The Voyager 2 spacecraft, one of just two human-made objects to reach interstellar space, experienced a slight malfunction this week.
An operational hiccup caused the more than 40-year-old probe to enter a low-power mode Saturday. NASA engineers have since managed to communicate with the probe and have begun powering various instruments back up. It's not yet known what caused the malfunction, according to the space agency.
The trouble began when Voyager 2 failed to complete a routine operation to calibrate its magnetic field instrument, in which it rotates a full 360 degrees. This caused a cascade of events: Two power-hungry systems were mistakenly left active, and the excess drain on the energy supply triggered an automatic fail-safe, placing most systems offline.
Voyager 2 can still communicate with Earth, and NASA engineers say they've restored the science instruments system to functionality and turned off one of the systems draining power. They're ...
