The U.S. space agency NASA announced the other day that they have reestablished communication with their spacecraft, Voyager 2, which is the second-farthest space probe from Earth ever.
At the end of last month, NASA lost contact with Voyager 2 after an erroneous command was sent to the probe, causing its antennas to reorient. In an updated blog post, NASA now writes:
The agency’s Deep Space Network facility in Canberra, Australia, sent the equivalent of an interstellar “shout” more than 12.3 billion miles (19.9 billion kilometers) to Voyager 2, instructing the spacecraft to reorient itself and turn its antenna back to Earth. With a one-way light time of 18.5 hours for the command to reach Voyager, it took 37 hours for mission controllers to learn whether the command worked.
Voyager 2 has now resumed transmitting data to Earth, something that NASA states indicates the spacecraft is functioning as intended and staying on course. If NASA had not been able to reestablish contact with Voyager 2 at this time, the spacecraft is equipped with a feature that periodically realigns its antennas toward Earth, and this action would have happened next in October.
