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

The two probes have left the solar system and are still collecting data from the interstellar environment—but their atomic hearts are growing weaker and weaker.

The farthest spacecraft in the universe went momentarily rogue, but scientists breathed a sigh of relief when it reconnected at an unexpected radio frequency

The switch caused NASA to lose contact with the far-flying probe for a few days in October.

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

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.

Unfortunately, it's also far fainter, and the crew feared that it could no longer be detected from this far away. After all, Voyager 1 hasn't used the S-band transmitter to talk to Earth since 1981, when it was obviously much, much closer to us.

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