May be it crossed into an area of space where physics is different.
Maybe it was waiting to go through the inter-solar customs line to get out.
A big unknown planet has crossed the path between Voyager 1 and the Earth, blocking the radio signals for 2 days !
(This is not impossible, because a planet so far away would have an extremely low angular velocity, so an occultation could take so long even for a not very big planet.)
If we are speculating, why be so uninteresting?
Maybe it has gained sentience on its own and is trying to awaken other space probes.
"Mysteriously". The gadget is pushing fifty with vintage hardware in a hostile environment. One could say a 90 year old grandma was asleep, presumed dead, and when the paramedics showed she woke up with, "What's all the fuss?"
At the same time, every component and line of code is known. Presumably they can simulate and test for all sorts of crazy exotic problems and error cases. It’s surprising that they’ve hit a new type of problem.
Could it have crashed into something? I find it incredible that that hadn’t happened yet.
On the one hand, it has crashed into a lot of somethings—like cosmic radiation and micrometeorites. On the other hand, there is a lot of space in space, and the chances of Voyager crashing into something of the same or larger scale as itself is infinitesimal.
Whatever happened, it was temporary, because radio contact was established again after a 2-day pause.
I missed this, fantastic!
If it did crash into anything probably like a grain or sand or something stupid like that.
For a spacecraft launched half a century ago, it's unbelievable that it still works at all.
I hope it's not because I used chatgpt to find signals outside of the internet and it successfully connected to voyager 1 somehow lmao