NASA has received a signal from Voyager 2 after accidentally losing contact with it, paving the way for an attempt to restore full communications.
NASA has received a signal from the Voyager 2 spacecraft that it accidentally lost contact with on July 21.
Communications with the famous spacecraft, which launched in 1977 and is currently around 12.4 billion miles (19.9 billion kilometers) from Earth, were cut after NASA “inadvertently” sent it a command that caused its antenna to point 2 degrees away from Earth.
It means that Voyager 2 is seemingly unable to receive commands or transmit data back to mission controllers on Earth.
NASA said this week that contact should be reestablished in October when Voyager 2 reorients itself as part of a regular maneuver. But there’s now hope that the communication link could be restored much sooner.
The space agency revealed on Tuesday that during its regular scan of the sky, its Deep Space Network managed to receive a signal — described as “a bit like hearing the spacecraft’s heartbeat’” — from Voyager 2, confirming that the spacecraft is still broadcasting as expected.
