Voyager 1 Briefly Loses Contact With Earth As It Nears One Light-Day Distance

NASA's historic Voyager 1 spacecraft, which is the farthest human-made object in existence, recently gave mission controllers a scare by going silent for two days. According to a report by Interesting Engineering, the space agency lost contact with the spacecraft during two scheduled communications attempts.

The Deep Space Network failed to pick up any signals from the probe during scheduled check-ins on October 18 and 19.

NASA said that the spacecraft unexpectedly began transmitting again on October 20 without needing any troubleshooting commands from Earth.

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Engineers discovered that one set of the probe's thrusters unexpectedly shut down, which automatically triggered an onboard safety response that switched on backup thrusters.

While the exact trigger is still under investigation, the ageing probe is operating roughly 16 billion miles away in interstellar space.

"This is the first time we've seen the spacecraft do something like this, but we are also at a point in the mission where we have to expect the unexpected," said Kareem Badaruddin, Voyager mission manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.

"We're relieved to be back in contact with Voyager 1 and are eager to understand what happened."

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What's the latest with Voyager 1?

NASA confirmed that the spacecraft is speeding at 38,000 mph (61,155 kph) and that on November 18, it will have travelled farther than any other human-made object will be, that is, 16.09 billion miles (25.89 billion kilometres) from Earth, the equivalent of one light-day, or the distance that light can travel in one day.

"If you want to say 'hello' to Voyager, you send your message, and then you go home, and you wait two days before you finally get a response," said Suzanne Dodd, Voyager project manager at JPL.