LAST-DITCH ‘SHOUT’ GETS NASA BACK IN TOUCH WITH VOYAGER 2

It took an interstellar “shout” across the solar system. But NASA’S Jet Propulsion Laboratory said on Friday that it re-established full communications with Voyager 2, an aging probe exploring the outer edges of the solar system.

“After two weeks of not hearing anything, we’re back to getting unique data from the interstellar medium,” said Linda Spilker, a planetary scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the lead mission scientist for Voyager 2.

The space agency lost contact with Voyager 2 on July 21 when the mission team accidentally sent a command that pushed the spacecraft’s antenna 2 degrees away from Earth. On Tuesday morning, officials from the Deep Space Network, a worldwide system of radio dishes NASA uses to communicate with various space probes, detected a carrier signal known as a “heartbeat” from Voyager 2. It was too faint to extract any data, but enough to confirm that the mission was still operating.

NASA said its Deep Space Network facility in Canberra “sent the equivalent of an interstellar ‘shout’” to Voyager 2 on Wednesday.

It may have been a long shot, but they heard back. “We shouted 12.3 billion miles into interstellar space, instructing it to turn its antenna back to Earth,” the laboratory said Friday. “And after 37 hours, we found out it worked!”

If its efforts had not succeeded, the team would have had to wait for the 46-year-old probe to automatically reset its direction in October.

Voyager 2 launched to space on Aug. 20, 1977, to fly by the solar system’s outer planets and then explore the interstellar space beyond it. The probe is more than 12.5 billion miles away from Earth and is collecting data on the distant region of space.

Its twin, Voyager 1, was launched weeks after Voyager 2 and became the first to cross the solar system’s boundary.