Voyager 2 Phones Home After Communications Lost

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NASA's Voyager 2 has officially phoned home.

"Can you hear me now? Last night, I reestablished full communications with Earth thanks to some quick thinking and a lot of collaboration," a post on Voyager's twitter account said Friday. "I'm operating normally and remain on my expected trajectory. So glad I can finally phone home."

C​ommunication was lost with the 46-year-old spacecraft about two weeks ago when a wrong command was accidentally sent by flight controllers. That pointed Voyager 2's antenna the wrong way, tilting it 2 degrees away from Earth, according to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

V​oyager 2 was launched in 1977 to explore far-away planets, and it's now more than 12 billion miles from Earth.

On Tuesday, after days of silence, JPL said they had confirmed the spacecraft was still operational after a "carrier signal" was picked up during a routine scan of the sky by NASA's Deep Space Network

"A bit like hearing the spacecraft's 'heartbeat,' it confirms the spacecraft is still broadcasting, which engineers expected," JPL said in a tweet Tuesday.

But that wasn't the same as resuming full communications. Friday afternoon, JPL issued this update, confirming all is well with Voyager 2:

"The agency’s Deep Space Network facility in Canberra, Australia, sent the equivalent of an interstellar 'shout' more than 12.3 billion miles to Voyager 2, instructing the spacecraft to reorient itself and turn its antenna back to Earth.

V​oyager 2's twin, Voyager 1, is also still working fine and - at 15 billion miles from Earth - is NASA's most distant spacecraft.

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Weather.com reporter Jan Childs covers breaking news and features related to weather, space, climate change, the environment and everything in between.

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