NASA Reestablishes Full Contact with Voyager 2 Two Months Ahead of Schedule

The U.S. space agency announced on Friday that its researchers successfully corrected the antenna direction of the Voyager 2 probe using their powerful transmitters, reestablishing full contact with it. NASA had previously reported on August 1 that it had received a signal from this 'far-reaching galaxy explorer,' which was a sign of increased hope for regaining control of the spacecraft. NASA officials stated on July 28 that a series of programmed commands sent to Voyager 2 on July 21 inadvertently caused the antenna to be positioned 2 degrees off Earth, resulting in Voyager 2 being unable to receive commands or send data back to Earth, and that communication would likely not be possible until October. A few days after NASA announced that due to an error and changes in the 'programmed commands,' Voyager 2 was currently unable to communicate with Earth, it reported on August 1 that it had received hopeful signals from the spacecraft. Officials from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which manages Voyager 2, tweeted on August 1: 'Hearing the spacecraft's heartbeat confirms that Voyager is healthy, something engineers expected until a command reaches it and it turns back toward Earth.' Susan Dodd, the Voyager project manager, told AFP on Friday, August 4, that the probe began returning 'science and telemetry' data at 12:29 AM Eastern Time on August 4, indicating that the spacecraft is functioning normally and will remain on its intended course. Voyager 2 was launched into space in August 1977 and became the only spacecraft to have visited two of the outer planets of the solar system after passing through the skies of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Voyager 2 is now nearly 12.4 billion miles from Earth, about 133 times the distance of our planet from the Sun. Prior to this malfunction, it took about 18.5 hours for a signal to travel from Earth to the spacecraft at the speed of light, but during the repair of this issue, the return message time from the spacecraft increased to 37 hours.