NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft is sending data back to Earth again after flight controllers were able to correct a mistake that halted communications with the satellite for weeks.
After two weeks of silence, NASA sent a new command to the craft in hopes of repointing its antenna, a shift of a mere two degrees which would mean life or death for the 46-year-old Voyager 2 mission.
It was considered a long shot that sending the new command would work, and to pull it off NASA employed the most powerful transmitter at the huge radio dish antenna in Australia.
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.
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.
Both craft are now outside our solar system in interstellar space.
The two-week outage was believed to be the longest NASA had gone without hearing from Voyager 2.
As long as their plutonium power holds, the Voyagers may be alive and well for the 50th anniversary of their launch in 2027.
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 contributed to this report.
