An illustration of NASA's Voyager 1 probe. (Image credit: JPL-Caltech/NASA)

Voyager, 1, humanity's most distant spacecraft, is back in contact after briefly losing touch with Earth last month.

The spacecraft stopped phoning home for about 48 hours between Oct. 18 and 20 due to a communications glitch that Voyager 1 resolved on its own, before engineers could send the long-running spacecraft a remote fix.

"This is the first time we've seen the spacecraft do something like this, but we are also at a point in the mission where we have to expect the unexpected," Kareem Badaruddin, Voyager mission manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), said in an agency statement about the incident on Oct. 29.

Voyager 1 is almost one light-day from Earth, meaning that a command takes nearly a day to reach the spacecraft and a response takes another day to come back to our planet. The spacecraft will reach the light-day milestone on Nov.…