Voyager 1 Revives 1981 Radio to Signal Earth from 15 Billion Miles Away

NASA's Voyager 1, the farthest human-made object from Earth, recently faced a communication blackout after a command to activate its heaters triggered a failsafe, shutting down its X-band transmitter. Engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory used the weaker S-band frequency, unused since 1981, to confirm the probe's status and send commands. They aim to restore the X-band to receive telemetry data, crucial for understanding the probe's condition as it travels further into interstellar space.