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45 years ago: voyager 1 begins its epic journey to the outer planets and beyond, johnson space center.

Forty-five years ago, the Voyager 1 spacecraft began an epic journey that continues to this day. The second of a pair of spacecraft, Voyager 1 lifted off on Sept. 5, 1977, 16 days after its twin left on a similar voyage. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, managed the two spacecraft on their missions to explore the outer planets. Taking advantage of a rare planetary alignment to use the gravity of one planet to redirect the spacecraft to the next, the Voyagers planned to use Jupiter’s gravity to send them on to explore Saturn and its large moon Titan. They carried sophisticated instruments to conduct their in-depth explorations of the giant planets. Both spacecraft continue to return data as they make their way out of our solar system and enter interstellar space.

In the 1960s, mission designers at JPL noted that the next occurrence of a once-every-175-year alignment of the outer planets would happen in the late 1970s. A spacecraft could take advantage of this opportunity to fly by Jupiter and use its gravity to bend its trajectory to visit Saturn, and repeat the process to also visit Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. Launching several missions to visit each planet individually would take much longer and cost much more. The original plan to send two pairs of Thermoelectric Outer Planet Spacecraft on these Grand Tours proved too costly leading to its cancellation in 1971. The next year, NASA approved a scaled-down version of the project to send a pair of Mariner-class spacecraft in 1977 to explore just Jupiter and Saturn, with an expected five-year operational life. On March 7, 1977, NASA Administrator James C. Fletcher announced the renaming of these Mariner Jupiter/Saturn 1977 spacecraft as Voyager 1 and 2. Scientists held out hope that one of them could ultimately visit Uranus and Neptune, thereby fulfilling most of the original Grand Tour’s objectives – Pluto would have to wait several decades for its first visit.

Each Voyager carried a suite of 11 instruments to study the planets during each encounter and to learn more about interplanetary space in the outer reaches of the solar system, including: 

• An imaging science system consisting of narrow-angle and wide-angle cameras to photograph the planet and its satellites.
• A radio science system to determine the planet’s physical properties.
• An infrared interferometer spectrometer to investigate local and global energy balance and atmospheric composition.
• An ultraviolet spectrometer to measure atmospheric properties.
• A magnetometer to analyze the planet’s magnetic field and interaction with the solar wind.
• A plasma spectrometer to investigate microscopic properties of plasma ions.
• A low-energy charged particle device to measure fluxes and distributions of ions.
• A cosmic ray detection system to determine the origin and behavior of cosmic radiation.
• A planetary radio astronomy investigation to study radio emissions from Jupiter.
• A photopolarimeter to measure the planet’s surface composition.
• A plasma wave system to study the planet’s magnetosphere.

Voyager 1 lifted off on Sept. 5, 1977, atop a Titan IIIE-Centaur rocket from Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, now Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, in Florida. Two weeks after its launch, from a distance of 7.25 million miles, Voyager 1 turned its camera back toward its home planet and took the first single-frame image of the Earth-Moon system. The spacecraft successfully crossed the asteroid belt between Dec. 10, 1977, and Sept. 8, 1978.

Although Voyager 1 launched two weeks after its twin, it traveled on a faster trajectory and arrived at Jupiter four months earlier. Voyager 1 conducted its observations of Jupiter between Jan. 6 and April 13, 1979, making its closest approach of 216,837 miles from the planet’s center on March 5. The spacecraft returned 19,000 images of the giant planet, many of Jupiter’s satellites, and confirmed the presence of a thin ring encircling it. Its other instruments returned information about Jupiter’s atmosphere and magnetic field. Jupiter’s massive gravity field bent the spacecraft’s trajectory and accelerated it toward Saturn.

Voyager 1 began its long-range observations of Saturn on Aug. 22, 1980, passed within 114,500 miles of the planet’s center on Nov. 12, and concluded its studies on Dec. 14. Because of its interest to scientists, mission planners chose the spacecraft’s trajectory to make a close flyby of Saturn’s largest moon Titan – the only planetary satellite with a dense atmosphere – just before the closest approach to the planet itself. This trajectory, passing over Saturn’s south pole and bending north over the plane of the ecliptic, precluded Voyager 1 from making any additional planetary encounters. The spacecraft flew 4,033 miles from Titan’s center, returning images of its unbroken orange atmosphere and high-altitude blue haze layer. During the encounter, Voyager 1 returned 16,000 photographs, imaging Saturn, its rings, many of its known satellites and discovering several new ones, while its instruments returned data about Saturn’s atmosphere and magnetic field.

On Feb. 14, 1990, more than 12 years after it began its journey from Earth and shortly before controllers  permanently turned off its cameras to conserve power, Voyager 1 spun around and pointed them back into the solar system. In a mosaic of 60 images, it captured a “family portrait” of six of the solar system’s planets, including a pale blue dot called Earth more than 3.7 billion miles away. Fittingly, these were the last pictures returned from either Voyager spacecraft. On Feb. 17, 1998, Voyager 1 became the most distant human-made object, overtaking the Pioneer 10 spacecraft on their way out of the solar system. In February 2020, to commemorate the photograph’s 30th anniversary, NASA released a remastered version of the image of Earth as Pale Blue Dot Revisited .

On New Year’s Day 1990, both spacecraft officially began the Voyager Interstellar Mission as they inexorably made their escape from our solar system. On Aug. 25, 2012, Voyager 1 passed beyond the heliopause, the boundary between the heliosphere, the bubble-like region of space created by the Sun, and the interstellar medium. Its twin followed suit six years later. Today , 45 years after its launch and 14.6 billion miles from Earth, four of Voyager 1’s 11 instruments continue to return useful data, having now spent 10 years in interstellar space. Signals from the spacecraft take nearly 22 hours to reach Earth, and 22 hours for Earth-based signals to reach the spacecraft. Engineers expect that the spacecraft will continue to return data from interstellar space until about 2025 when it will no longer be able to power its systems. And just in case an alien intelligence finds it one day, Voyager 1 like its twin carries a gold-plated record that contains information about its home planet, including recordings of terrestrial sounds, music, and greetings in 55 languages. Engineers at NASA thoughtfully included Instructions on how to play the record.

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10 Interesting Facts about the Voyager 1 Probe

October 29, 2017 James Miller Solar System , Space Missions 0

According to some reports, many of the mission scientists working on the Voyager space exploration program are “amazed” that both Voyagers are still functioning after forty years in service. This sentiment becomes clear when one considers that the Voyagers run on technology that was developed in the 1970’s, which incidentally, has not suffered any major breakdowns and malfunctions in four decades.

The fact that Voyager 1 had made it to outer space is a testament to the skill, knowledge, and dedication of the engineers who designed, built, and still operate the craft. Furthermore, Voyager 1 has made major contributions to our knowledge of the outer planets over the years, and is expected to continue collecting and returning data to Earth until about 2025. Below are ten interesting facts about this amazing craft.

Voyager 1 is the furthest space craft from Earth

The image below shows Voyager 1 being propelled into space by a Titan IIIE lift vehicle. Launched on September 5, 1977, sixteen days after Voyager 2 which lifted off on August 20, Voyager 1 is now the furthest manufactured object from Earth, even further than the dwarf planets Eris and V774104, which are 96 AU and about 103 AU away, respectively. From a distance of 140 AU away (as on September 22, 2017), Voyager 1 is still in regular contact with the Deep Space Network, and receiving control inputs and return data. In practice, this means that Voyager 1 is the most distant object in the solar system whose exact location is known at all times.

Voyager 1 was originally part of the Mariner 11 program

When NASA first conceived of a “Grand Tour” of the solar system in the 1960’s, the proposed craft that would conduct the tour was designed to be a part of the Mariner 11 program. However, based on the lessons on solar radiation learned from the Mariner 10 program, (as well as severe budget cuts), the craft was designed to be able to cope more effectively with the strong radiation fields around Jupiter, which it was meant to visit. Eventually, the design and specifications of the proposed craft started to deviate from the Mariner designs so radically that the proposed craft was renamed as Voyager 1.

Voyager 1 has three nuclear reactors that generate power

Voyager 1 is the third craft to reach solar system-escape velocity

After completing its planetary mission in November of 1980, Voyager 1 became one of only a handful of spacecraft to obtain enough velocity (about 17 km/sec) to escape from the solar system, the other craft being Pioneer 10, Pioneer 11, and Voyager 2. Apart from the New Horizons craft, Voyager 1 also had the fastest launch speed; it overtook Voyager 2 a few months after launch, flew past Pioneer 11 in the late 1980’s, and passed Pioneer 10 on February 17, 1998. Incidentally, New Horizons will, despite its high velocity, never overtake either of the two Voyagers.

Voyager 1 discovered the source of Saturn’s excess heat

Voyager 1 detected during the Saturn fly-by that the planet’s upper atmosphere contains only about 7% helium, which was surprising considering its helium abundance was expected to be about 11%, or the value for both the Sun and Jupiter . Investigators are surmising that the heavier helium is sinking downward through the less-dense hydrogen in the planets’ atmosphere creating heat, which might explain why Saturn radiates more heat than it receives from the Sun. Voyager 1 also discovered winds that blow at more than 500 m/sec (1,100 mph) through Saturn’s atmosphere in an easterly direction.

Voyager 1 also discovered volcanoes in the Jovian system

Since it was long thought that Earth is the only body in the solar system on which active volcanoes are present, this image taken by Voyager 1 of an erupting volcano on Jupiter’s moon Io came as a major surprise. Voyager also discovered that material ejected from volcanoes on Io permeates the entire Jovian system, since sulphur, oxygen, and sodium was detected by Voyager 1 right at the outer limits of Jupiter’s magnetosphere, which is the region of space around the system that is affected and influenced by Jupiter’s magnetic field.

Voyager 1 took the first solar system “family portrait”

The assembled mosaic above represents the first ever image of the solar system taken from outside of the solar system. This image was taken by Voyager 1 on February 14, 1990, shortly before the crafts’ imaging equipment was purposely disabled by deleting the software that control the cameras. This was done to conserve both power and computer resources, but also because Earth-based technology to receive and “read” images from the craft are no longer available.

The modified image below shows one small part of the above mosaic. This image is known as the Pale Blue Dot, and it shows Earth as the bright spot at the centre of the blue circle, with Voyager 1 having taken the photo on February 14, 1990 from a distance of 4 billion miles (6.4 billion km). The brown line in which Earth appears is one band of sunlight that is reflecting off a part of the spacecraft.

Voyager 1 is now officially in outer space

While the question of when Voyager 1 had left the solar system , or even if it had left at all, was the subject of heated debate among scientists for several years, most investigators now accept August 25, 2012 as the date on which the craft officially exited the solar system. This was decided based upon the increase of the average density of electrons in the craft’s vicinity, which in turn is based on a solar outburst that had occurred March of 2012, and the frequency of plasma oscillations caused by the outburst. The final conclusion was that since the electron density outside of the Sun’s heliosheath is expected be twice that of the electron density inside it, Voyager must be in the interstellar medium.

Despite the above, Voyager 1 is still in the solar system proper

While many people consider leaving the heliosheath as being synonymous with leaving the solar system,, the fact is that the two are vastly different. The Sun’s heliosheath merely refers to the region of space that is influenced by the Sun’s gravity and radiation, while the term “solar system” refers to the region of space that is inhabited by all the bodies that orbit the Sun.

Based on the above, Voyager 1 is still in the solar system, since it will take another three hundred years or so for it to reach the inner edge of the Oort cloud and another 30,000 years or so for it to exit the Oort cloud. Note that while Voyager 1 is not headed toward any particular star, it will pass within 1.6 light years of the star Gliese 445 (which is approaching us at about 119 km/s (430,000 km/h; 270,000 mph), in about 400,000 years’ time.

Voyager 1 carries a message of love

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Voyager 1, First Craft in Interstellar Space, May Have Gone Dark

The 46-year-old probe, which flew by Jupiter and Saturn in its youth and inspired earthlings with images of the planet as a “Pale Blue Dot,” hasn’t sent usable data from interstellar space in months.

By Orlando Mayorquin

When Voyager 1 launched in 1977, scientists hoped it could do what it was built to do and take up-close images of Jupiter and Saturn. It did that — and much more.

Voyager 1 discovered active volcanoes, moons and planetary rings, proving along the way that Earth and all of humanity could be squished into a single pixel in a photograph, a “ pale blue dot, ” as the astronomer Carl Sagan called it. It stretched a four-year mission into the present day, embarking on the deepest journey ever into space.

Now, it may have bid its final farewell to that faraway dot.

Voyager 1 , the farthest man-made object in space, hasn’t sent coherent data to Earth since November. NASA has been trying to diagnose what the Voyager mission’s project manager, Suzanne Dodd, called the “most serious issue” the robotic probe has faced since she took the job in 2010.

The spacecraft encountered a glitch in one of its computers that has eliminated its ability to send engineering and science data back to Earth.

The loss of Voyager 1 would cap decades of scientific breakthroughs and signal the beginning of the end for a mission that has given shape to humanity’s most distant ambition and inspired generations to look to the skies.

“Scientifically, it’s a big loss,” Ms. Dodd said. “I think — emotionally — it’s maybe even a bigger loss.”

Voyager 1 is one half of the Voyager mission. It has a twin spacecraft, Voyager 2.

Launched in 1977, they were primarily built for a four-year trip to Jupiter and Saturn , expanding on earlier flybys by the Pioneer 10 and 11 probes.

The Voyager mission capitalized on a rare alignment of the outer planets — once every 175 years — allowing the probes to visit all four.

Using the gravity of each planet, the Voyager spacecraft could swing onto the next, according to NASA .

The mission to Jupiter and Saturn was a success.

The 1980s flybys yielded several new discoveries, including new insights about the so-called great red spot on Jupiter, the rings around Saturn and the many moons of each planet.

Voyager 2 also explored Uranus and Neptune , becoming in 1989 the only spacecraft to explore all four outer planets.

Voyager 1, meanwhile, had set a course for deep space, using its camera to photograph the planets it was leaving behind along the way. Voyager 2 would later begin its own trek into deep space.

“Anybody who is interested in space is interested in the things Voyager discovered about the outer planets and their moons,” said Kate Howells, the public education specialist at the Planetary Society, an organization co-founded by Dr. Sagan to promote space exploration.

“But I think the pale blue dot was one of those things that was sort of more poetic and touching,” she added.

On Valentine’s Day 1990, Voyager 1, darting 3.7 billion miles away from the sun toward the outer reaches of the solar system, turned around and snapped a photo of Earth that Dr. Sagan and others understood to be a humbling self-portrait of humanity.

“It’s known the world over, and it does connect humanity to the stars,” Ms. Dodd said of the mission.

She added: “I’ve had many, many many people come up to me and say: ‘Wow, I love Voyager. It’s what got me excited about space. It’s what got me thinking about our place here on Earth and what that means.’”

Ms. Howells, 35, counts herself among those people.

About 10 years ago, to celebrate the beginning of her space career, Ms. Howells spent her first paycheck from the Planetary Society to get a Voyager tattoo.

Though spacecraft “all kind of look the same,” she said, more people recognize the tattoo than she anticipated.

“I think that speaks to how famous Voyager is,” she said.

The Voyagers made their mark on popular culture , inspiring a highly intelligent “Voyager 6” in “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” and references on “The X Files” and “The West Wing.”

Even as more advanced probes were launched from Earth, Voyager 1 continued to reliably enrich our understanding of space.

In 2012, it became the first man-made object to exit the heliosphere, the space around the solar system directly influenced by the sun. There is a technical debate among scientists around whether Voyager 1 has actually left the solar system, but, nonetheless, it became interstellar — traversing the space between stars.

That charted a new path for heliophysics, which looks at how the sun influences the space around it. In 2018, Voyager 2 followed its twin between the stars.

Before Voyager 1, scientific data on the sun’s gases and material came only from within the heliosphere’s confines, according to Dr. Jamie Rankin, Voyager’s deputy project scientist.

“And so now we can for the first time kind of connect the inside-out view from the outside-in,” Dr. Rankin said, “That’s a big part of it,” she added. “But the other half is simply that a lot of this material can’t be measured any other way than sending a spacecraft out there.”

Voyager 1 and 2 are the only such spacecraft. Before it went offline, Voyager 1 had been studying an anomalous disturbance in the magnetic field and plasma particles in interstellar space.

“Nothing else is getting launched to go out there,” Ms. Dodd said. “So that’s why we’re spending the time and being careful about trying to recover this spacecraft — because the science is so valuable.”

But recovery means getting under the hood of an aging spacecraft more than 15 billion miles away, equipped with the technology of yesteryear. It takes 45 hours to exchange information with the craft.

It has been repeated over the years that a smartphone has hundreds of thousands of times Voyager 1’s memory — and that the radio transmitter emits as many watts as a refrigerator lightbulb.

“There was one analogy given that is it’s like trying to figure out where your cursor is on your laptop screen when your laptop screen doesn’t work,” Ms. Dodd said.

Her team is still holding out hope, she said, especially as the tantalizing 50th launch anniversary in 2027 approaches. Voyager 1 has survived glitches before, though none as serious.

Voyager 2 is still operational, but aging. It has faced its own technical difficulties too.

NASA had already estimated that the nuclear-powered generators of both spacecrafts would likely die around 2025.

Even if the Voyager interstellar mission is near its end, the voyage still has far to go.

Voyager 1 and its twin, each 40,000 years away from the next closest star, will arguably remain on an indefinite mission.

“If Voyager should sometime in its distant future encounter beings from some other civilization in space, it bears a message,” Dr. Sagan said in a 1980 interview .

Each spacecraft carries a gold-plated phonograph record loaded with an array of sound recordings and images representing humanity’s richness, its diverse cultures and life on Earth.

“A gift across the cosmic ocean from one island of civilization to another,” Dr. Sagan said.

Orlando Mayorquin is a general assignment and breaking news reporter based in New York. More about Orlando Mayorquin

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NASA engineers discover why Voyager 1 is sending a stream of gibberish from outside our solar system

Voyager 1 has been sending a stream of garbled nonsense since November. Now NASA engineers have identified the fault and found a potential workaround.

For the past five months, the Voyager 1 spacecraft has been sending a steady stream of unreadable gibberish back to Earth. Now, NASA engineers finally know why.

The 46-year-old spacecraft sends regular radio signals as it drifts further from our solar system . But in November 2023, the signals suddenly became garbled, meaning  scientists were unable to read any of its data, and they were left mystified about the fault's origins. 

In March, NASA engineers sent a command prompt, or "poke," to the craft to get a readout from its flight data subsystem (FDS) — which packages Voyager 1's science and engineering data before beaming it back to Earth. 

After decoding the spacecraft's response, the engineers have found the source of the problem: The FDS's memory has been corrupted.

Related: NASA's Voyager 1 sends readable message to Earth after 4 nail-biting months of gibberish

"The team suspects that a single chip responsible for storing part of the affected portion of the FDS memory isn't working," NASA said in a blog post Wednesday (March 13) . "Engineers can't determine with certainty what caused the issue. Two possibilities are that the chip could have been hit by an energetic particle from space or that it simply may have worn out after 46 years."

— NASA hears 'heartbeat' signal from Voyager 2 probe a week after losing contact

— Historic space photo of the week: Voyager 2 spies a storm on Saturn 42 years ago

— NASA reestablishes full contact with Voyager 2 probe after nail-biting 2-week blackout

Although it may take several months, the engineers say they can find a workaround to run the FDS without the fried chip — restoring the spacecraft's messaging output and enabling it to continue to send readable information from outside our solar system.

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Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 zipped past Saturn and Jupiter in 1979 and 1980 before flying out into interstellar space in 2012. It is now recording the conditions outside of the sun's protective magnetic field , or heliosphere, which blankets our solar system.

Voyager 1 is currently more than 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, and it takes 22.5 hours for any radio signal to travel from the craft to our planet.

Ben Turner is a U.K. based staff writer at Live Science. He covers physics and astronomy, among other topics like tech and climate change. He graduated from University College London with a degree in particle physics before training as a journalist. When he's not writing, Ben enjoys reading literature, playing the guitar and embarrassing himself with chess.

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• TorbjornLarsson Bon voyage, Voyager! Reply
• Jay McHue What if aliens are doing it to try to communicate with us? 🤪 Reply

Jay McHue said: What if aliens are doing it to try to communicate with us? 🤪

admin said: Voyager 1 has been sending a stream of garbled nonsense since November. Now NASA engineers have identified the fault and found a potential workaround. NASA engineers discover why Voyager 1 is sending a stream of gibberish from outside our solar system : Read more

sourloaf said: What does FSB mean?

Rusty Lugnuts said: Where are you seeing "FSB"? The closest thing I can see in the article is "FDS". In modern computers, FSB would most likely refer to the Fr0nt S1ide Bu5, though I have no idea if a system as old as Voyagers, let alone engineered so specifically, would have an FSB. (apparently I can't spell out "Fr0nt S1ide Bu5" or my post gets flagged as spam or inappropriate??)

• SkidWard Just cut the % of ram needed... skip the bad sectors Reply
• kloudykat FDS = fl1ght da1a sub5ystem5 Reply
• 5ft24dave This is pretty old news, like 6 months old. Are you guys just now discovering this? Reply

Commodore Browncoat said: That's about as sane a theory as many of the others that have become ridiculously popular in the past several years, so sure - why not? What reply do you think we should send?

• View All 11 Comments

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Voyager 1 facts for kids

Voyager 1 is a space probe launched by NASA on September 5, 1977, as part of the Voyager program to study the outer Solar System and interstellar space beyond the Sun's heliosphere . It was launched 16 days after its twin Voyager 2 . It communicates through the NASA Deep Space Network to receive routine commands and to transmit data to Earth. Real-time distance and velocity data is provided by NASA and JPL . At a distance of 162  AU (24  billion   km ; 15 billion  mi ) from Earth as of November 2023 [update] , it is the most distant human-made object from Earth.

The probe made flybys of Jupiter , Saturn , and Saturn's largest moon , Titan . NASA had a choice of either doing a Pluto or Titan flyby; exploration of the moon took priority because it was known to have a substantial atmosphere. Voyager 1 studied the weather, magnetic fields , and rings of the two gas giants and was the first probe to provide detailed images of their moons.

As part of the Voyager program and like its sister craft Voyager 2 , the spacecraft's extended mission is to locate and study the regions and boundaries of the outer heliosphere and to begin exploring the interstellar medium . Voyager 1 crossed the heliopause and entered interstellar space on August 25, 2012, making it the first spacecraft to do so. Two years later, Voyager 1 began experiencing a third "tsunami wave" of coronal mass ejections from the Sun that continued to at least December 15, 2014, further confirming that the probe is indeed in interstellar space.

In a further testament to the robustness of Voyager 1 , the Voyager team tested the spacecraft's trajectory correction maneuver (TCM) thrusters in late 2017 (the first time these thrusters had been fired since 1980), a project enabling the mission to be extended by two to three years. Voyager 1 ' s extended mission is expected to continue until about 2025, when its radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs) will no longer supply enough electric power to operate its scientific instruments.

Communication system

Scientific instruments, timeline of travel, launch and trajectory, flyby of jupiter, flyby of saturn, termination shock, heliosheath, interstellar medium, remaining lifespan, concerns with the orientation thrusters, golden record, mission background.

During the 1960s, a Grand Tour to study the outer planets was proposed which prompted NASA to begin work on a mission during the early 1970s. Information gathered by the Pioneer 10 spacecraft helped Voyager's engineers design Voyager to cope more effectively with the intense radiation environment around Jupiter. However, shortly before launch, strips of kitchen-grade aluminum foil were applied to certain cabling to further enhance radiation shielding.

Initially, Voyager 1 was planned as " Mariner 11 " of the Mariner program . Due to budget cuts, the mission was scaled back to be a flyby of Jupiter and Saturn and renamed the Mariner Jupiter-Saturn probes. As the program progressed, the name was later changed to Voyager, since the probe designs began to differ substantially from previous Mariner missions.

Spacecraft components

Voyager 1 was constructed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory . It has 16 hydrazine thrusters, three-axis stabilization gyroscopes, and referencing instruments to keep the probe's radio antenna pointed toward Earth. Collectively, these instruments are part of the Attitude and Articulation Control Subsystem (AACS), along with redundant units of most instruments and 8 backup thrusters. The spacecraft also included 11 scientific instruments to study celestial objects such as planets as it travels through space.

The radio communication system of Voyager 1 was designed to be used up to and beyond the limits of the Solar System . The communication system includes a 3.7-meter (12 ft) diameter high gain Cassegrain antenna to send and receive radio waves via the three Deep Space Network stations on the Earth. The craft normally transmits data to Earth over Deep Space Network Channel 18, using a frequency of either 2.3 GHz or 8.4 GHz, while signals from Earth to Voyager are transmitted at 2.1 GHz.

When Voyager 1 is unable to communicate directly with the Earth, its digital tape recorder (DTR) can record about 67 megabytes of data for transmission at a later time. As of 2023 [update] signals from Voyager 1 take over 22 hours to reach Earth.

Voyager 1 has three radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs) mounted on a boom. Each MHW-RTG contains 24 pressed plutonium-238 oxide spheres. The RTGs generated about 470 W of electric power at the time of launch, with the remainder being dissipated as waste heat. The power output of the RTGs declines over time due to the 87.7-year half-life of the fuel and degradation of the thermocouples, but the craft's RTGs will continue to support some of its operations until 2025.

Diagram of RTG fuel container, showing the plutonium-238 oxide spheres

Diagram of RTG shell, showing the power-producing silicon - germanium thermocouples

Model of an RTG unit

Unlike the other onboard instruments, the operation of the cameras for visible light is not autonomous, but rather it is controlled by an imaging parameter table contained in one of the on-board digital computers, the Flight Data Subsystem (FDS). Since the 1990s, most space probes have been equipped with completely autonomous cameras.

The computer command subsystem (CCS) controls the cameras. The CCS contains fixed computer programs, such as command decoding, fault-detection and fault-correction routines, antenna pointing routines, and spacecraft sequencing routines. This computer is an improved version of the one that was used in the 1970s Viking orbiters .

The Attitude and Articulation Control Subsystem (AACS) controls the spacecraft orientation (its attitude). It keeps the high-gain antenna pointing towards the Earth , controls attitude changes, and points the scan platform. The custom-built AACS systems on both Voyagers are the same.

• Principal investigator: Bradford Smith / University of Arizona (PDS/PRN website)
• Data: PDS/PDI data catalog, PDS/PRN data catalog
• Principal investigator: G. Tyler / Stanford University PDS/PRN overview
• Data: PDS/PPI data catalog, PDS/PRN data catalog (VG_2803), NSSDC data archive
• Principal investigator: Rudolf Hanel / NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (PDS/PRN website)
• Data: PDS/PRN data catalog, PDS/PRN expanded data catalog (VGIRIS_0001, VGIRIS_002), NSSDC Jupiter data archive
• Principal investigator: A. Broadfoot / University of Southern California (PDS/PRN website)
• Data: PDS/PRN data catalog
• Principal investigator: Norman F. Ness / NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (website)
• Data: PDS/PPI data catalog, NSSDC data archive
• Principal investigator: John Richardson / MIT (website)
• Principal investigator: Stamatios Krimigis / JHU / APL / University of Maryland (JHU/APL website / UMD website / KU website)
• Data: UMD data plotting, PDS/PPI data catalog, NSSDC data archive
• Principal investigator: Edward Stone / Caltech / NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (website)
• Principal investigator: James Warwick / University of Colorado
• Principal investigator: Arthur Lane / JPL (PDS/PRN website)
• Principal investigator: William Kurth / University of Iowa (website)
• Data: PDS/PPI data catalog

For more details on the Voyager space probes' identical instrument packages, see the separate article on the overall Voyager Program.

Voyager 1 in a space simulator chamber

Gold-Plated Record is attached to Voyager 1

Edward C. Stone, former director of NASA JPL , standing in front of a Voyager spacecraft model

Location of the scientific instruments indicated in a diagram

Mission profile

The Voyager 1 probe was launched on September 5, 1977, from Launch Complex 41 at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station , aboard a Titan IIIE launch vehicle. The Voyager 2 probe had been launched two weeks earlier, on August 20, 1977. Despite being launched later, Voyager 1 reached both Jupiter and Saturn sooner, following a shorter trajectory.

Voyager 1 ' s launch almost failed because Titan's LR-91 second stage shut down prematurely, leaving 1,200 pounds (540 kg) of propellant unburned. Recognizing the deficiency, the Centaur stage's on-board computers ordered a burn that was far longer than planned in order to compensate. Centaur extended its own burn and was able to give Voyager 1 the additional velocity it needed. At cutoff, the Centaur was only 3.4 seconds from propellant exhaustion. If the same failure had occurred during Voyager 2 ' s launch a few weeks earlier, the Centaur would have run out of propellant before the probe reached the correct trajectory. Jupiter was in a more favorable position vis-à-vis Earth during the launch of Voyager 1 than during the launch of Voyager 2 .

Voyager 1 's initial orbit had an aphelion of 8.9 AU (830 million mi), just a little short of Saturn's orbit of 9.5 AU (880 million mi). Voyager 2 ' s initial orbit had an aphelion of 6.2 AU (580 million mi), well short of Saturn's orbit.

Voyager 1 began photographing Jupiter in January 1979. Its closest approach to Jupiter was on March 5, 1979, at a distance of about 349,000 kilometers (217,000 miles) from the planet's center. Because of the greater photographic resolution allowed by a closer approach, most observations of the moons, rings, magnetic fields, and the radiation belt environment of the Jovian system were made during the 48-hour period that bracketed the closest approach. Voyager 1 finished photographing the Jovian system in April 1979.

The discovery of ongoing volcanic activity on the moon Io was probably the greatest surprise. It was the first time active volcanoes had been seen on another body in the Solar System . It appears that activity on Io affects the entire Jovian system . Io appears to be the primary source of matter that pervades the Jovian magnetosphere – the region of space that surrounds the planet influenced by the planet's strong magnetic field . Sulfur , oxygen , and sodium , apparently erupted by Io's volcanoes and sputtered off the surface by the impact of high-energy particles, were detected at the outer edge of the magnetosphere of Jupiter.

The two Voyager space probes made a number of important discoveries about Jupiter, its satellites, its radiation belts, and its never-before-seen planetary rings .

Jupiter's Great Red Spot , an anti-cyclonic storm larger than Earth, as seen from Voyager 1

View of sulfur-rich lava flows radiating from the volcano Ra Patera on Io

The eruption plume of the volcano Loki rises 160 km (100 mi) over the limb of Io

Europa 's lineated but un-cratered face, evidence of currently active geology, at a distance of 2.8 million km.

Ganymede 's tectonically disrupted surface, marked with bright impact sites, from 253,000 km.

The gravitational assist trajectories at Jupiter were successfully carried out by both Voyagers, and the two spacecraft went on to visit Saturn and its system of moons and rings. Voyager 1 encountered Saturn in November 1980, with the closest approach on November 12, 1980, when the space probe came within 124,000 kilometers (77,000 mi) of Saturn's cloud-tops. The space probe's cameras detected complex structures in the rings of Saturn , and its remote sensing instruments studied the atmospheres of Saturn and its giant moon Titan .

Voyager 1 found that about seven percent of the volume of Saturn's upper atmosphere is helium (compared with 11 percent of Jupiter's atmosphere), while almost all the rest is hydrogen . Since Saturn's internal helium abundance was expected to be the same as Jupiter's and the Sun's, the lower abundance of helium in the upper atmosphere may imply that the heavier helium may be slowly sinking through Saturn's hydrogen; that might explain the excess heat that Saturn radiates over energy it receives from the Sun. Winds blow at high speeds on Saturn. Near the equator, the Voyagers measured winds about 500 m/s (1,100 mph). The wind blows mostly in an easterly direction.

The Voyagers found aurora -like ultraviolet emissions of hydrogen at mid-latitudes in the atmosphere, and auroras at polar latitudes (above 65 degrees). The high-level auroral activity may lead to the formation of complex hydrocarbon molecules that are carried toward the equator . The mid-latitude auroras, which occur only in sunlit regions, remain a puzzle, since bombardment by electrons and ions, known to cause auroras on Earth, occurs primarily at high latitudes. Both Voyagers measured the rotation of Saturn (the length of a day) at 10 hours, 39 minutes, 24 seconds.

Voyager 1 ' s mission included a flyby of Titan, Saturn's largest moon, which had long been known to have an atmosphere. Images taken by Pioneer 11 in 1979 had indicated the atmosphere was substantial and complex, further increasing interest. The Titan flyby occurred as the spacecraft entered the system to avoid any possibility of damage closer to Saturn compromising observations, and approached to within 6,400 km (4,000 mi), passing behind Titan as seen from Earth and the Sun. Voyager's measurement of the atmosphere's effect on sunlight and Earth-based measurement of its effect on the probe's radio signal were used to determine the atmosphere's composition, density, and pressure. Titan's mass was also measured by observing its effect on the probe's trajectory. The thick haze prevented any visual observation of the surface, but the measurement of the atmosphere's composition, temperature, and pressure led to speculation that lakes of liquid hydrocarbons could exist on the surface.

Because observations of Titan were considered vital, the trajectory chosen for Voyager 1 was designed around the optimum Titan flyby, which took it below the south pole of Saturn and out of the plane of the ecliptic , ending its planetary science mission. Had Voyager 1 failed or been unable to observe Titan, Voyager 2 's trajectory would have been altered to incorporate the Titan flyby, precluding any visit to Uranus and Neptune. The trajectory Voyager 1 was launched into would not have allowed it to continue on to Uranus and Neptune, but could have been altered to avoid a Titan flyby and travel from Saturn to Pluto , arriving in 1986.

Crescent Saturn from 5.3 million km, four days after closest approach

Voyager 1 image of Saturn's narrow, twisted and braided F Ring.

Mimas at a range of 425,000 km; the crater Herschel is at upper right

Tethys , with its giant rift valley Ithaca Chasma, from 1.2 million km.

Fractured 'wispy terrain' on Dione 's trailing hemisphere.

The icy surface of Rhea is nearly saturated with impact craters .

Titan's thick haze layer is shown in this enhanced Voyager 1 image.

Layers of haze , composed of complex organic compounds, covering Saturn's satellite Titan .

Exit from the heliosphere

On February 14, 1990, Voyager 1 took the first "family portrait" of the Solar System as seen from outside, which includes the image of planet Earth known as Pale Blue Dot . Soon afterward, its cameras were deactivated to conserve energy and computer resources for other equipment. The camera software has been removed from the spacecraft, so it would now be complex to get them working again. Earth-side software and computers for reading the images are also no longer available.

On February 17, 1998, Voyager 1 reached a distance of 69 AU (6.4 billion mi; 10.3 billion km) from the Sun and overtook Pioneer 10 as the most distant spacecraft from Earth. Travelling at about 17 km/s (11 mi/s), it has the fastest heliocentric recession speed of any spacecraft.

As Voyager 1 headed for interstellar space, its instruments continued to study the Solar System. Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientists used the plasma wave experiments aboard Voyager 1 and 2 to look for the heliopause , the boundary at which the solar wind transitions into the interstellar medium . As of 2013 [update] , the probe was moving with a relative velocity to the Sun of about 61,197 kilometers per hour (38,026 mph). With the velocity the probe is currently maintaining, Voyager 1 is traveling about 523 million km (325 million mi) per year, or about one light-year per 18,000 years.

Scientists at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory believe that Voyager 1 entered the termination shock in February 2003. This marks the point where the solar wind slows to subsonic speeds. Some other scientists expressed doubt and discussed this in the journal Nature of November 6, 2003. The issue would not be resolved until other data became available, since Voyager 1 's solar-wind detector ceased functioning in 1990. This failure meant that termination shock detection would have to be inferred from the data from the other instruments on board.

In May 2005, a NASA press release said that the consensus was that Voyager 1 was then in the heliosheath. In a scientific session at the American Geophysical Union meeting in New Orleans on May 25, 2005, Ed Stone presented evidence that the craft crossed the termination shock in late 2004. This event is estimated to have occurred on December 15, 2004, at a distance of 94 AU (8,700 million mi) from the Sun.

On March 31, 2006, amateur radio operators from AMSAT in Germany tracked and received radio waves from Voyager 1 using the 20-meter (66 ft) dish at Bochum with a long integration technique. Retrieved data was checked and verified against data from the Deep Space Network station at Madrid, Spain. This seems to be the first such amateur tracking of Voyager 1 .

It was confirmed on December 13, 2010, that Voyager 1 had passed the reach of the radial outward flow of the solar wind , as measured by the Low Energy Charged Particle device. It is suspected that solar wind at this distance turns sideways because of interstellar wind pushing against the heliosphere. Since June 2010, detection of solar wind had been consistently at zero, providing conclusive evidence of the event. On this date, the spacecraft was approximately 116 AU (17.4 billion km; 10.8 billion mi) from the Sun.

Voyager 1 was commanded to change its orientation to measure the sideways motion of the solar wind at that location in space in March 2011 (~33yr 6mo from launch). A test roll done in February had confirmed the spacecraft's ability to maneuver and reorient itself. The course of the spacecraft was not changed. It rotated 70 degrees counterclockwise with respect to Earth to detect the solar wind. This was the first time the spacecraft had done any major maneuvering since the Family Portrait photograph of the planets was taken in 1990. After the first roll the spacecraft had no problem in reorienting itself with Alpha Centauri , Voyager 1 's guide star, and it resumed sending transmissions back to Earth. Voyager 1 was expected to enter interstellar space "at any time". Voyager 2 was still detecting outward flow of solar wind at that point but it was estimated that in the following months or years it would experience the same conditions as Voyager 1 .

The spacecraft was reported at 12.44° declination and 17.163 hours right ascension, and at an ecliptic latitude of 34.9° (the ecliptic latitude changes very slowly), placing it in the constellation Ophiuchus as observed from the Earth on May 21, 2011.

On December 1, 2011, it was announced that Voyager 1 had detected the first Lyman-alpha radiation originating from the Milky Way galaxy. Lyman-alpha radiation had previously been detected from other galaxies, but because of interference from the Sun, the radiation from the Milky Way was not detectable.

NASA announced on December 5, 2011, that Voyager 1 had entered a new region referred to as a "cosmic purgatory". Within this stagnation region, charged particles streaming from the Sun slow and turn inward, and the Solar System's magnetic field is doubled in strength as interstellar space appears to be applying pressure. Energetic particles originating in the Solar System decline by nearly half, while the detection of high-energy electrons from outside increases 100-fold. The inner edge of the stagnation region is located approximately 113 AU from the Sun.

NASA announced in June 2012 that the probe was detecting changes in the environment that were suspected to correlate with arrival at the heliopause . Voyager 1 had reported a marked increase in its detection of charged particles from interstellar space, which are normally deflected by the solar winds within the heliosphere from the Sun. The craft thus began to enter the interstellar medium at the edge of the Solar System.

Voyager 1 became the first spacecraft to cross the heliopause in August 2012, then at a distance of 121 AU (1.12 × 10 10  mi; 1.81 × 10 10  km) from the Sun, although this was not confirmed for another year.

As of September 2012, sunlight took 16.89 hours to get to Voyager 1 which was at a distance of 121 AU. The apparent magnitude of the Sun from the spacecraft was -16.3 (about 30 times brighter than the full Moon). The spacecraft was traveling at 17.043 km/s (10.590 mi/s) relative to the Sun. At this rate, it would need about 17,565 years at this speed to travel a single light-year . To compare, Proxima Centauri , the closest star to the Sun, is about 4.2 light-years ( 2.65 × 10 5  AU ) distant. If the spacecraft was traveling in the direction of that star, it would take 73,775 years to reach it. ( Voyager 1 is heading in the direction of the constellation Ophiuchus .)

In late 2012, researchers reported that particle data from the spacecraft suggested that the probe had passed through the heliopause. Measurements from the spacecraft revealed a steady rise since May in collisions with high energy particles (above 70 MeV), which are thought to be cosmic rays emanating from supernova explosions far beyond the Solar System , with a sharp increase in these collisions in late August. At the same time, in late August, there was a dramatic drop in collisions with low-energy particles, which are thought to originate from the Sun.

Ed Roelof, space scientist at Johns Hopkins University and principal investigator for the Low-Energy Charged Particle instrument on the spacecraft, declared that "most scientists involved with Voyager 1 would agree that [these two criteria] have been sufficiently satisfied". However, the last criterion for officially declaring that Voyager 1 had crossed the boundary, the expected change in magnetic field direction (from that of the Sun to that of the interstellar field beyond), had not been observed (the field had changed direction by only 2 degrees), which suggested to some that the nature of the edge of the heliosphere had been misjudged.

On December 3, 2012, Voyager project scientist Ed Stone of the California Institute of Technology said, "Voyager has discovered a new region of the heliosphere that we had not realized was there. We're still inside, apparently. But the magnetic field now is connected to the outside. So it's like a highway letting particles in and out." The magnetic field in this region was 10 times more intense than Voyager 1 encountered before the termination shock. It was expected to be the last barrier before the spacecraft exited the Solar System completely and entered interstellar space.

In March 2013, it was announced that Voyager 1 might have become the first spacecraft to enter interstellar space, having detected a marked change in the plasma environment on August 25, 2012. However, until September 12, 2013, it was still an open question as to whether the new region was interstellar space or an unknown region of the Solar System. At that time, the former alternative was officially confirmed.

In 2013 Voyager 1 was exiting the Solar System at a speed of about 3.6 AU (330 million mi; 540 million km) per year, while Voyager 2 is going slower, leaving the Solar System at 3.3 AU (310 million mi; 490 million km) per year. Each year, Voyager 1 increases its lead over Voyager 2 .

Voyager 1 reached a distance of 135 AU (12.5 billion mi; 20.2 billion km) from the Sun on May 18, 2016. On September 5, 2017, that had increased to about 139.64 AU (12.980 billion mi; 20.890 billion km) from the Sun, or just over 19 light-hours; at that time, Voyager 2 was 115.32 AU (10.720 billion mi; 17.252 billion km) from the Sun.

Its progress can be monitored at NASA's website (see § External links ).

Plot showing a dramatic increase in the rate of cosmic ray particle detection by the Voyager 1 spacecraft (October 2011 through October 2012)

Plot showing a dramatic decrease in the rate of solar wind particle detection by Voyager 1 (October 2011 through October 2012)

On September 12, 2013, NASA officially confirmed that Voyager 1 had reached the interstellar medium in August 2012 as previously observed. The generally accepted date of arrival is August 25, 2012 (approximately 10 days before the 35th anniversary of its launch), the date durable changes in the density of energetic particles were first detected. By this point, most space scientists had abandoned the hypothesis that a change in magnetic field direction must accompany a crossing of the heliopause; a new model of the heliopause predicted that no such change would be found.

A key finding that persuaded many scientists that the heliopause had been crossed was an indirect measurement of an 80-fold increase in electron density, based on the frequency of plasma oscillations observed beginning on April 9, 2013, triggered by a solar outburst that had occurred in March 2012 (electron density is expected to be two orders of magnitude higher outside the heliopause than within). Weaker sets of oscillations measured in October and November 2012 provided additional data. An indirect measurement was required because Voyager 1 's plasma spectrometer had stopped working in 1980. In September 2013, NASA released recordings of audio transductions of these plasma waves, the first to be measured in interstellar space.

While Voyager 1 is commonly spoken of as having left the Solar System simultaneously with having left the heliosphere, the two are not the same. The Solar System is usually defined as the vastly larger region of space populated by bodies that orbit the Sun. The craft is presently less than one-seventh the distance to the aphelion of Sedna , and it has not yet entered the Oort cloud , the source region of long-period comets, regarded by astronomers as the outermost zone of the Solar System.

In October 2020, astronomers reported a significant unexpected increase in density in the space beyond the Solar System as detected by the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 space probes . According to the researchers, this implies that "the density gradient is a large-scale feature of the VLISM (very local interstellar medium ) in the general direction of the heliospheric nose ".

In May 2021, NASA reported on the continuous measurement, for the first time, of the density of material in interstellar space and, as well, the detection of interstellar sounds for the first time.

In May 2022, NASA reported that Voyager 1 had begun transmitting "mysterious" and "peculiar" telemetric data to the Deep Space Network (DSN). It confirmed that the operational status of the craft remained unchanged, but that the issue stemmed from the Attitude Articulation and Control System (AACS). NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) published a statement on May 18, 2022, that the AACS was functional but sending invalid data. The problem was eventually traced to the AACS sending its telemetry through a computer that had been non-operational for years, resulting in data corruption. In August 2022, NASA transmitted a command to the AACS to utilize another computer, which resolved the problem. An investigation into what caused the initial switch is underway, though engineers have hypothesized that the AACS had executed a bad command from another onboard computer.

Future of the probe

In December 2017, NASA successfully fired all four of Voyager 1 ' s trajectory correction maneuver (TCM) thrusters for the first time since 1980. The TCM thrusters were used in the place of a degraded set of jets to help keep the probe's antenna pointed towards the Earth. Use of the TCM thrusters allowed Voyager 1 to continue to transmit data to NASA for two to three more years.

Due to the diminishing electrical power available, the Voyager team has had to prioritize which instruments to keep on and which to turn off. Heaters and other spacecraft systems have been turned off one by one as part of power management. The fields and particles instruments that are the most likely to send back key data about the heliosphere and interstellar space have been prioritized to keep operating. Engineers expect the spacecraft to continue operating at least one science instrument until around 2025.

Some thrusters needed to control the attitude of the spacecraft and point its high-gain antenna in the direction of Earth are out of use due to clogging problems in their hydrazine lines. The spacecraft no longer has a backup available for its thruster system and "everything onboard is single-string," according to Suzanne Dodd, Voyager project manager at JPL , in an interview with Ars Technica. NASA has accordingly decided to modify the spacecraft's computer software in order to reduce the rate at which the hydrazine lines clog. NASA will first deploy the modified software on Voyager 2 , which is less distant from Earth, before deploying it on Voyager 1.

Simulated view of Voyager 1 relative to the Solar System on August 2, 2018.

Simulated view of the Voyager probes relative to the Solar System and heliopause on August 2, 2018.

In about 50,000 years Voyager 1 will be as distant as several nearby stars

Provided Voyager 1 does not collide with anything and is not retrieved, the New Horizons space probe will never pass it, despite being launched from Earth at a higher speed than either Voyager spacecraft. The Voyager spacecraft benefited from multiple planetary flybys to increase its heliocentric velocities, whereas New Horizons received only a single such boost, from its Jupiter flyby. As of 2018 [update] , New Horizons is traveling at about 14 km/s (8.7 mi/s), 3 km/s (1.9 mi/s) slower than Voyager 1 and is still slowing down.

Voyager 1 is expected to reach the theorized Oort cloud in about 300 years and take about 30,000 years to pass through it. Though it is not heading towards any particular star, in about 40,000 years , it will pass within 1.6 light-years (0.49 parsecs ) of the star Gliese 445, which is at present in the constellation Camelopardalis and 17.1 light-years from Earth. That star is generally moving towards the Solar System at about 119 km/s (430,000 km/h; 270,000 mph). NASA says that "The Voyagers are destined—perhaps eternally—to wander the Milky Way." In 300,000 years, it will pass within less than 1 light year of the M3V star TYC 3135-52-1.

Each Voyager space probe carries a gold-plated audio-visual disc , should the spacecraft ever be found by intelligent life forms from other planetary systems. The disc carries photos of the Earth and its lifeforms, a range of scientific information, spoken greetings from people such as the Secretary-General of the United Nations and the President of the United States and a medley, "Sounds of Earth", that includes the sounds of whales, a baby crying, waves breaking on a shore, and a collection of music including works by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart , Blind Willie Johnson , Chuck Berry and Valya Balkanska . Other Eastern and Western classics are included, as well as various performances of indigenous music from around the world. The record also contains greetings in 55 different languages.

• The Farthest , a 2017 documentary on the Voyager program
• Interstellar probe
• List of artificial objects leaving the Solar System
• List of missions to the outer planets
• Local Interstellar Cloud
• Space exploration
• Specific orbital energy of Voyager 1
• Timeline of artificial satellites and space probes
• This page was last modified on 14 December 2023, at 10:43. Suggest an edit .

9 Mind-Blowing Facts About Voyager 1

A spacecraft launched in the 1970s, Voyager 1 is still traveling and sending back data today, well beyond the scope of its initial, relatively simplistic mission. Keep reading to find out more about where Voyager 1 is today, what it's teaching us about the universe, and where it's headed in the future:

1. Voyager 1 Has Been Traveling for 35 Years

Launched in 1977, September 5 will mark the 36th anniversary of Voyager 1's launch. That makes it one of the oldest pieces of space technology that is still in contact with Earth.

2. V1 Has Traversed Over 11 BILLION Miles

To put this number in perspective, 11 billion miles is the equivalent of circling the Earth 440,000 times. And yet, in terms of light-years, the unit to measure space that is marked by how far light can travel in a year, V1 hasn't even left the neighborhood. It will take 40,000 years for V1 to reach only two light-years distance from the sun. As large as 11 billion is, space is infinitely bigger.

3. V1 is Traveling At 39,000 mph

This speed makes it the fastest space technology we have right now. Even spacecraft that have been launched years later with better technology are slower than V1. How does that work? During its initial years, when V1 was investigating planets, scientists used the large gravitational fields of the planets to help propel V1 even faster — and it's been going steady ever since.

4. It Was Originally Only Supposed to Survey Jupiter

The original intention of V1 and its sister ship Voyager 2 was to investigate Jupiter and Saturn up-close for the first time during a specific time frame when the planets were close together. The mission was a huge success, allowing scientists to learn the makeup of the planets and giving the rest of us gorgeous photos to admire. From there, V1 was launched to study some of the moons up-close, another successful mission that scientists viewed as a bonus. Nobody could have predicted that V1 would still be just as useful and performing missions decades later, but V1 is the gift that keeps on giving.

5. It's Powered By Plutonium

Though V1's longevity could not have been predicted, scientists did plan for it. When building the spacecraft, they used long-lasting plutonium batteries for fuel, and those batteries are still going strong today. While traveling, V1 has turned off everything but its essential functions, and at this rate, the batteries should last throughout the 2020s. Who knows what discoveries V1 might make in that time!

6. v1 Can Communicate Through Radio Waves No Matter How Far It Goes

Its satellites were only supposed to last five years, but NASA is maintaining contact with V1 through the use of radio waves, a system that should be viable well beyond the stretches of our solar system. The only real problem is that it takes 16 hours for the radio waves to reach Earth, a number that is continuously increasing as V1 gets farther and farther away.

7. No One is Quite Sure Of Where Exactly It is Right Now

V1's current mission is to explore interstellar space, which requires exiting the solar system. In the meantime, scientists are also taking the opportunity to study the edges of our solar system, which have never been seen so closely. However, while everyone agrees is that V1 is definitely near the edge of our solar system, NASA maintains that it has yet to cross the boundary into interstellar space while several other prominent scientists are arguing that it has already crossed over months or even years ago. This debate is the hot-button topic in the world of astrophysics today.

8. It Carries a Message to Alien Life

V1 carries an audio-visual recording in the form of a gold-plated record that is meant to be both a message to intelligent life and a symbolic time capsule. The record has greetings in over 55 languages, pictures of Earth's life forms, various scientific knowledge, and recordings of pieces of music and earth sounds, like the sound of waves crashing on the shore.

9. It Will Outlive Earth

Eons after humans have gone extinct and well after the sun expands to swallow Earth entirely, V1 will still be traversing the universe, silently charting entirely unknown territories.

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

The first spacecraft to explore beyond the solar system started spouting gibberish late last year. Now, NASA knows why.

NASA engineers have discovered the cause of a communications breakdown between Earth and the interstellar explorer Voyager 1. It would appear that a small portion of corrupted memory exists in one of the spacecraft's computers. 

The glitch caused Voyager 1 to send unreadable data back to Earth, and is found in the NASA spacecraft's flight data subsystem (FDS). That's the system responsible for packaging the probe's science and engineering data before the telemetry modulation unit (TMU) and radio transmitter send it back to mission control. 

The source of the issue began to reveal itself when Voyager 1 operators sent the spacecraft a "poke" on March 3, 2024. This was intended to prompt FDS to send a full memory readout back to Earth.

The readout confirmed to the NASA team that about 3% of the FDS memory had been corrupted, and that this was preventing the computer from carrying out its normal operations.

Related: NASA finds clue while solving Voyager 1's communication breakdown case

Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 became the first human-made object to leave the solar system and enter interstellar space in 2012. Voyager 2 followed its spacecraft sibling out of the solar system in 2018, and is still operational and communicating well with  Earth.

After 11 years of interstellar exploration, in Nov. 2023, Voyager 1's binary code — the computer language it uses to communicate with Earth — stopped making sense. Its 0's and 1's didn't mean anything anymore.

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"Effectively, the call between the spacecraft and the Earth was still connected, but Voyager's 'voice' was replaced with a monotonous dial tone," Voyager 1's engineering team previously  told Space.com .

The team strongly suspects this glitch is the result of a single chip that's responsible for storing part of the affected portion of the FDS memory ceasing to work.

Currently, however, NASA can’t say for sure what exactly caused that particular issue. The chip could have been struck by a high-speed energetic particle from space or, after 46 years serving Voyager 1, it may simply have worn out.

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Voyager 1 currently sits around 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, which means it takes 22.5 hours to receive a radio signal from it — and another 22.5 hours for the spacecraft to receive a response via the Deep Space Network's antennas. Solving this communication issue is thus no mean feat.

Yet, NASA scientists and engineers are optimistic they can find a way to help FDS operate normally, even without the unusable memory hardware.

Solving this issue could take weeks or even months, according to NASA — but if it is resolved, Voyager 1 should be able to resume returning science data about what lies outside 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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• jcs Funny timing for this article, when I am streaming an old Star Trek movie. So, surely this didn't cause a 3 byte glitch removing the O, Y and A from Voyager's name buffer? Get it? Reply
• bwana4swahili It is quite amazing it has lasted this long in a space environment. Reply

bwana4swahili said: It is quite amazing it has lasted this long in a space environment.

• HankySpanky So now we know even better for next time. Perhaps a spare chipset that is not redundant but is ready to take over, stored in a protective environment. A task NASA can handle. We'll find out in 100 year or so - if humanity still exists. Reply

HankySpanky said: So now we know even better for next time. Perhaps a spare chipset that is not redundant but is ready to take over, stored in a protective environment. A task NASA can handle. We'll find out in 100 year or so - if humanity still exists.

• Classical Motion I'm afraid it might self repair. And download galactic knowledge, then decide we are a danger. And turn around. Reply

Classical Motion said: I'm afraid it might self repair. And download galactic knowledge, then decide we are a danger. And turn around.

• jcs ROFLOL! And a hot bald chick delivering the bad news! Reply
• View All 8 Comments

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Engineers Pinpoint Cause of Voyager 1 Issue, Are Working on Solution

Engineers have confirmed that a small portion of corrupted memory in one of the computers aboard NASA’s Voyager 1 has been causing the spacecraft to send unreadable science and engineering data to Earth since last November. Called the flight data subsystem (FDS), the computer is responsible for packaging the probe’s science and engineering data before the telemetry modulation unit (TMU) and radio transmitter send the data to Earth.

In early March , the team issued a “poke” command to prompt the spacecraft to send back a readout of the FDS memory, which includes the computer’s software code as well as variables (values used in the code that can change based on commands or the spacecraft’s status). Using the readout, the team has confirmed that about 3% of the FDS memory has been corrupted, preventing the computer from carrying out normal operations.

The team suspects that a single chip responsible for storing part of the affected portion of the FDS memory isn’t working. Engineers can’t determine with certainty what caused the issue. Two possibilities are that the chip could have been hit by an energetic particle from space or that it simply may have worn out after 46 years.

Although it may take weeks or months, engineers are optimistic they can find a way for the FDS to operate normally without the unusable memory hardware, which would enable Voyager 1 to begin returning science and engineering data again.

Launched in 1977 , the twin Voyager spacecraft flew by Saturn and Jupiter, and Voyager 2 flew by Uranus and Neptune. They are both exploring interstellar space, outside the bubble of particles and magnetic fields created by the Sun, called the heliosphere. Voyager 2 continues to operate normally.

News Media Contact Calla Cofield Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. 626-808-2469 [email protected]

NASA's Voyager 1 probe has been glitching for months and we finally know why

An artist’s concept of the Voyager 1 spacecraft in interstellar space.

After months of sending unusable data to mission control, there’s finally hope for the Voyager 1 spacecraft. NASA engineers pinpointed the cause behind the mission’s odd anomaly, and think they can help the interstellar probe make sense again.

Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory believe the Voyager 1 spacecraft has been sending nonsensical data due to corrupted memory hardware in the spacecraft’s flight data system (FDS). “The team suspects that a single chip responsible for storing part of the affected portion of the FDS memory isn’t working,” NASA wrote in an update.

FDS collects data from Voyager’s science instruments, as well as engineering data about the health of the spacecraft, and combines them into a single package that’s transmitted to Earth through one of the probe’s subsystems, the telemetry modulation unit (TMU), in binary code.

FDS and TMU have been having trouble communicating with one another. As a result, TMU has been sending data to mission control in a repeating pattern of ones and zeroes. NASA’s engineers aren’t quite sure what corrupted the FDS memory hardware; they think that either the chip was hit by an energetic particle from space or that it’s just worn out after operating for 46 years.

Voyager 1 launched in 1977, less than a month after its twin probe, Voyager 2, began its own journey to space. The probe ventured into interstellar space in August 2012, becoming the first spacecraft to leave the heliosphere.

The problem first began in May 2022, when the probe suddenly started sending nonsensical attitude articulation and control (AACS) data . Engineers resolved the issue by sending the telemetry data through one of the spacecraft’s other computers. In December 2023, Voyager 1 started speaking gibberish again .

On March 1, the team sent a “poke” to the spacecraft’s data system, a command that gently prompts FDS to try different sequences in its software package in an effort to pinpoint the corrupted section. Two days later, Voyager 1 sent a signal that contained a readout of the entire FDS memory , which helped the team pinpoint the source of the glitch by comparing this memory readout with a previous one to look for discrepancies in the code.

“Using the readout, the team has confirmed that about 3% of the FDS memory has been corrupted, preventing the computer from carrying out normal operations,” NASA wrote in its update.

The engineers are hoping to resolve the issue by finding a way for FDS to operate normally without the corrupted memory hardware, enabling Voyager 1 to begin transmitting data about the cosmos and continue its journey through deep space.

A version of this article originally appeared on Gizmodo .

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