NASA has succeeded in re-establishing full contact with Voyager 2 by using its highest-power transmitter to send an "interstellar shout" that righted the distant probe's antenna orientation, the space agency said Friday.

Launched in 1977 to explore the outer planets and serve as a beacon of humanity to the wider universe, it is currently more than 12.3 billion miles (19.9 billion kilometers) from our planet—well beyond the solar system.

Researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese National Space Administration recently published a study in the journal Space: Science & Technology outlining how the upcoming Chang'e-7 mission, due to launch in 2026, will use a combination of orbital observations and in-situ analyses to help identify the location, amount, and dispersion of water-ice in the permanently-shadowed regions (PSRs) of the moon, specifically at the lunar south pole.

Once the Chang'e-7 orbiter successfully achieves lunar orbit, it will deploy a lander and mini-flying probe with both designed to perform in-situ analyses of lunar water-ice while the orbiter is expected to conduct remote observations using a variety of instruments.

The paper discusses how the mini-flying probe, which will be equipped with a water molecular analyzer to collect lunar surface frost water molecules, will be capable of flying from the sunlit regions on the lunar south pole to the dark bottom of the impact craters within the PSRs, which conventional lunar rovers were never designed to do, thus providing an enormous benefit to using this new robotic explorer.

Japan's XRISM (X-ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission, pronounced "crism") observatory, expected to launch Aug. 25 (Aug. 26 Japan local time), will provide an unprecedented view into some of the hottest places in the universe. And it will do so using an instrument that's actually colder than the frostiest cosmic location now known.