"NASA successfully contacted Pioneer 6 on Friday, nearly 35 years to the day after the space agency’s oldest working spacecraft was launched into solar orbit on what was to have been a six-month mission. NASA used its 231-foot (70-meter) dish antenna in Goldstone, Calif., to lock onto a signal from the spacecraft’s 8-watt transmitter at 7 p.m. EST. 'We have made contact with the spacecraft and have a downlink from it,' said Washington Downs, the Deep Space Network operations chief at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), halfway through the 2.5-hour tracking period. At the time, the spacecraft was 83 million miles (133 million kilometers) from Earth."