NASA Successfully Restores Contact with Voyager 2

NASA succeded in re-establishing deep contact with Voyager 2 as the agency used a power transmitter to send an "interstellar shout" which helped in correcting the orientation of the device, NASA announced on Friday.

NASA lost contact with Voyager 2 after sending various commands, and one of the mistakenly caused the antenna to point two degrees away from the Earth, causing it to stop receiving signals from the operating spaceship. 

On Tuesday, engineers enlisted various observatories to create the Deep Space Network (DSN) to detect the carrier of Voyager 2.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) said it succeeded in sending instructions.

Voyager project manager Suzanne Dodd told AFP: "The Deep Space Network used the highest-power transmitter to send the command (the 100-kw S-band uplink from the Canberra site) and timed it to be sent during the best conditions during the antenna tracking pass in order to maximize possible receipt of the command by the spacecraft."

This procedure was called "interstellar shout" and required 18.5 hours of traveling at light speed to reach Voyager.

It also took 37 hours for mission controllers to control the device, JPL said in a statement.