NASA announced on Friday that it had reestablished communication with the Voyager 2 space probe after a long-shot strategy paid off.
The agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory sent an interstellar "shout" more than 12.3 billion miles which got the probe's attention after an error by NASA officials rendered the probe temporarily unreachable.
NASA lost contact with Voyager 2 on July 21 after it erroneously sent a series of commands that caused its antenna to point two degrees away from Earth.
That left it "unable to receive commands or transmit data back to Earth," severing it from the ground antennae of NASA's Deep Space Network, a global system that NASA uses to communicate with space probes.
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Hope re-emerged on Tuesday, when NASA said it had detected a faint signal from Voyager.
The agency then used a facility in Canberra, Australia, to blast a "shout" across the cosmos to get Voyager to point its antennae back to Earth and resume ordinary communication.
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According to the agency, it took the signal 18.5 hours for commands to reach Voyager 2 through the vastness of space. The outward and return journeys together took 37 hours, leaving the scientists in limbo waiting to hear whether the ploy worked.
Suzanne Dodd, the project manager for Voyager 2, said that that time "was pretty nervewracking. You don't sleep well," per The New York Times.
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The operation only had a small chance of success, a spokeswoman for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory told The Times. But it nevertheless appeared to be a success, as NASA said that the probe finally began sending back data on August 4 at 12:29 a.m., and that all seemed to return to normal.
"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 probe does not appear to have been affected by the incident, with Dodd saying that an assessment showed that it looked "very healthy, very normal," per The Times.
The Voyager 2 probe is part of NASA's longest-running mission, and it has traveled through space for almost half a century, capturing some of the most iconic picturesof the solar system.
