At present, the Voyager 2 space probe is the second-most distant man-made object from Earth; at about 12.3 billion miles from our planet, its distance is seconded only by Voyager 1.

You would think, at those immense lengths — and with its 45-year-old onboard technology to boot — that we wouldn't be hearing much from ol' Voyager 2 anymore.

But it's still out there, and still talking:

NASA has detected a signal from Voyager 2 after nearly two weeks of silence from the interstellar spacecraft.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said on Tuesday that a series of ground antennas, part of the Deep Space Network, had registered a carrier signal from Voyager 2 on Tuesday.

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

The space agency had lost contact with the craft last week after engineers "inadvertently caused the craft to turn its antenna 2 degrees away from the direction of its home planet." That's enough over those immense distances to cut off contact with the little guy.

NASA had originally thought they wouldn't hear from Voyager 2 until at least October, when an automated process was expected to turn the antenna back toward Earth.

About that...

Jamie Renkin was hired in December 2022 to lead the decades-old project, and I'm sure it had nothing to do with "inclusion" quotas, virtue signaling, and the like!

DIVERSITY IS OUR STRENGTH!

And there's a lot of "strength" happening in all our agencies and institutions.

NASA may yet have to wait until the October automated reset for regular communication to resume, the agency said.

Voyager 2 was originally launched to study the outer gas planets (Jupiter and Saturn) and ice giants (Uranus and Neptune). It remains the only spacecraft to have visited the latter two. As with Voyager 1, it is currently exploring and studying interstellar space.