NASA's Voyager 1 probe bounces back from communications glitch in interstellar space
NASA's Voyager 1 probe is back in communication after the 49-year-old spacecraft briefly fell silent last month, during its interstellar-space mission.
NASA's Voyager 1, humanity's most distant spacecraft, has bounced back from a communications glitch that briefly cut off contact with Earth last month. On October 18-20, the spacecraft stopped sending data for about 48 hours before resolving the issue on its own. Voyager 1, located almost one light-day away from Earth, took about a day for commands to reach it and another day for responses to return.
The spacecraft will reach the one light-day milestone on November 18, 2023, at a distance of 16.09 billion miles (25.89 billion kilometers) from Earth. Engineers are still investigating the cause of the communication loss, but believe the spacecraft went into a safe mode after one set of thrusters went offline and their backups turned on.
Voyager 1 and its twin, Voyager 2, launched in 1977 with the initial mission to explore the solar system's planets. Both spacecraft have provided valuable science from deep space and have extended their missions repeatedly.
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