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Scientists lost contact with the Voyager 1 interstellar probe from October 19 to 24, after a technical malfunction forced the shutdown of the spacecraft’s main radio transmitter, NASA officials wrote in a statement. blog post. Engineers have since established contact with Voyager 1’s weaker backup transmitter, which has not been used since 1981, while they assess the situation.

“The transmitter cutoff appears to have been caused by the spacecraft’s fault protection system, which responds autonomously to problems on board,” NASA officials wrote in the blog post. “For example, if the spacecraft exceeds its power supply, the outage protection will conserve power by turning off systems that are not essential to keeping the spacecraft in flight,” including the spacecraft’s main radio transmitter. machine, the team added.

Once communication is re-established, it may take several additional days or weeks before the underlying problem is identified.

Interstellar computing

Communicating with Voyager 1 and its sister spacecraft, Voyager 2, is not easy. Voyager 1, currently more than 15 billion miles from Earth, is the most distant man-made object in the universe. Commands sent from Earth take 23 hours to reach the spacecraft at its current position beyond the edge of the solar systemand Voyager 1’s responses take another 23 hours to return to Earth.

According to NASA, the current communications outage began on October 16, after engineers sent Voyager 1 a command to turn on one of its heaters. While the spacecraft should have had enough power to execute this command, the prompt instead triggered Voyager 1’s crash protection system.

Two days later, when NASA engineers searched for Voyager 1’s response with the Deep Space Network – a global network of radio antennas used to support interplanetary missions – they could not detect the signal from spacecraft. The team finally found Voyager 1’s signal later that day. However, the next day (October 19), communication with Voyager “appeared to stop completely,” according to NASA.

Related: NASA shuts down Voyager 2 science instrument as power wanes

Engineers suspect that during this time, Voyager 1’s failure protection system tripped two more times. This forced the spacecraft to turn off its primary X-band radio transmitter and switch to its backup S-band transmitter, which uses a different frequency and is “considerably weaker” than the primary transmitter, according to NASA.

“Although S-band consumes less power, Voyager 1 has not used it to communicate with Earth since 1981,” the agency added.

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On October 22, engineers sent a command to confirm that the spacecraft was indeed using its backup S-band transmitter. The team successfully reestablished contact with Voyager 1 two days later. NASA engineers are currently working to diagnose the problem that triggered Voyager 1’s crash protection system and restore it to normal operation.

Voyager 1 and 2 were launched in 1977. They remain the only two spacecraft to have pass beyond the heliosphere – the bubble of charged solar particles that surrounds our solar system – making it humanity’s first (and, so far, only) interstellar vehicle. As spacecraft age and move further and further from Earth, technical problems are becoming more and more frequent. So far, scientists have managed to solve these interstellar computing problems billions of miles away, keeping both Voyager probes functional.