After weeks of power outages, NASA’s Voyager 1 continues to operate normally

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has confirmed that its engineers have successfully restored contact with Voyager 1. Dwindling power on the spacecraft caused a power outage for several weeks, but it is now functioning normally, the agency said.

The problem first arose in October 2024 when Voyager 1 automatically switched from its primary X-band radio transmitter to a much weaker S-band radio transmitter to communicate with its mission team on Earth, CNN reported.

Voyager 1, the furthest spacecraft from Earth, is currently exploring uncharted territory at a distance of nearly 15.4 billion miles (24.9 billion kilometers).

The transmitter change occurred autonomously after detecting that Voyager I was low on power when the mission team sent a command to turn on one of the onboard heaters.

However, this unexpected exchange prevented NASA engineers from receiving information about the status of the spacecraft as well as the scientific data collected by its instruments for almost a month.

Later, when the team was able to solve the problem, they switched the spacecraft back to its X-band radio transmitter and began receiving its daily data stream in mid-November.

Kareem Badaruddin, Voyager mission manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said the probes were “never really designed for such operations and the team is learning new things every day.”

“Fortunately, they were able to recover from this issue and learned a few things,” the official added.

This was just one of the many challenges the mission team has faced in recent years as Voyager 1 and its twin probe, Voyager 2, continued to explore further regions of space more than 47 years after launch.

The two were launched just weeks apart in 1977 and have long outlived their original missions. Currently in interstellar space, they are the only spacecraft operating outside the heliosphere, the bubble of the Sun’s magnetic fields and particles that extends beyond Pluto’s orbit.

These spacecraft are powered by the heat of decaying plutonium, which is converted into electricity. According to NASA, the probes lose about four watts of power each year, which is just about the power of a small, energy-efficient light bulb.