The most public side of the space engineer's improvisation takes place in fixing damaged spacecraft or instrumentation, such as the Hubble Space Telescope or the troubled Apollo 13 craft. But even more creativity may be shown by the engineers and scientists who work to make space devices launched years ago and now located millions of miles away do things their original builders never imagined. The Voyager 2 space probe was launched in August 1977, primarily as a back-up for the Voyager 1 flight to Jupiter and Saturn. Designed to operate for five years, it ended up carrying out important missions for more than 12 and is still sending data back to earth. Now from far beyond the most distant planet, its most important achievements were the transmission of pictures from Uranus and Neptune. Voyager 2 has been constantly re-engineered, repaired, reprogrammed, and reconfigured by earth-bound engineers working with the constraints of a device which receives its communications in a dead language minutes after the commands are sent.