NASA’s Voyager 1, the most distant human-made object, briefly went quiet this month before reconnecting on its own.On Oct.

NASA’s Voyager 1, the most distant human-made object, briefly went quiet this month before reconnecting on its own.On Oct. 18 and 19, the giant dish antennas of NASA’s Deep Space Network failed to pick up the probe’s radio signal during two scheduled check-ins. The signal returned on Oct. 20, before engineers had sent any commands. Early clues show that one set of thrusters shut down and backups took over automatically. This built-in safety response, called fault protection, puts the spacecraft in a stable state while engineers figure out what went wrong. The exact cause is still under investigation.In September, engineers replaced three heating devices with lower-power versions all at once, a move nicknamed the “Big Bang.” Voyager runs on heat from decaying plutonium and loses about 4 watts of power each year. Without the swap, another science instrument might have been shut off by summer 2027.Science and facts💡