The spacecraft—humanity's most distant probe—managed to resumed contact by switching to a secondary radio not used since 1981.

A Space.com report indicated that the issue arose when engineers instructed Voyager 1 to activate a heater for its instruments. This led the spacecraft's fault protection system to switch off the primary X-band transmitter, as non-essential systems had already been deactivated to conserve energy.

The spacecraft, launched in 1977, is 15 billion miles away from Earth. It stopped sending data but NASA managed to get it restarted.

Voyager 1, NASA's furthest-traveling spacecraft, re-established contact after a brief communication gap by switching to a backup radio transmitter inactive since 1981. This unexpected signal, sent via a lower-frequency channel,

Voyager 1 is shouting across the cosmos again, following a glitch that had seen it inadvertently switch to its low-power transmitter.