Voyager 1 mysteriously loses contact with NASA. 24 hours later, it came back by itself

Voyager 1 is about to reach one light-day from Earth, but weeks before this historic event, the spacecraft left NASA in a tizzy when the engineers could not contact it for over 24 hours. In mid-October, NASA engineers failed to detect its radio signal twice in a 24 hour gap. The contact was re-established the next day, but they are still trying to work out what went wrong.

Voyager 1 was launched in 1977 to study Jupiter and Saturn closely, including their rings and moons. It completed the two flyby for 1980, and yet continued to remain active and move ahead. Today, it is the farthest man-made object in space. On November 18, 2026, it will reach one light-day from Earth, that is the distance that light takes to travel in 24 hours.

NASA relies on Deep Space Network (DSN), an array of giant radio antennas, to communicate with Voyager 1. However, on October 18 and 19, NASA was jolted when it failed to establish contact with Voyager. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory said in a statement on 29 October 2026 that all communications returned back to normal on October 20 without the engineers having sent any command. The reason for the loss remains a mystery, although investigations are going on. Till now, scientists have established that one group of thrusters went offline on the spacecraft and the backup thrusters turned on. This switch is built into the programming in case the active thrusters experience some problem.

According to JPL, this is known as automatic response fault protection and it puts the probe into a safe, or stable, configuration. All normal operations are put on hold while the engineers identify the issue.

“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,” Kareem Badaruddin, Voyager mission manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, said in a statement.

Voyager 1 is travelling at a speed of 611,55 kilometres per hour and will be 25.89 billion km from Earth on November 18. At this distance, light takes 24 hours to travel. Radio waves already take 24 hours to reach the probe. “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,” Suzanne Dodd, Voyager project manager at JPL, said.

To keep the probe going, NASA has switched off several scientific instruments which helps save power. It is powered by heat from decaying plutonium, which is converted into electricity.