On July 21, NASA lost contact with Voyager 2, the second furthest spacecraft from humanity. Some instructions, sent to the probe, had caused the unwanted movement of its antenna, and it had stopped pointing towards Earth.
As NASA had announced, they trusted the proper functioning of the autonomous antenna reorientation operation, which the spacecraft performs periodically, in order to recover communications. This maneuver was scheduled for October 15.
However, on August 1, one of the centers of the network of receivers that NASA has deployed around the world (the DSN, or Deep Space Network) captured the heartbeat of Voyager 2. The signal was too weak to be able to extract information, since it arrived attenuated by the incorrect orientation of the antenna. But at least it indicated that the ship was still operational.
So it was decided to try their luck and send into space, in the direction of the probe, a transmission with instructions to redirect the antenna correctly towards Earth, in what NASA has literally called an “interstellar scream”. All this, with the hope that Voyager 2 could capture the message and interpret it.
Within 37 hours of sending the signal through the Canberra radio antenna in Australia (the time it takes for light to travel to the spacecraft and back to Earth), NASA operators received confirmation, coming from 19.9 billion miles away, indicating that the operation had gone well and that communications with Voyager 2 had been re-established.
The twin Voyager probes launched into space in 1977, and are the farthest spacecraft humanity has. Voyager 2 is the only mission in history to have visited Uranus and Neptune (in 1986 and 1989 respectively), and NASA announced, in 2018, that the probe had left the region of the solar system dominated by the magnetic field of the Sol and had entered interstellar space (Voyager 1 had done so six years earlier).
Now, after almost 46 years of space travel, 5 of Voyager 2’s 10 science instruments are still working, and it is expected to have enough power to continue sending data back to Earth until the year 2034.
