Tag: 46-year-old spacecraft

After days of silence, NASA's Voyager 2 finally phoned home. "A bit like hearing the spacecraft's 'heartbeat,' it confirms the spacecraft is still broadcasting, which engineers expected," NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said in a tweet Tuesday. 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 JPL. V​oyager 2 was launched in 1977 to explore far-away planets, and it's now more than 12 billion miles from Earth. The "carrier signal" was picked up during a routine scan of the sky by NASA's Deep Space Network, according to JPL. T​he signal doesn't mean all communication has resumed, but it ind...