The National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA) has confirmed that its engineers have successfully restored contact with Voyager 1. The dwindling power supply in the spacecraft caused a blackout for several weeks, but it's operating normally now, the agency said.
The issue first came up in October 2024 when Voyager 1 automatically switched from the primary X-band radio transmitter to a much weaker S-band radio transmitter to communicate with its mission team back on Earth, CNN reported.
Voyager 1, called the farthest spacecraft from Earth, is at present exploring uncharted territory nearly 15.4 billion miles (24.9 billion km) away.
The transmitter swap was made autonomously after it was determined that Voyager I had little power left as the mission team sent a command to turn on one of the heaters onboard.
However, this unexpected swap prevented NASA engineers from getting information about the status of the spacecraft along with the scientific data collected by its instruments for nearly a month.
Later, once the team was able to resolve the issue, they switched the spacecraft back to its X-band radio transmitter and started receiving its daily stream of data in mid-November.
Kareem Badaruddin, Voyager mission manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said the probes were "never really designed to be operated like this and the team is learning new things day by day".
"Thankfully they were able to recover from this issue and learned some things," the official added.
This was only one of the many challenges the mission team faced in recent years as Voyager 1, as well as its twin probe Voyager 2, continued to explore more regions in space more than 47 years after the lift-off.
Launched weeks apart in 1977, the two of them have long outlasted their original missions. For now, they are in interstellar space and are the only spacecraft to operate beyond the heliosphere, the bubble of magnetic fields and particles of the Sun extending beyond the orbit of Pluto.
These spacecraft have been powered by the heat from decaying plutonium, which is converted into electricity. The probes lose around four watts of power every year, NASA said, adding this is just equivalent to a small, energy-efficient light bulb.
