NASA briefly lost contact with Voyager 1 in mid-October after the nearly 50-year-old spacecraft stopped transmitting a detectable radio signal during two scheduled communications attempts. The signal returned on October 20, but engineers are still investigating what caused the interruption.<\/p>\n
The incident comes just weeks before Voyager 1 is expected to become the first human-made object to reach a distance of one light-day from Earth, a point at which radio messages will take a full 24 hours to travel in either direction.<\/p>\n
NASA\u2019s Deep Space Network, a global system of large radio antennas used to communicate with distant spacecraft, failed to detect Voyager 1\u2019s signal on October 18 and 19. The probe is now approximately 16 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth.<\/p>\n
Communication resumed on October 20, about 48 hours after the interruption began. NASA says<\/a> the team has maintained contact with the spacecraft since then.<\/p>\n An automatic safety response may hold the clue<\/p>\n Engineers are still trying to determine what triggered the communications loss. However, NASA has established that one group of Voyager 1\u2019s thrusters went offline during the incident, prompting its backup thrusters to switch on automatically.<\/p>\n The spacecraft<\/a> is programmed to respond this way when its onboard computers detect a potential problem with the active thrusters. This automated protection system can place the probe in a stable, safe configuration and pause normal operations while engineers investigate.<\/p>\n The spacecraft\u2019s signal returned before the team sent commands to troubleshoot the issue from Earth.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is the first time we\u2019ve seen the spacecraft do something like this, but we are also at a point in the mission where we have to expect the unexpected,\u201d said Kareem Badaruddin, Voyager mission manager at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. \u201cWe\u2019re relieved to be back in contact with Voyager 1 and are eager to understand what happened.\u201d<\/p>\n The incident is another reminder of the challenges of operating spacecraft launched nearly half a century ago, especially as their onboard power supplies continue to weaken.<\/p>\n NASA is trying to squeeze more life out of Voyager 1<\/p>\n