Voyager 1 briefly loses contact ahead of light-day milestone

NASA could not detect Voyager 1's signal during scheduled attempts on October 18 and 19. Contact resumed the next day, but the cause remains under investigation. One group of thrusters went offline during the outage, and backup thrusters activated automatically. Voyager 1 is expected to reach a distance of one light-day from Earth on November 18, when radio messages will take 24 hours each way.