Voyager 1 Regains Contact After a 48-Hour Communications Glitch

The agency also said the probe would reach 16.09 billion miles (25.89 billion kilometers) on Nov. 18. The release did not reconcile that distance with its “almost one light-day” description.

A planetary mission built on a rare alignment

• Voyager 1 and its still-operational twin, Voyager 2, launched in 1977 for an initial mission to explore the planets.
• A rare alignment let the probes swing past Jupiter and Saturn with minimal fuel, opening a route to Uranus and Neptune for Voyager 2. Launch planners did not guarantee funding for exploration of the more distant planets and moons.
• Their Jupiter and Saturn encounters, some months apart, drew acclaim before the spacecraft took separate paths.
• Voyager 1 delivered close-up views of Saturn’s rings and Titan, a moon with possible prebiotic or pre-life chemistry—chemical conditions associated with a possible precursor to life. Those observations altered its trajectory to carry it high above the solar system’s plane.
• Voyager 2 reached Uranus in 1986 and Neptune in 1989, providing the only close-up views of those planetary systems to date.

The power squeeze behind the mission

Both probes remain operational and crossed into interstellar space, the region between stars, a few years ago. Their plutonium power sources are diminishing, so engineers periodically shut down instruments or find other ways to conserve power. NASA has extended both missions repeatedly, and the spacecraft continue to deliver science from deep space.

In early September, engineers performed Voyager 1’s “Big Bang” power adjustment, named for the reconfiguration of several instruments. They switched off three devices and substituted three lower-power alternatives. Voyager 2 had completed its own “Big Bang” about six weeks earlier.

JPL said the changes let the spacecraft operate science instruments longer than previously anticipated. Without Voyager 1’s adjustment, declining power might have forced engineers to shut down another instrument as soon as next summer.

The agency gave no estimate of how long either mission could continue, though each probe loses four watts of electrical power per year from the 470 watts available at launch.

In 2022, Voyager project manager Suzanne Dodd said the hope was that the mission would operate into the 2030s. That was an aspiration, not a schedule or guarantee; JPL still has not supplied an end date.

What does this change for Voyager 1?

For now, the practical change is modest but real: the probe stayed in contact and appears to have switched to backup thrusters without help from Earth. The episode does not prove that similar outages will resolve themselves, because investigators still have not identified what triggered the primary thruster failure.

Nothing in the Oct. 29 statement announced a mission change or an end. The larger constraint remains the fading plutonium power supply, which forces periodic instrument shutdowns. The “Big Bang” bought operating time; it did not reverse the decline in the power sources.