Then, on October 19, Voyager 1 fell silent again. The team speculated that the probe might have completely turned off its X-band transmitter in favor of a backup S-band radio transmitter, which operates at a much lower frequency of two to four gigahertz—an instrument it hadn’t used in 43 years. Communicating on the S-band uses less power, but its signal is also fainter, so if that was the case, NASA scientists weren’t sure whether they’d be able to detect it from Earth. Coupled with the fact that Voyager 1 is much farther away now than it was when it last used the S-band in the ’80s, finding the signal could have been a difficult task.
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