Nasa restores contact with Voyager 2 spacecraft after mistake led to silence

Spacecraft more than 12 billion miles away returning data once again after its antenna was successfully repointed.

The 46-year-old Voyager 2 is currently more than 12 billion miles from Earth. Photograph: Nasa/AP

Nasa’s Voyager 2 spacecraft has come back online after flight controllers corrected a mistake that had led to weeks of silence.

On Wednesday, Nasa’s Deep Space Network sent a new command in hopes of repointing the antenna, using the highest powered transmitter at the huge radio dish antenna in Australia. Voyager 2’s antenna needed to be shifted a mere 2 per cent.

Graphic: PA

It took more than 18 hours for the command to reach Voyager 2 – more than 12 billion miles away – and another 18 hours to hear back.

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The long shot paid off. On Friday, the spacecraft started returning data again, according to officials at California’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

“I just sort of sighed. I melted in the chair,” project manager Suzanne Dodd told the Associated Press.

“Voyager’s back,” project scientist Linda Spilker chimed in.

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The two-week outage was believed to be the longest Nasa had gone without hearing from Voyager 2, Ms Dodd said.

As long as their plutonium power holds, the Voyagers may be alive and well for the 50th anniversary of their launch in 2027, said Ms Dodd.

Among the scientific tidbits they have beamed back in recent years include details about the interstellar magnetic field and the abundance of cosmic rays.

“We’ve been very clever over the last 10 years to eke out every single little watt,” Ms Dodd said.

“Hopefully, one of them will make it to 50. But they are old and certainly events like this one that just happened scare the dickens out of me, as far as making that type of a milestone.” – AP

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NASA listens for Voyager 2 spacecraft after wrong command cuts contact

by Marcia Dunn

NASA is listening for any peep from Voyager 2 after losing contact with the spacecraft billions of miles away.

Hurtling ever deeper into interstellar space, Voyager 2 has been out of touch ever since flight controllers accidentally sent a wrong command more than a week ago that tilted its antenna away from Earth. The spacecraft's antenna shifted a mere 2%, but it was enough to cut communications.

Although it's considered a long shot, NASA said Monday that its huge dish antenna in Canberra, Australia, is on the lookout for any stray signals from Voyager 2, currently more than 12 billion miles (19 billion kilometers) distant. It takes more than 18 hours for a signal to reach Earth from so far away.

In the coming week, the Canberra antenna—part of NASA's Deep Space Network—also will bombard Voyager 2's vicinity with the correct command, in hopes it hits its mark, according to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which manages the Voyager missions.

Otherwise, NASA will have to wait until October for an automatic spacecraft reset that should restore communication, according to officials.

Voyager 2 was launched in 1977 to explore the outer planets, just a couple weeks ahead of its identical twin, Voyager 1.

Still in touch with Earth, Voyager 1 is now nearly 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) away, making it humanity's most distant spacecraft.

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Space and Astronomy

NASA restores contact with Voyager 2 spacecraft after mistake led to weeks of silence

Voyager 2 has been traveling through space since its launch in 1977. It takes more than 18 hours for a command to reach the spacecraft.

Le Monde with AP

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In this August 4, 1977, photo provided by NASA, the

NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft was back chatting it up on Friday, August 4, after flight controllers corrected a mistake that had led to weeks of silence.

On Wednesday, NASA’s Deep Space Network sent a new command in hopes of repointing the antenna, using the highest-powered transmitter at the huge radio dish antenna in Australia. Voyager 2's antenna needed to be shifted a mere 2 degrees. It took more than 18 hours for the command to reach Voyager 2 – more than 19 billion kilometers away – and another 18 hours to hear back. The long shot paid off. On Friday, the spacecraft started returning data again, according to officials at California's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

"I just sort of sighed. I melted in the chair," project manager Suzanne Dodd told the Associated Press. "Voyager's back," project scientist Linda Spilker chimed in.

Voyager 2 has been hurtling through space since its launch in 1977 to explore the outer solar system. Launched two weeks later, its twin, Voyager 1, is now the most distant spacecraft – 24 billion kilometers away – and still in contact. The two-week outage was believed to be the longest NASA had gone without hearing from Voyager 2, Dodd said.

As long as their plutonium power holds, the Voyagers may be alive and well for the 50 th anniversary of their launch in 2027, according to Dodd. Among the scientific tidbits they've beamed back in recent years include details about the interstellar magnetic field and the abundance of cosmic rays.

"We've been very clever over the last 10 years to eke out every single little watt," Dodd said. "Hopefully, one of them will make it to 50. But they are old and certainly events like this one that just happened scare the dickens out of me, as far as making that type of a milestone."

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A 'shout' across interstellar space restores contact between Voyager 2 craft and NASA

After weeks of giving Earth the silent treatment , NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft is once again communicating with mission control from billions of miles away.

All it took was for the ground team to send an interstellar "shout" across more than 12.3 billion miles instructing the historic probe launched in the 1970s to explore the far reaches of space to turn its antenna back to Earth.

Easy enough, right? Not so much.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory wasn't even confident the command would be capable of reaching the wayward probe across the expansive solar system. Failure meant that the space agency would have been waiting until mid-October for Voyager 2 to automatically reorient itself after NASA lost contact with the 46-year-old spacecraft last month.

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The array of giant radio network antennas known as the Deep Space Network detected a faint signal last week from Voyager 2, which on July 21 had inadvertently tilted its antenna a mere 2 degrees away from Earth. Though the signal was not strong enough for any data to be extracted, the faint "heartbeat" was enough to give NASA hope that the spacecraft was still operational.

In a Hail Mary effort, a Deep Space Network radio dish in Canberra, Australia sent out a message it hoped would somehow reach the craft and command it to correct its antenna orientation.

It took 18 and-a-half hours for the command to reach Voyager 2, and 37 hours total for mission controllers to know whether it was successful. But after what must have been dozens of tense hours, the team received science and telemetry data from Voyager 2 around 12:30 a.m. on Friday, indicating the craft remains operational and on its expected trajectory.

"NASA has reestablished full communications with Voyager 2," JPL announced , saying that the antenna has realigned with Earth.

Where is Voyager 2?

Voyager 2, which is nearly 46 years into its mission, is roughly 12.4 billion miles from Earth after leaving the heliosphere — the shield that protects the planets from interstellar radiation — five years ago, according to NASA.

The agency provides an interactive diagram tracking Voyager 2's path outside the solar system.

Historic probes launched in the 1970s

Voyager 2 was launched into space in 1977 from Cape Canaveral, Florida with the mission of exploring the outer solar system . Its twin probe, Voyager 1, launched two weeks later and at 15 billion miles away, has the distinction of being the farthest human-made object from Earth .

In 2012, Voyager 1 was the first spacecraft to reach interstellar space , followed in 2018 by Voyager 2.

Voyager 1's communications were not interrupted when a routine command sent its twin probe pointing in the wrong direction last month, disrupting it ability to receive commands or transmit data back to Earth.

Had NASA not reestablished contact, it wouldn't have been until Oct. 15 that Voyager 2 would have automatically repositioned its antenna to ensure it was pointed at its home planet.

'Internet apocalypse': How NASA's solar-storm studies could help save the web

Should they encounter extraterrestrial life, both Voyager 1 and 2 carry the famous " golden record ," functioning both as a time capsule and friendly Earthling greeting. The phonograph record — a 12-inch gold-plated copper disk — contains music, languages and sounds representative of Earth's various cultures and eras.

Eric Lagatta covers breaking and trending news for USA TODAY. Reach him at [email protected].

NASA used an interstellar 'shout' to reconnect with Voyager 2 probe after losing it in a technical screw-up

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory reconnected with the Voyager 2 space probe after losing it.
The space agency lost contact on July 21 after accidentally sending a wrong command.
The team was able to reorient it back towards Earth using a last-ditch strategy few thought would work.

NASA announced on Friday that it had reestablished communication with the Voyager 2 space probe after a long-shot strategy paid off.

The agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory sent an interstellar "shout" more than 12.3 billion miles which got the probe's attention after an error by NASA officials rendered the probe temporarily unreachable.

NASA lost contact with Voyager 2 on July 21 after it erroneously sent a series of commands that caused its antenna to point two degrees away from Earth.

NASA restores contact with Voyager 2 spacecraft after mistake led to weeks of silence

In this Saturday, Aug. 20, 1977 file photo, the Voyager 2 spacecraft, atop a Titan Centaur rocket, is launched from Cape Canaveral, Fla. (AP Photo)

NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft was back chatting it up Friday after flight controllers corrected a mistake that had led to weeks of silence.

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On Wednesday, NASA's Deep Space Network sent a new command in hopes of repointing the antenna, using the highest powered transmitter at the huge radio dish antenna in Australia. Voyager 2's antenna needed to be shifted a mere 2 per cent.

It took more than 18 hours for the command to reach Voyager 2 -- more than 12 billion miles (19 billion kilometres) away -- and another 18 hours to hear back.

The long shot paid off. On Friday, the spacecraft started returning data again, according to officials at California's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

"I just sort of sighed. I melted in the chair," project manager Suzanne Dodd told The Associated Press.

"Voyager's back," project scientist Linda Spilker chimed in.

Voyager 2 has been hurtling through space since its launch in 1977 to explore the outer solar system. Launched two weeks later, its twin, Voyager 1, is now the most distant spacecraft -- 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometres) away -- and still in contact.

The two-week outage was believed to be the longest NASA had gone without hearing from Voyager 2, Dodd said.

As long as their plutonium power holds, the Voyagers may be alive and well for the 50th anniversary of their launch in 2027, according to Dodd. Among the scientific tidbits they've beamed back in recent years include details about the interstellar magnetic field and the abundance of cosmic rays.

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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NASA restores contact with Voyager 2 spacecraft after weeks of silence from interstellar space

Scientists feared the 46-year-old spacecraft may have been lost for good, by marcia dunn and marcia dunn • published august 4, 2023 • updated on august 4, 2023 at 7:55 pm.

NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft was back chatting it up Friday after flight controllers corrected a mistake that had led to weeks of silence.

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It took more than 18 hours for the command to reach Voyager 2 — more than 12 billion miles (19 billion kilometers) away — and another 18 hours to hear back.

The long shot paid off. On Friday, the spacecraft started returning data again, according to officials at California's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

“I just sort of sighed. I melted in the chair,” project manager Suzanne Dodd told The Associated Press.

“Voyager's back,” project scientist Linda Spilker chimed in.

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The two-week outage was believed to be the longest NASA had gone without hearing from Voyager 2, Dodd said.

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As long as their plutonium power holds, the Voyagers may be alive and well for the 50th anniversary of their launch in 2027, according to Dodd. Among the scientific tidbits they've beamed back in recent years include details about the interstellar magnetic field and the abundance of cosmic rays.

“We've been very clever over the last 10 years to eke out every single little watt,” Dodd said. “Hopefully, one of them will make it to 50. But they are old and certainly events like this one that just happened scare the dickens out of me, as far as making that type of a milestone."

This article tagged under:

NASA Restores Contact With Voyager 2 Spacecraft After Mistake Led to Weeks of Silence

NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft is back in contact again, after flight controllers corrected a mistake that had led to weeks of silence

FILE - In this Aug. 4, 1977, photo provided by NASA, the "Sounds of Earth" record is mounted on the Voyager 2 spacecraft in the Safe-1 Building at the Kennedy Space Center, Fla., prior to encapsulation in the protective shroud. NASA is listening for any peep from Voyager 2 after losing contact with the spacecraft billions of miles away. (AP Photo/NASA, File)

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft was back chatting it up Friday after flight controllers corrected a mistake that had led to weeks of silence.

It took more than 18 hours for the command to reach Voyager 2 — more than 12 billion miles (19 billion kilometers) away — and another 18 hours to hear back.

The long shot paid off. On Friday, the spacecraft started returning data again, according to officials at California 's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

“I just sort of sighed. I melted in the chair,” project manager Suzanne Dodd told The Associated Press.

“Voyager's back,” project scientist Linda Spilker chimed in.

The two-week outage was believed to be the longest NASA had gone without hearing from Voyager 2, Dodd said.

As long as their plutonium power holds, the Voyagers may be alive and well for the 50th anniversary of their launch in 2027, according to Dodd. Among the scientific tidbits they've beamed back in recent years include details about the interstellar magnetic field and the abundance of cosmic rays.

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Photos You Should See - May 2024

TOPSHOT - A woman wades through flood waters at an inundated residential area in Garissa, on May 9, 2024. Kenya is grappling with one of its worst floods in recent history, the latest in a string of weather catastrophes, following weeks of extreme rainfall scientists have linked to a changing climate. At least 257 people have been killed and more than 55,000 households have been displaced as murky waters submerge entire villages, destroy roads and inundate dams. (Photo by LUIS TATO / AFP) (Photo by LUIS TATO/AFP via Getty Images)

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Red lobster seeks bankruptcy protection days after closing dozens of restaurants, sunshine girl kelli, iran’s president, foreign minister and others found dead at helicopter crash site, scottie scheffler's charges expected to be dropped by louisville police, nasa restores contact with voyager 2 after mistake led to weeks of silence.

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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft was back chatting it up Friday after flight controllers corrected a mistake that had led to weeks of silence.

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NASA restores contact with Voyager 2 after mistake led to weeks of silence Back to video

It took more than 18 hours for the command to reach Voyager 2 _ more than 12 billion miles (19 billion kilometers) away — and another 18 hours to hear back.

The long shot paid off. On Friday, the spacecraft started returning data again, according to officials at California’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

“I just sort of sighed. I melted in the chair,” project manager Suzanne Dodd told The Associated Press.

“Voyager’s back,” project scientist Linda Spilker chimed in.

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Voyager 1 was in crisis in interstellar space. NASA wouldn’t give up.

NASA engineers spent months doggedly trying to fix a computer on Voyager 1, a spacecraft launched in the 1970s that’s now exploring interstellar space.

For the past six months a team of engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has been trying to fix a glitchy computer. Three things make the repair job challenging:

The computer is highly customized and unlike anything on the market today.

It was built in the 1970s.

And it is 15 billion miles away.

The computer is on Voyager 1, the most distant human-made spacecraft ever launched. Far beyond the orbit of Pluto, it is riding point for all humanity as it hurtles through interstellar space.

But on Nov. 14, Voyager 1 suddenly stopped sending any data back to Earth. While it remained in radio contact, the transmission had, as NASA engineers put it, “flatlined.” So began the greatest crisis in the history of the fabled Voyager program.

Voyager 1 and its twin, Voyager 2, launched in 1977 and in the years that followed obtained stunning close-up images of Jupiter and Saturn. Voyager 2 also flew by Uranus and Neptune and is the only spacecraft to have visited those ice giants. The Voyagers blew past the heliopause, where the solar wind abates and interstellar space begins, and continued to send back science data about particles and magnetic fields in a realm never before visited.

The two Voyagers are powered by the radioactive decay of plutonium-238, and in the near future that power source will be too feeble to keep the spacecraft warm and functioning. But for now, they have operational scientific instruments that are sending back otherwise unobtainable data on the composition of space beyond the heliopause.

Fixing Voyager 1 quickly became a priority for NASA, and especially for Jeffrey Mellstrom, who has been at JPL in Pasadena for 35 years and is the chief engineer in the astronomy and physics directorate.

Mellstrom took on the challenge even as he planned for retirement in the spring. In January, Mellstrom told a colleague, “The one thing I’m going to regret is if I retire before we solve Voyager 1’s problem.”

Like kicking a vending machine

After initial attempts to resolve the issue went nowhere, JPL leadership created a “tiger team” made of a multigenerational crew of engineers, some of them veterans of the lab and some born long after the Voyagers launched.

“We didn’t know how to solve this in the beginning because we didn’t know what’s wrong,” said Mellstrom, the team’s leader.

Voyager 1 has three computers. One is the attitude and articulation control system, which makes sure the spacecraft is pointed in the right direction. Another is the command control system, which handles the commands coming from Earth. The third is the flight data subsystem, which takes science and engineering data and packages it for transmission home.

Something had gone wrong somewhere in that trio of computers. Maybe a “cosmic ray” — a particle from deep space — had smashed into a computer chip. Or maybe a piece of hardware just got so old it ceased to work.

“All we had was incoherent data, garbled data,” said Suzanne Dodd, the Voyager project manager since 2010. Dodd has been at JPL for four decades, and in her early years she wrote computer code for Voyager 2’s encounters with Uranus and Neptune. She vividly remembers that first close-up look of Neptune and an image of the ice giant with its huge moon Triton in the background.

“We didn’t know what part of the spacecraft was involved with this,” Dodd said.

So they poked it. They sent commands to Voyager 1, trying to jolt it back to coherence. The team had a list of potential failures and figured that one of the commands might have the equivalent effect of kicking a vending machine.

Here is where the troubleshooting encountered an inviolable obstacle: the speed of light. Even at 186,000 miles per second, a command sent to Voyager 1 would take 22½ hours to arrive. Then the engineers would have to wait another 22½ hours for the spacecraft to send a response.

The planet Earth is kind of a pain, too, because it spins inconveniently on its axis and moves restlessly around the sun. To communicate with distant spacecraft, NASA relies on the Deep Space Network, three arrays of huge radio telescopes in California, Spain and Australia. The idea is that, regardless of Earth’s movement, at least one array can be pointed toward a spacecraft at almost any time.

The tiger team developed a pattern of sending a command on a Friday and waiting for the return signal on Sunday. Some dark days and weeks followed.

“None of those commands that we sent were able to make any discernible difference whatsoever,” said David Cummings, an advanced flight software designer and developer.

In late February, the team sent a series of commands to prod the flight data subsystem to place software in each of 10 different “data modes.” The team waited, hoping for a breakthrough. After two days, Voyager responded — still without data. Engineer Greg Chin circulated a technical chart and summarized the situation: “So, at this time, no joy.”

“It was unbelievably depressing,” Cummings said. “Luckily the story doesn’t end there.”

Cracking the code

Just a day after the “no joy” email, the team felt a surge of optimism.

JPL has specialists in radio transmissions, and they noticed that in some “modes” the return signal from Voyager 1 had been modulated in a pattern consistent with the flight subsystem computer producing data, though not in any normal format. The modulation suggested that the processor was functioning and supported the team’s conjecture that some of the memory had been corrupted.

“That was huge,” Cummings said. “The processor was not dead.”

Painstakingly, the team at last tracked down the origin of the problem: a bad memory chip holding one bit — the smallest unit of binary data — for each of 256 contiguous words of memory.

The flight data subsystem was built with 8K memory, or more exactly 8,192 bytes. (A modern smartphone has something like 6G memory, or 6 billion bytes.)

The engineers came up with a plan: They would move the software to different parts of the flight data subsystem memory. Unfortunately they couldn’t just move the 256 words in a single batch, because there was no place roomy enough for all of it. They had to break it down into pieces. And they’d have to proofread everything. It was tedious, error-prone work.

Cummings called a young JPL flight software engineer named Armen Arslanian: “Do you want to help me relocate Voyager code?”

Arslanian was the right person for the job. Just six years out of college, he knew how to write code for spacecraft, and he knew how to deal with “assembly language,” the coding that underlies the common languages used by programmers today. That’s the language of Voyager’s 1970s-era computers.

“I ended up needing that skill,” Arslanian said.

The JPL teams had documentation from the 1970s describing the function of the software, but often the descriptions were contingent on other information that could not be found. The team also lacked the tools to verify their coding. They had to do everything essentially by hand. It wasn’t like trying to find a needle in a haystack so much as like trying to examine every piece of hay for possible flaws.

The team prioritized the software for the engineering data so that they could fully restore communication with the spacecraft. If that worked, they could fix the science data later.

On April 18, the team sent a package of commands to the spacecraft and then waited. Two days later the spacecraft sent back the first intelligible engineering data in more than five months.

There is more work to be done, but the end is in sight. The engineers are still working on transferring the code that controls the scientific data. But they know how to do this. They found the problem, figured out the workaround and are just grinding through the code transfer.

Mellstrom and Dodd are fully confident that Voyager 1 has been saved. Mellstrom said he can retire without regret.

“The spacecraft is working,” Dodd said. “Go Voyager!”

An earlier version of this story incorrectly said Jeffrey Mellstrom and Suzanne Dodd are married. They are married to other people. This story has been corrected.

NASA restores contact with Voyager 2 spacecraft after mistake led to weeks of silence

Saturday 5 August 2023 at 8:25am

NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft has come back into contact with flight controllers after they corrected a mistake that had led to weeks of silence.

It took more than 18 hours for the command to reach Voyager 2 — more than 12 billion miles (19 billion kilometers) away — and another 18 hours to hear back.

The long shot paid off. On Friday, the spacecraft started returning data again, according to officials at California's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

“I just sort of sighed. I melted in the chair,” project manager Suzanne Dodd told The Associated Press.

“Voyager's back,” project scientist Linda Spilker chimed in.

The two-week outage was believed to be the longest NASA had gone without hearing from Voyager 2, Dodd said.

As long as their plutonium power holds, the Voyagers may be alive and well for the 50th anniversary of their launch in 2027, according to Dodd. Among the scientific tidbits they've beamed back in recent years include details about the interstellar magnetic field and the abundance of cosmic rays.

Want a quick and expert briefing on the biggest news stories? Listen to our latest podcasts to find out What You Need To Know.

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Ieee spectrum, follow ieee spectrum, support ieee spectrum, enjoy more free content and benefits by creating an account, saving articles to read later requires an ieee spectrum account, the institute content is only available for members, downloading full pdf issues is exclusive for ieee members, downloading this e-book is exclusive for ieee members, access to spectrum 's digital edition is exclusive for ieee members, following topics is a feature exclusive for ieee members, adding your response to an article requires an ieee spectrum account, create an account to access more content and features on ieee spectrum , including the ability to save articles to read later, download spectrum collections, and participate in conversations with readers and editors. for more exclusive content and features, consider joining ieee ., join the world’s largest professional organization devoted to engineering and applied sciences and get access to all of spectrum’s articles, archives, pdf downloads, and other benefits. learn more →, join the world’s largest professional organization devoted to engineering and applied sciences and get access to this e-book plus all of ieee spectrum’s articles, archives, pdf downloads, and other benefits. learn more →, access thousands of articles — completely free, create an account and get exclusive content and features: save articles, download collections, and talk to tech insiders — all free for full access and benefits, join ieee as a paying member., how nasa is hacking voyager 1 back to life, engineers found space in the geriatric spacecraft’s memory to deal with a stuck bit.

illlustration of a disc with probes against a black background with white dots all around

Voyager 1 whizzes through interstellar space at 17 kilometers per second.

On 14 November 2023, NASA’s interstellar space probe Voyager 1 began sending gibberish back to Earth. For five months, the spacecraft transmitted unusable data equivalent to a dial tone.

In March, engineers discovered the cause of the communication snafu: a stuck bit in one of the chips comprising part of Voyager’s onboard memory. The chip contained lines of code used by the flight data subsystem (FDS), one of three computers aboard the spacecraft and the one that is responsible for collecting and packaging data before sending it back to Earth.

JPL engineers sent a command through the Deep Space Network on 18 April to relocate the affected section of code to another part of the spacecraft’s memory, hoping to fix the glitch in the archaic computer system. Roughly 22.5 hours later, the radio signal reached Voyager in interstellar space, and by the following day it was clear the command had worked. Voyager began returning useful data again on 20 April.

NASA engineers managed to diagnose and repair Voyager 1 from 24 billion kilometers away—all while working within the constraints of the vintage technology. “We had some people left that we could rely on [who] could remember working on bits of the hardware,” says project scientist Linda Spilker . “But a lot of it was going back through old memos, like an archeological dig to try and find information on the best way to proceed.”

Minuscule Memory

Voyager 1 and its twin, Voyager 2—which also remains operational—were launched nearly 50 years ago, in 1977, to tour the solar system. Both spacecraft far surpassed their original missions of visiting Jupiter and Saturn, and in 2012, entered interstellar space .

“That mission literally rewrote the textbooks on the solar system,” says Jim Bell , a planetary scientist at Arizona State University and author of a book recounting 40 years of the mission. “We’ve never sent anything out that far, so every bit of data they send back is new.” The 1960s and 1970s technology, on the other hand, is now ancient.

Decades after the tech went out of vogue, the FDS still uses assembly language and 16-bit words . “These are two positively geriatric spacecraft,” says Todd Barber , a propulsion engineer for Voyager. Working to fix the issues, he says, is “like palliative care.”

To first diagnose the issue, NASA’s engineers first tried turning on and off different instruments, says Spilker. When that proved unsuccessful, they initiated a full memory readout of the FDS. “That’s what led to us finding that piece of hardware that had failed and that 256-bit chunk of memory,” she says. In one chip, the engineers found a stuck bit, fixed at the same binary value. It became clear that the chip was irreparable, so the team had to identify and relocate the affected code.

However, no single location was large enough to accommodate the extra 256 bits. “The size of the memory was the biggest challenge in this anomaly,” says Spilker. Voyager’s computers each have a mere 69.63 kilobytes of memory.

To begin fixing the issue, the team searched for corners of Voyager’s memory to place segments of code that would allow for the return of engineering data, which includes information about the status of science instruments and the spacecraft itself. One way the engineers freed up extra space was by identifying processes no longer used. For example, Voyager was programmed with several data modes—the rate at which data is sent back to Earth—because the spacecraft could transmit data much faster when it was closer to Earth. At Jupiter, the spacecraft transmitted data at 115.2 kilobits per second; now, that rate has slowed to 40 bits per second, and faster modes can be overwritten. However, the engineers have to be careful to ensure they don’t delete code that is used by multiple data modes.

Having successfully returned engineering data, the team is working to relocate the rest of the affected code in the coming weeks. “We’re having to look a little harder to find the space and make some key decisions about what to overwrite,” says Spilker. When their work is completed, the Voyager team hopes to return new science data, though unfortunately, all data from the anomaly period was lost.

Built to Last

The cause of the stuck bit is a mystery, but it’s likely the chip either wore out with age or was hit by a highly energetic particle from a cosmic ray. Having entered interstellar space, “Voyager is out bathed in the cosmic rays,” Spilker says. Luckily, the spacecraft was built to take it, with its electronic components shielded from the large amount of radiation present at Jupiter. “That’s serving us quite well now in the interstellar medium.”

When Voyager was built, the 12-year trip to Uranus and Neptune alone was a “seemingly impossible goal for a 1977 launch,” says Barber. The longevity of Voyager is a testament of its engineering, which accounted for many contingencies and added redundancy. The mission also included several firsts, for example, as the first spacecraft with computers able to hold data temporarily using volatile CMOS memory. (An 8-track digital tape recorder onboard stores data when collected at a high rate.)

Importantly, it was also the first mission with a reprogrammable computer. “We take it for granted now,” Bell says, but before Voyager, it wasn’t possible to adjust software in-flight. This capability proved essential when the mission was extended, as well as when issues arise.

Going forward, the Voyager team expects to encounter additional problems in the aging spacecraft—though they hope to make it to the 50-year anniversary before the next one. “With each anomaly, we just learn more about how to work with the spacecraft and are just amazed at the capabilities that the engineers built into it using that 1960s and ’70s technology,” Spilker says. “It’s just amazing.”

50 Years Later, This Apollo-Era Antenna Still Talks to Voyager 2 ›
Voyager 1 Hasn't Really Left The Solar System, But That's OK ›
Mission Status - Voyager ›
Voyager 1 ›

Gwendolyn Rak is a contributor to IEEE Spectrum with interests in biotechnology and aerospace. She holds a master’s degree in science journalism from New York University.

I worked with COSMAC and similar rudimentary processors in the early 70’s so was curious to learn how they solved this problem. The nearest it got was “they initiated a full memory readout of the FDS.” But if the telemetry was faulty how did the get the readout?

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Law & order: svu could fix its biggest casting mistake if mariska hargitay gets her wish.

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Law & Order: 20 Saddest SVU Episodes

Young sheldon series finale set images reveal lance barber's unexpected cameo at george's funeral, all 4 spartacus seasons, ranked worst to best.

Mariska Hargitay wants Kelli Giddish back on Law & Order: SVU to fix a casting mistake, which could open new story possibilities.
The attempt to replace Rollins has failed, as new characters fall short. Bringing back Rollins is the best move for the series.
Season 26 could be the perfect time for Rollins' return to SVU, as Mariska Hargitay supports the idea and fans are eager for it.

Law & Order: SVU has the opportunity to fix a huge casting mistake if the producers listen to Mariska Hargitay's wishes. Hargitay is the star most closely associated with the long-running police procedural and has also been an executive producer for SVU since season 18, which premiered in 2017. She is involved in many aspects of the show and has some input into casting choices, although the final decision about who will be part of the main cast rests with Dick Wolf.

The series recently wrapped up its 25th season, and Law & Order: SVU has been confirmed for season 26 . The 25th season brought with it several casting changes, adding newcomer Renee Curry (Aimé Donna Kelly) to the team, making Agent Sykes (Jordana Spiro) a recurring team member, and re-introducing Amanda Rollins (Kelli Giddish) as a guest star in the second-to-last episode of the season. Rollins was a popular character who was written out at the end of season 24. Kelli Giddish has returned to Law & Order: SVU three times since leaving the series.

There are more than a few difficult episodes and storylines in Law & Order: SVU and some of the saddest stories are hard for fans to get through.

Law & Order: SVU Firing Kelli Giddish Is A Major Mistake

The series was not able to find a suitable replacement character.

Law & Order SVU's Amanda Rollins exit was one of the series' most controversial casting decisions in recent years. Giddish had played Rollins for 11 years and was a popular character, and there was a segment of the fanbase that threatened to boycott the series once she exited. Rollins supposedly left to become a forensics professor rather than a cop even though she had no formal training or qualifications for the position. This story kept Rollins alive, which gave her the opportunity to return to the series, but did not satisfy those fans who were heartbroken that she was leaving.

Attempts to make new characters Rollins 2.0 are destined to fail, especially when it would be easier to bring Rollins back to the series full-time.

Law & Order: SVU has attempted to fill the hole Rollins left behind with other characters, but to no avail. Molly Burnett's Grace Muncy was also written out by the end of season 24, and recurring character Shannah Sykes' drinking problem and pain over her sister's death came across as an attempt to recreate Rollins' gambling addiction arc rather than create whole new stories. Attempts to make new characters blatant replacements for Rollins would be hard-pressed to succeed.

Rollins Still Has Plenty of Storyline Potential on Law & Order: SVU

Her recent guest appearance opened new story possibilities.

Rollins' recent guest appearance on episode 11 of the 25th season is the perfect opening for her return to Law & Order: SVU . Rollins was revealed to have turned down an offer of a tenured position and quit her job because she had no passion for teaching. However, she was so bored with being a stay-at-home mom that she tagged along on an SVU case for the hell of it, and that led to an interesting storyline where Carisi realized his wife was an asset to the team but feared for her safety during a sting operation.

Her guest appearance re-introduced her in a new phase of her life; Rollins he is a wife and mother who needs to find her purpose outside of raising her children , especially now that she has quit her teaching job. Her need to balance her desire for fulfilling work with safety concerns, raising children, and protecting her relationship with her ADA husband could lead to a Law & Order: SVU spinoff about her and Carisi's life, but could also provide compelling storylines for her if she were to return to SVU full-time.

How Mariska Hargitay's Plan to Bring Kelli Giddish Back To Law & Order Could Succeed

Season 26 could be the perfect time to reintroduce rollins.

Mariska Hargitay couldn't stop Kelli Giddish's original Law & Order: SVU exit , but the lead actress has been vocal about wanting Rollins back for season 26. Rollins' latest guest appearance opened the door for that to happen. It's a good idea not only because Hargitay supports it, but also because Rollins continues to be a popular character whose stories generate interest.

Rollins' last guest appearance on Law & Order: SVU ended with Rollins and Benson discussing the possibility of Rollins returning full-time to her old job , but Benson made it clear she only will rehire her if Rollins truly wants it and not if she's looking for a temporary gig while she finds her true passion. This ending makes it relatively simple for Rollins to return.

Rollins would only have to convince Benson that she's serious about her commitment to the SVU squad. The series could also stretch her return over several episodes by having 1PP express doubts about rehiring Rollins that force her to prove herself during a dangerous assignment before Benson gets the green light to rehire her. A storyline like this could take two or three episodes, which would generate extra interest in Rollins' return.

Law & Order: SVU made a big mistake by writing Rollins out and has not been able to rectify it by adding new characters. Instead, the producers should listen to Mariska Hargitay's desire to bring Rollins back into the SVU fold. This would please that segment of the fanbase that has never forgiven the series for writing Rollins out and open interesting storyline possibilities as the long-running police procedural heads into its 26th season.

Law & Order: SVU airs on NBC on Thursdays and streams on Peacock.

Law & Order: Special Victims Unit

Law and Order

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NASA restores contact with Voyager 2 spacecraft after mistake led to
Nasa restores contact with Voyager 2 spacecraft after mistake led to
After NASA Mistake, Voyager 2 Communications Return
NASA restores contact with Voyager 2 after mistake led to weeks of silence
NASA restores contact with Voyager 2 spacecraft after mistake led to
Voyager 2 Spacecraft Loses Contact due to NASA's Mistake

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Correction Aug. 3, 2023

Nasa restores contact with Voyager 2 spacecraft after mistake led to silence

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NASA restores contact with Voyager 2 spacecraft after mistake led to weeks of silence

A 'shout' across interstellar space restores contact between Voyager 2 craft and NASA

Where is Voyager 2?

Historic probes launched in the 1970s

NASA used an interstellar 'shout' to reconnect with Voyager 2 probe after losing it in a technical screw-up

NASA restores contact with Voyager 2 spacecraft after mistake led to weeks of silence

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