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Why didn’t Voyager visit Pluto?

Voyager 1 has now traveled more than 16 billion miles (26 billion kilometers), drifting past Jupiter and Saturn on a long haul out of the solar system. And its incredible success helped pave the way for both the Galileo and Cassini spacecraft that followed in its footsteps.

Yet when NASA initially programmed what became the first “interstellar mission,” Voyager was actually set to see Pluto in March of 1986 as well. The plan changed mid-flight.

But why? That question raises a fun series of “what ifs.”

NASA built the twin Voyager spacecraft to take advantage of a rare planetary alignment that put Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune within reach at once. Such a window only comes every 175 years.

However, sending a single spacecraft was too expensive with all the orbital complexities. NASA decided to launch Voyager 1 on a route that would primarily take it past Jupiter and Saturn while Voyager 2 could do the same before winding past Uranus and Neptune.

When the pair launched from Cape Canaveral in 1977, astronomers knew little about the outer solar system. The Pioneer spacecraft had already extended humanity’s reach to the gaseous giants, but it carried rudimentary instrumentation.

Even less was known about far-off Pluto. Astronomers had recently detected methane on the dwarf planet, but the planet’s atmosphere was unknown. Scientists had only speculated about the existence of the Kuiper Belt .

“We didn’t even know Pluto’s size,” New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern said in a recent interview. “All we knew was that Pluto had a moon.”

Instead, Saturn’s planet-like moon Titan was the darling of planetary sciences in the 1970s, and it enamored astronomers with a thick atmosphere and potential warmth.

Astronomers decided that in order to optimize their science at Saturn, they’d need an orbit that brought Voyager 1 up close with Titan. But that flyby also would put Pluto out of reach after the spacecraft lifted out of our solar system’s ecliptic plane.

“It was a pretty straightforward decision for them because they thought there was going to be a third Voyager mission that could come along and go to Pluto,” Stern says.

Interestingly, Voyager 2, whose trajectory couldn’t have realistically reached Pluto, played a part in making the case for a Pluto flyby. The final Voyager program flyby revealed Neptune’s moon Triton in 1989. It was the last time humans saw a new world for the first time. Voyager 2 found an icy and dynamic moon complete with ice volcanoes. Surface features, as well as Triton’s strange orbit, make astronomers suspect it’s actually a kidnapped Pluto.

The moon is still seen as the closest stand-in we have for a world that New Horizons will finally reveal next month.

In a fascinating post last year , Stern pondered what Voyager would have seen if it had visited Pluto. He says that because astronomers didn’t know about the dwarf planet’s atmosphere, they would not have been prepared for what they saw. The Hubble Space Telescope also didn’t exist yet, so Pluto’s many small moons were unknown. And because the Kuiper Belt wasn’t known to exist yet either, Voyager couldn’t have been programmed to continue on to additional worlds like New Horizons.

“I’m very glad that they chose not to go to Pluto in 1986,” Stern says. “We’ll do a better job at Pluto with modern instruments than they would have, and they did a much better job at Saturn by not going to Pluto — they got to explore Titan up close. For our team, it also worked out very well because there would have been no need to do New Horizons.”

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One part of Pluto’s heart is covered in smooth, crater-free icy plains. Called Sputnik Planum, the region is carved into polygonal shapes by long, narrow troughs.

New Pluto Photos Show ‘Astoundingly  Amazing’ Landscape

More images from this week's New Horizons mission are forcing scientists to rethink how icy worlds work.

New images from the New Horizons spacecraft's close encounter with Pluto this week show the dwarf planet emerging in wonderfully perplexing detail .

“I’m still having to remind myself to take deep breaths,” Jeff Moore of NASA’s Ames Research Center said Friday, when NASA released several new pictures from Tuesday's Pluto flyby. "This landscape is just astoundingly amazing.”

One new image shows a curiously young terrain marked by smooth, icy plains that’s north of a spiky mountain range revealed earlier in the week. Another piece of data shows an unexplained clump of carbon monoxide ice clustered over the left ventricle of the smooth, heart-shaped patch on Pluto’s face.

On Pluto’s heart, which is called Tombaugh Regio, scientists found a concentrated clump of carbon monoxide ice. “We’re not sure we understand that,” says Alan Stern.

There’s also a new photo of Nix, one of Pluto’s small, tumbling, potato-shaped moons .

Now, with Pluto already more than 2 million miles in its rearview mirror, New Horizons is sailing into the Kuiper Belt, a donut-shaped debris field outside the orbit of Neptune that’s filled with countless icy worlds. It will continue sending data from its Pluto encounter for the next 16 months.

Those observations will include information about the dwarf planet’s atmosphere and composition, plus more views of its surface features.

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“I’m a little biased, but I think the solar system saved the best for last,” New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern told reporters on Friday.

Rethinking Icy Worlds

After a 9-and-a-half-year, 3 billion-mile journey, New Horizons flew through the Pluto system—the planet and its moons—on Tuesday . It was a fleeting encounter, with the craft furiously gathering data as it sped past the frosted dwarf at 31,000 miles per hour.

Earlier images from New Horizons revealed a multi-colored world with a large, bright heart-shaped region called Tombaugh Regio, in honor of Pluto’s discoverer. The heart is hugged on either side by dark splotches.

Most strikingly, the planet’s youthful-looking surface is surprisingly craterless, suggesting a complex geological history. That observation, along with a similarly young surface on Pluto’s large moon Charon , is challenging ideas about how icy worlds maintain their internal heat, previously thought to require some help from a nearby giant planet’s gravity.

“Could icy worlds minding their own business—not orbiting some giant planet—also be geologically active? The answer is obviously yes,” says Moore. “Pluto is every bit as geologically active as any place we’ve seen anyplace else in the solar system.”

Covered in a thin veneer of exotic frost, Pluto is home to many varied terrains. Scientists have already released an image showing icy mountains punching through that frost and rising as high as 11,000 feet. Next to those mountains (now called Norgay Montes in honor of Nepalese Sherpa Tenzing Norgay) is a region of smooth, icy plains that are occasionally interrupted by networks of polygonal fractures and oddly bumpy hills.

“When I saw this image the first time, I decided I was going to call it ‘not easy to explain terrain’,” Moore says. “This could be only a week old for all we know.”

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Within those plains, called Sputnik Planum, are darkish spots that could be tantalizing evidence of geysers erupting from Pluto’s surface. It wouldn’t be the first time such geysers have been seen: When the Voyager spacecraft flew by Neptune in 1989, it spotted similarly dark fountains on Neptune’s large moon Triton .

But it’s too soon to say what those spots actually are.

“We are in the most preliminary stages of our investigations,” Moore says. “We are acutely aware that jumping to conclusions comes with great peril.”

Focusing on Pluto's small moon, Nix, this image reveals features as small as 4 miles (6 kilometers) across. Mission scientists believe we are looking at one end of an elongated body.

Carried Away by Solar Wind

Other observations discussed by NASA on Friday include data on how Pluto’s atmosphere behaves. “The atmosphere is very symmetric on opposite sides of the planet,” said New Horizons team member Randy Gladstone , of the Southwest Research Institute.

Scientists didn’t know Pluto had an atmosphere until 1988, and since then have been trying to understand how the planet’s puffy shroud evolves over the world’s 248-year trip around the sun.

Early theories suggested the atmosphere would freeze out and collapse as Pluto got farther and farther from the sun. But so far, that doesn’t appear to be happening. Preliminary data suggests that it’s more of a sluggish, stagnant shroud than a roiling, turbulent cloud.

“A glimpse of the data eliminates some models that were contenders up until now,” says Gladstone.

Like Earth’s atmosphere, Pluto’s is primarily made of nitrogen, though there are also layers of methane and   heavier   hydrocarbons.   It is   less dense but more voluminous than Earth’s, rising about 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) above the planet's surface. The bulk of Earth's atmosphere, in contrast, is concentrated in a veil just 60 miles thick (100 kilometers).  

And unlike Earth's atmosphere, Pluto's is escaping—or wafting into space. In fact, the   New Horizons began detecting nitrogen atoms from Pluto’s atmosphere five days earlier than anticipated.“That nitrogen atmosphere, because Pluto is so small, escapes directly into space,” says team member   Fran Bagenal of the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Now, New Horizons has detected a long tail of charged particles streaming off of Pluto that have “been pulled away and carried away by the solar wind,” Bagenal says. Calculations suggest Pluto loses as much as 500 tons of nitrogen per hour, meaning it has lost as much as 9,000 feet of nitrogen over the course of its 4.6 billion-year history, Bagenal says. “That’s a substantial mountain of nitrogen ice that’s been removed.”

Follow Nadia Drake on Twitter and on her blog at National Geographic's Phenomena.

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Astronomy Picture of the Day

NASA Marks Milestones for Voyager and New Horizons' Mission to Pluto

The planets were literally aligned on Monday for NASA's celebration of its Voyager mission to the outer planets and its upcoming New Horizons mission to Pluto and beyond.

Monday marked 25 years since the Voyager 2 probe made its flyby of the planet Neptune, and the day also marked a milestone for the New Horizons spacecraft, which was launched eight and a half years ago .

"Today we crossed the orbit of Neptune ... outbound for Pluto to make a little bit of history," said Alan Stern, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute who heads up the $728 million New Horizons mission. New Horizons is due to fly past Pluto and its moons next July 14, on Bastille Day.

Stern said he considered the flyby to be on a par with Voyager's encounter with Neptune in 1989, in that it would mark the first close-up view of a new frontier in the solar system. To mark the occasion, the New Horizons team released a picture of Neptune and its largest moon, Triton , taken in July from a distance of nearly 2.5 billion miles (4 billion kilometers).

The planet and moon look like little more than specks in New Horizons' picture — and so do Pluto and its largest moon, Charon , which are still about 240 million miles (385 million kilometers) away. But the controversial dwarf planet is due to loom much larger in the coming months.

By next May, the views from New Horizons' high-resolution LORRI camera should outdo the Hubble Space Telescope, Stern said. And during next July's 30,000-mph flyby, the pictures of Pluto are expected to be far better than anything Voyager sent back from Neptune.

During a news briefing at NASA Headquarters in Washington on Monday, Stern paid tribute to Voyager's project scientist, Ed Stone. "We stand on the shoulders of giants, giants like Ed Stone and his Voyager science team, who pioneered how to do the exploration of the deep outer solar system," he said.

Stern also praised the more than 2,000 members of what he called the "New Horizons Corps of Discovery." Thanks to technological advances in the past 25 years, New Horizons' mission cost is about a fifth of Voyager's price tag, Stern said. He noted that the piano-sized probe's seven scientific instruments weigh less than the camera on NASA's Cassini orbiter, and that they draw "less than one-half the power of a 60-watt light bulb." The power is provided by a plutonium-fueled generator that's expected to run for decades.

Focusing on the solar system's icy ring

New Horizons is the first mission to focus on the Kuiper Belt, a ring of icy material that lies more than 2.7 billion miles (4.5 billion kilometers) from the sun.

In preparation for the flyby, the New Horizons team has been using Hubble to survey Pluto's vicinity for moons and debris, as well as for potential targets beyond Pluto in the Kuiper Belt. The effort has turned up four new moons , plus several prospects for a follow-up flyby. Stern said it would take several months to determine whether any of the Kuiper Belt targets were within the spacecraft's fuel range.

New Horizons will be programmed to take pictures of Pluto and all of its five known moons, with the tiny moon Nix looming as a particularly promising target. The probe's instruments will also analyze Pluto's ultra-thin atmosphere and watch for phenomena ranging from planetary rings to clouds and ice geysers. Although there are no pictures that show Pluto's surface in detail, scientists expect it to have the weird-looking "cantaloupe terrain" that Voyager's cameras saw on Triton 25 years ago.

"This is just mouth-watering," Stern said. "It's a scientific wonderland that we look forward to exploring."

Veterans of the twin Voyager missions said they were looking forward to the Pluto flyby as well. "The one thing I'd be surprised about at Pluto is if we weren't truly surprised," said Jeffrey Moore, a planetary scientist at NASA Ames Research Center.

Stern said there'd be booklets and "Plutopalooza" party kits to publicize New Horizons' mission. He promised that during the height of the mission, pictures from Pluto would be posted to the Web on the same day they're received. "We're going to take you along on all of this journey," he said.

Revisiting the question of Pluto's planethood

This week marks yet another anniversary for Pluto's fans and detractors: Eight years ago, the International Astronomical Union voted to reclassify the icy world as a dwarf planet , and declared that such bodies were not planets per se because they did not "clear the neighborhood around their orbits."

Pluto was once seen as a misfit in the solar system, but astronomers have found more objects like it in recent years. So far, the IAU has designated four other worlds as dwarf planets: Eris, Makemake and Haumea, which are beyond Pluto's orbit, plus Ceres in the main asteroid belt. Stern said at least eight more objects (Quaoar, Sedna , Orcus, Ixion, Varuna, 2002 AW197 , Pallas and Vesta ) may well be round enough to fit the IAU's dwarf-planet definition.

"More dwarf planets than all the giants and terrestrials combined," he noted. "You might ask yourself, who are the misfits now?"

During the briefing, a NASA moderator read out a Pluto-centric question submitted via Twitter by William Shatner , who portrayed Captain Kirk in the popular "Star Trek" TV series and several movies.

@NASAGoddard What can we do to get it's planetary status back? There can't be just 8 planets in our solar system. — William Shatner (@WilliamShatner) August 25, 2014

"It's silly that it comes down to whether you think a dwarf planet is a planet or not. That's kind of semantics," Voyager veteran David Grinspoon, a researcher at the Planetary Science Institute, replied.

The University of Colorado's Fran Bagenal jumped in, saying, "Dwarf planets are planets — come on!"

Grinspoon (who has criticized the IAU's ruling in the past) noted that Pluto would probably pass the "Captain Kirk Test" for planethood — that is, a judgment by Kirk and Spock that what they were seeing on the Starship Enterprise's viewscreen was a planet rather than something else. But he said the semantics weren't as important as the prospect of learning about a new planetary frontier.

"We're exploring this new realm of the solar system that we haven't explored before, the realm of dwarf planets," Grinspoon said. "Dwarf planets are this amazing new kind of body that we're about to learn a lot more about. Take us into orbit, Captain. Beam us up to Pluto."

• The Contents
• The Making of
• Where Are They Now
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Q & A with Ed Stone

golden record

Where are they now.

• frequently asked questions
• Q&A with Ed Stone

Mission Overview

The twin Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft are exploring where nothing from Earth has flown before. Continuing on their more-than-40-year journey since their 1977 launches, they each are much farther away from Earth and the sun than Pluto. In August 2012, Voyager 1 made the historic entry into interstellar space, the region between stars, filled with material ejected by the death of nearby stars millions of years ago. Voyager 2 entered interstellar space on November 5, 2018 and scientists hope to learn more about this region. Both spacecraft are still sending scientific information about their surroundings through the Deep Space Network, or DSN.

The primary mission was the exploration of Jupiter and Saturn. After making a string of discoveries there — such as active volcanoes on Jupiter's moon Io and intricacies of Saturn's rings — the mission was extended. Voyager 2 went on to explore Uranus and Neptune, and is still the only spacecraft to have visited those outer planets. The adventurers' current mission, the Voyager Interstellar Mission (VIM), will explore the outermost edge of the Sun's domain. And beyond.

Interstellar Mission

The mission objective of the Voyager Interstellar Mission (VIM) is to extend the NASA exploration of the solar system beyond the neighborhood of the outer planets to the outer limits of the Sun's sphere of influence, and possibly beyond.

› Learn more

Planetary Voyage

The twin spacecraft Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were launched by NASA in separate months in the summer of 1977 from Cape Canaveral, Florida. As originally designed, the Voyagers were to conduct closeup studies of Jupiter and Saturn, Saturn's rings, and the larger moons of the two planets.

› View more

Launch: Voyager 2 launched on August 20, 1977, from Cape Canaveral, Florida aboard a Titan-Centaur rocket. On September 5, Voyager 1 launched, also from Cape Canaveral aboard a Titan-Centaur rocket.

NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft finally phones home after 5 months of no contact

On Saturday, April 5, Voyager 1 finally "phoned home" and updated its NASA operating team about its health.

NASA's interstellar explorer Voyager 1 is finally communicating with ground control in an understandable way again. On Saturday (April 20), Voyager 1 updated ground control about its health status for the first time in 5 months. While the Voyager 1 spacecraft still isn't sending valid science data back to Earth, it is now returning usable information about the health and operating status of its onboard engineering systems. 

Thirty-five years after its launch in 1977, Voyager 1 became the first human-made object to leave the solar system and enter interstellar space . It was followed out of our cosmic quarters by its space-faring sibling, Voyager 2 , six years later in 2018. Voyager 2, thankfully, is still operational and communicating well with Earth. 

The two spacecraft remain the only human-made objects exploring space beyond the influence of the sun. However, on Nov. 14, 2023, after 11 years of exploring interstellar space and while sitting a staggering 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, Voyager 1's binary code — computer language composed of 0s and 1s that it uses to communicate with its flight team at NASA — stopped making sense.

Related: We finally know why NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft stopped communicating — scientists are working on a fix

In March, NASA's Voyager 1 operating team sent a digital "poke" to the spacecraft, prompting its flight data subsystem (FDS) to send a full memory readout back home.

This memory dump revealed to scientists and engineers that the "glitch" is the result of a corrupted code contained on a single chip representing around 3% of the FDS memory. The loss of this code rendered Voyager 1's science and engineering data unusable.

The NASA team can't physically repair or replace this chip, of course, but what they can do is remotely place the affected code elsewhere in the FDS memory. Though no single section of the memory is large enough to hold this code entirely, the team can slice it into sections and store these chunks separately. To do this, they will also have to adjust the relevant storage sections to ensure the addition of this corrupted code won't cause those areas to stop operating individually, or working together as a whole. In addition to this, NASA staff will also have to ensure any references to the corrupted code's location are updated.

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On April 18, 2024, the team began sending the code to its new location in the FDS memory. This was a painstaking process, as a radio signal takes 22.5 hours to traverse the distance between Earth and Voyager 1, and it then takes another 22.5 hours to get a signal back from the craft. 

By Saturday (April 20), however, the team confirmed their modification had worked. For the first time in five months, the scientists were able to communicate with Voyager 1 and check its health. Over the next few weeks, the team will work on adjusting the rest of the FDS software and aim to recover the regions of the system that are responsible for packaging and returning vital science data from beyond the limits of the solar system.

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: [email protected].

Robert Lea is a science journalist in the U.K. whose articles have been published in Physics World, New Scientist, Astronomy Magazine, All About Space, Newsweek and ZME Science. He also writes about science communication for Elsevier and the European Journal of Physics. Rob holds a bachelor of science degree in physics and astronomy from the U.K.’s Open University. Follow him on Twitter @sciencef1rst.

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• Robb62 'V'ger must contact the creator. Reply
• Holy HannaH! Couldn't help but think that "repair" sounded extremely similar to the mechanics of DNA and the evolution of life. Reply
• Torbjorn Larsson *Applause* indeed, thanks to the Voyager teams for the hard work! Reply
• SpaceSpinner I notice that the article says that it has been in space for 35 years. Either I have gone back in time 10 years, or their AI is off by 10 years. V-*ger has been captured! Reply

Admin said: On Saturday, April 5, Voyager 1 finally "phoned home" and updated its NASA operating team about its health. The interstellar explorer is back in touch after five months of sending back nonsense data. NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft finally phones home after 5 months of no contact : Read more

evw said: I'm incredibly grateful for the persistence and dedication of the Voyagers' teams and for the amazing accomplishments that have kept these two spacecrafts operational so many years beyond their expected lifetimes. V-1 was launched when I was 25 years young; I was nearly delirious with joy. Exploring the physical universe captivated my attention while I was in elementary school and has kept me mesmerized since. I'm very emotional writing this note, thinking about what amounts to a miracle of technology and longevity in my eyes. BRAVO!!! THANK YOU EVERYONE PAST & PRESENT!!!

• EBairead I presume it's Fortran. Well done all. Reply

SpaceSpinner said: I notice that the article says that it has been in space for 35 years. Either I have gone back in time 10 years, or their AI is off by 10 years. V-*ger has been captured!

EBairead said: I presume it's Fortran. Well done all.

• View All 11 Comments

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Nasa celebrates as 1977’s voyager 1 phones home at last.

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NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft is depicted in this artist’s concept traveling through interstellar ... [+] space, or the space between stars, which it entered in 2012.

Voyager 1 has finally returned usable data to NASA from outside the solar system after five months offline.

Launched in 1977 and now in its 46th year, the probe has been suffering from communication issues since November 14. The same thing also happened in 2022 . However, this week, NASA said that engineers were finally able to get usable data about the health and status of its onboard engineering systems.

Fixing Voyager 1 has been slow work. It’s currently over 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, which means a radio message takes about 22.5 hours to reach it—and the same again to receive an answer.

The problem appears to have been its flight data subsystem, one of the spacecraft’s three onboard computers. Its job is to package the science and engineering data before it’s sent to Earth. Since the computer chip that stores its memory and some of its code is broken, engineers had to reinsert that code into a new location.

Next up for engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California is to adjust other parts of the FDS software so Voyager 1 can resume sending science data.

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The longest-running and most distant spacecraft in history, Voyager 1, was launched on September 5, 1977, while its twin spacecraft, Voyager 2, was launched a little earlier, on August 20, 1977. Voyager 2—now 12 billion miles away and traveling more slowly—continues to operate normally.

Both are now beyond what astronomers call the heliopause—a protective bubble of particles and magnetic fields created by the sun, which is thought to represent the sun’s farthest influence. Voyager 1 got to the heliopause in 2012 and Voyager 2 in 2018.

The Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of Earth taken Feb. 14, 1990, by NASA’s Voyager 1 at a distance of ... [+] 3.7 billion miles (6 billion kilometers) from the sun. The image inspired the title of scientist Carl Sagan's book, "Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space," in which he wrote: "Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us."

Pale Blue Dot

Since their launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, aboard Titan-Centaur rockets, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 have had glittering careers. Both photographed Jupiter and Saturn in 1979 and 1980 before going their separate ways. Voyager 1 could have visited Pluto, but that was sacrificed so scientists could get images of Saturn’s moon, Titan, a maneuver that made it impossible for it to reach any other body in the solar system. Meanwhile, Voyager 2 took slingshots around the planets to also image Uranus in 1986 and Neptune in 1989—the only spacecraft ever to image the two outer planets.

On February 14, 1990, when 3.7 billion miles from Earth, Voyager 1 turned its cameras back toward the sun and took an image that included our planet as “a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” Known as the “Pale Blue Dot,” it’s one of the most famous photos ever taken. It was remastered in 2019 .

Wishing you clear skies and wide eyes.

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NASA re-establishes communication with Voyager 1 interstellar spacecraft that went silent for months

NASA and Voyager 1 are communicating back and forth again, after the most distant human-made object in space stopped sending usable data back to the space agency nearly five months ago.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory said Voyager 1, which is more than 15 billion miles away from Earth, stopped sending readable data back to scientists on Nov. 14, 2023, though mission controllers could still see the spacecraft was receiving commands and operating as intended.

The Southern California-based engineering team responsible for Voyager 1 investigated the problem and learned the issue was connected to one of the spacecraft’s three onboard computers, which is called the Flight Data Subsystem (FDS).

The FDS packages the data collected by the spacecraft before sending it back to earth.

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Engineers discovered the chip responsible for storing a portion of the FDS memory was faulty, making the code unusable.

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Had the spacecraft been located on Earth, engineers would be able to go in and replace a chip, but because it is in interstellar space, engineers needed to figure out a way to move the affected code somewhere else in the FDS memory.

The code is so large that there is not a single location to store the entire section of the code. So, engineers divided the affected code into sections and planned to move them to various locations in the FDS.

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Engineers also had to make sure the code worked together as a whole after being moved.

Once the code was reconfigured, engineers transmitted the changes to the FDS memory on April 18.

The signal takes about 22.5 hours to travel through space until it reaches Voyager 1, and then another 22.5 hours for a signal to come back to earth.

VOYAGER 1 DETECTS ‘HUM’ WHILE IN INTERSTELLAR SPACE: REPORT

On April 20, the mission team received a response from Voyager 1 and confirmed the modification worked. As a result, engineers now have the ability to check the health and status of the spacecraft.

In the coming months, the team plans to move and adjust additional portions of the FDS software that was affected, including portions that send scientific data back to mission control.

Voyager 1′s odyssey began in 1977 when the spacecraft and its twin, Voyager 2, were launched on a tour of the gas giant planets of the solar system.

After beaming back dazzling postcard views of Jupiter’s giant red spot and Saturn’s shimmering rings, Voyager 2 hopscotched to Uranus and Neptune . Meanwhile, Voyager 1 used Saturn as a gravitational slingshot to power itself past Pluto. 

Original article source: NASA re-establishes communication with Voyager 1 interstellar spacecraft that went silent for months

Voyager 1 was 15 billion miles from home and broken. Here's what NASA did to fix it.

A scrambled computer signal helped NASA engineers resume data transmission from the distant Voyager 1, a spacecraft that was launched in 1977 and now, 15 billion miles from home, is the farthest a human-made object has traveled from Earth.

Voyager 1 – and its sister craft, Voyager 2 – are robotic space probes that became the first spacecraft to leave our solar system and plunge into interstellar space, 11 billion miles from the sun.

Step by step: Details on Voyager 1 fix .

They were designed to last five years , but have become the longest-operating spacecraft in history. Both carry gold-plated copper discs containing sounds and images from Earth, contents that were chosen by a team headed by celebrity astronomer Carl Sagan .

Voyager 2, now 12.7 billion miles from Earth, is functioning normally. However, a computer problem aboard Voyager 1 on Nov. 14, 2023, corrupted the stream of science and engineering data the craft is sending to Earth, making it unreadable , arstechnica.com reported.

Voyager 1 was able to receive communications from Earth and was still transmitting, but its returning signals were a " monotonous dial tone ,” according to space.com.

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What's the problem with Voyager 1?

NASA and Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineers traced the problem to one of Voyager’s three onboard computers, one called a Flight Data Subsystem. The system collects information, including:

◾ Data from science instruments that monitor cosmic rays, solar wind particles, the sun's magnetic field, and other phenomena.

◾ Engineering data on spacecraft operating systems.

The Flight Data Subsystem gives that information to the spacecraft’s Telemetry Modulation Unit. The The unit converts the data to binary code – consisting of zeros and ones, the simplest form of computer code – then transmits that code to Earth, using Voyager's 12-foot antenna dish.

The data is received by NASA's Deep Space Network , giant 112-foot radio antennas placed around the world. The network handles space communications from several missions.

In November, the Telemetry Modulation Unit transmissions became a repeating pattern of zeros and ones " as if it were stuck ," NASA said.

Engineers restarted the Flight Data System in December, but that failed to fix the problem.

Voyager 1 is far away – and it's getting old

Voyager 1 has been in space for more than 46 years. Attempts to fix problems aboard the spacecraft often mean "consulting original, decades-old documents written by engineers who didn’t anticipate the issues that are arising today," NASA says. 

Engineers have consulted archived documents to find solutions to other Voyager problems in the past, wired.com says.

Engineers need time to understand how new commands will affect the spacecraft and to avoid unintended consequences. It's a complicated, time-consuming process.

A long time lag makes solving the problem more difficult. Voyager is moving at about 38,000 mph. It takes 22.5 hours for an Earth radio signal to reach Voyager and another 22.5 hours for the spacecraft’s reply to reach antenna networks on Earth.

That means engineers must wait 45 hours to get a response and learn if a command has been successful.

What was the key computer signal?

The key signal was received after engineers "poked" the spacecraft.

◾ March 1: Teams send a command known as a “poke” to Voyager. In essence, the poke tells the Flight Data System to try different sequences in its software program, in the hope a corrupted portion can be found and bypassed.

◾ March 3: Engineers receive a new signal from Voyager that is different from both the unreadable dial tone and the spacecraft’s original transmission stream.

◾ March 7: Engineers begin decoding the signal.

◾ March 10: A Deep Space Network engineer finishes decoding the new signal and finds it contains a readout of the spacecraft’s entire Flight Data System memory. That includes instructions for the spacecraft when it receives commands or when its operational status changes. 

◾ April 4: Engineers trace the problem to a chip in the FDS but are not sure what caused the problem. It could have been hit by an energetic particle from space or was simply worn out because of age, NASA says.

◾ April 18: Controllers send a command to Voyager to reposition the code.

◾ April 20: Voyager sends a transmission indicating the repositioning has worked.

What happens next?

Engineers will reposition the other sections of the code to allow Voyager to resume transmitting science data.

Voyager 2 was launched first on Aug. 20, 1977. Voyager 1 was launched Sept. 5, 1977. It was put on a faster, shorter trajectory, which took it to interstellar space ahead of Voyager 2.

The Voyagers are the only spacecraft in the interstellar void. NASA's New Horizons probe , launched Jan. 19, 2006, flew past Pluto in 2015 and is expected to enter interstellar space in the 2040s.

SOURCE USA TODAY Network reporting and research; NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory/California Institute of Technology; Reuters

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Voyager 1 transmitting data again after Nasa remotely fixes 46-year-old probe

Engineers spent months working to repair link with Earth’s most distant spacecraft, says space agency

Earth’s most distant spacecraft, Voyager 1, has started communicating properly again with Nasa after engineers worked for months to remotely fix the 46-year-old probe.

Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which makes and operates the agency’s robotic spacecraft, said in December that the probe – more than 15bn miles (24bn kilometres) away – was sending gibberish code back to Earth.

In an update released on Monday , JPL announced the mission team had managed “after some inventive sleuthing” to receive usable data about the health and status of Voyager 1’s engineering systems. “The next step is to enable the spacecraft to begin returning science data again,” JPL said. Despite the fault, Voyager 1 had operated normally throughout, it added.

Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 was designed with the primary goal of conducting close-up studies of Jupiter and Saturn in a five-year mission. However, its journey continued and the spacecraft is now approaching a half-century in operation.

Voyager 1 crossed into interstellar space in August 2012, making it the first human-made object to venture out of the solar system. It is currently travelling at 37,800mph (60,821km/h).

Hi, it's me. - V1 https://t.co/jgGFBfxIOe — NASA Voyager (@NASAVoyager) April 22, 2024

The recent problem was related to one of the spacecraft’s three onboard computers, which are responsible for packaging the science and engineering data before it is sent to Earth. Unable to repair a broken chip, the JPL team decided to move the corrupted code elsewhere, a tricky job considering the old technology.

The computers on Voyager 1 and its sister probe, Voyager 2, have less than 70 kilobytes of memory in total – the equivalent of a low-resolution computer image. They use old-fashioned digital tape to record data.

The fix was transmitted from Earth on 18 April but it took two days to assess if it had been successful as a radio signal takes about 22 and a half hours to reach Voyager 1 and another 22 and a half hours for a response to come back to Earth. “When the mission flight team heard back from the spacecraft on 20 April, they saw that the modification worked,” JPL said.

Alongside its announcement, JPL posted a photo of members of the Voyager flight team cheering and clapping in a conference room after receiving usable data again, with laptops, notebooks and doughnuts on the table in front of them.

The Retired Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, who flew two space shuttle missions and acted as commander of the International Space Station, compared the JPL mission to long-distance maintenance on a vintage car.

“Imagine a computer chip fails in your 1977 vehicle. Now imagine it’s in interstellar space, 15bn miles away,” Hadfield wrote on X . “Nasa’s Voyager probe just got fixed by this team of brilliant software mechanics.

Voyager 1 and 2 have made numerous scientific discoveries , including taking detailed recordings of Saturn and revealing that Jupiter also has rings, as well as active volcanism on one of its moons, Io. The probes later discovered 23 new moons around the outer planets.

As their trajectory takes them so far from the sun, the Voyager probes are unable to use solar panels, instead converting the heat produced from the natural radioactive decay of plutonium into electricity to power the spacecraft’s systems.

Nasa hopes to continue to collect data from the two Voyager spacecraft for several more years but engineers expect the probes will be too far out of range to communicate in about a decade, depending on how much power they can generate. Voyager 2 is slightly behind its twin and is moving slightly slower.

In roughly 40,000 years, the probes will pass relatively close, in astronomical terms, to two stars. Voyager 1 will come within 1.7 light years of a star in the constellation Ursa Minor, while Voyager 2 will come within a similar distance of a star called Ross 248 in the constellation of Andromeda.

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NASA’s Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth

NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft is depicted in this artist’s concept traveling through interstellar space, or the space between stars, which it entered in 2012.

After some inventive sleuthing, the mission team can — for the first time in five months — check the health and status of the most distant human-made object in existence.

For the first time since November , NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft is returning usable data about the health and status of its onboard engineering systems. The next step is to enable the spacecraft to begin returning science data again. The probe and its twin, Voyager 2, are the only spacecraft to ever fly in interstellar space (the space between stars).

Voyager 1 stopped sending readable science and engineering data back to Earth on Nov. 14, 2023, even though mission controllers could tell the spacecraft was still receiving their commands and otherwise operating normally. In March, the Voyager engineering team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California confirmed that the issue was tied to one of the spacecraft’s three onboard computers, called the flight data subsystem (FDS). The FDS is responsible for packaging the science and engineering data before it’s sent to Earth.

After receiving data about the health and status of Voyager 1 for the first time in five months, members of the Voyager flight team celebrate in a conference room at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory on April 20.

The team discovered that a single chip responsible for storing a portion of the FDS memory — including some of the FDS computer’s software code — isn’t working. The loss of that code rendered the science and engineering data unusable. Unable to repair the chip, the team decided to place the affected code elsewhere in the FDS memory. But no single location is large enough to hold the section of code in its entirety.

So they devised a plan to divide the affected code into sections and store those sections in different places in the FDS. To make this plan work, they also needed to adjust those code sections to ensure, for example, that they all still function as a whole. Any references to the location of that code in other parts of the FDS memory needed to be updated as well.

The team started by singling out the code responsible for packaging the spacecraft’s engineering data. They sent it to its new location in the FDS memory on April 18. A radio signal takes about 22 ½ hours to reach Voyager 1, which is over 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, and another 22 ½ hours for a signal to come back to Earth. When the mission flight team heard back from the spacecraft on April 20, they saw that the modification worked: For the first time in five months, they have been able to check the health and status of the spacecraft.

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During the coming weeks, the team will relocate and adjust the other affected portions of the FDS software. These include the portions that will start returning science data.

Voyager 2 continues to operate normally. Launched over 46 years ago , the twin Voyager spacecraft are the longest-running and most distant spacecraft in history. Before the start of their interstellar exploration, both probes flew by Saturn and Jupiter, and Voyager 2 flew by Uranus and Neptune.

Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages JPL for NASA.

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Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

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Voyager 1 Sends Clear Data to NASA for the First Time in Five Months

The farthest spacecraft from Earth had been transmitting nonsense since November, but after an engineering tweak, it finally beamed back a report on its health and status

Will Sullivan

Daily Correspondent

For the first time in five months, NASA has received usable data from Voyager 1, the farthest spacecraft from Earth.

The aging probe, which has traveled more than 15 billion miles into space, stopped transmitting science and engineering data on November 14. Instead, it sent NASA a nonsensical stream of repetitive binary code . For months, the agency’s engineers undertook a slow process of trial and error, giving the spacecraft various commands and waiting to see how it responded. Thanks to some creative thinking, the team identified a broken chip on the spacecraft and relocated some of the code that was stored there, according to the agency .

NASA is now receiving data about the health and status of Voyager 1’s engineering systems. The next step is to get the spacecraft to start sending science data again.

“Today was a great day for Voyager 1,” Linda Spilker , a Voyager project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), said in a statement over the weekend, per CNN ’s Ashley Strickland. “We’re back in communication with the spacecraft. And we look forward to getting science data back.”

Hi, it's me. - V1 https://t.co/jgGFBfxIOe — NASA Voyager (@NASAVoyager) April 22, 2024

Voyager 1 and its companion, Voyager 2, separately launched from Earth in 1977. Between the two of them, the probes have studied all four giant planets in the outer solar system—Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune—along with 48 of their moons and the planets’ magnetic fields. The spacecraft observed Saturn’s rings in detail and discovered active volcanoes on Jupiter’s moon Io .

Originally designed for a five-year mission within our solar system, both probes are still operational and chugging along through space, far beyond Pluto’s orbit. In 2012, Voyager 1 became the first human-made object to reach interstellar space, the area between stars. The probe is now about eight times farther from the sun than Uranus is on average.

Over the decades, the Voyager spacecraft have transmitted data collected on their travels back to NASA scientists. But in November, Voyager 1 started sending gibberish .

Engineers determined Voyager 1’s issue was with one of three onboard computers, called the flight data system (FDS), NASA said in a December blog post . While the spacecraft was still receiving and executing commands from Earth, the FDS was not communicating properly with a subsystem called the telemetry modulation unit (TMU). The FDS collects science and engineering data and combines it into a package that the TMU transmits back to Earth.

Since Voyager 1 is so far away, testing solutions to its technical issues requires time—it takes 22.5 hours for commands to reach the probe and another 22.5 hours for Voyager 1’s response to come back.

On March 1, engineers sent a command that coaxed Voyager 1 into sending a readout of the FDS memory, NASA said in a March 13 blog post . From that readout, the team confirmed a small part—about 3 percent—of the system’s memory had been corrupted, NASA said in an April 4 update .

The core of the problem turned out to be a faulty chip hosting some software code and part of the FDS memory. NASA doesn’t know what caused the chip to stop working—it could be that a high-energy particle from space collided with it, or the chip might have just run out of steam after almost 50 years spent hurtling through the cosmos.

“It’s the most serious issue we’ve had since I’ve been the project manager, and it’s scary because you lose communication with the spacecraft,” Suzanne Dodd , Voyager project manager at JPL, told Scientific American ’s Nadia Drake in March.

To receive usable data again, the engineers needed to move the affected code somewhere else that wasn’t broken. But no single location in the FDS memory was large enough to hold all of the code, so the engineers divided it into chunks and stored it in multiple places, per NASA .

The team started with moving the code responsible for sending Voyager’s status reports, sending it to its new location in the FDS memory on April 18. They received confirmation that the strategy worked on April 20, when the first data on the spacecraft’s health since November arrived on Earth.

In the next several weeks, the team will relocate the parts of the FDS software that can start returning science data.

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Will Sullivan | | READ MORE

Will Sullivan is a science writer based in Washington, D.C. His work has appeared in Inside Science and NOVA Next .