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Voyager in different languages

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What Is on Voyager’s Golden Record?

From a whale song to a kiss, the time capsule sent into space in 1977 had some interesting contents

Megan Gambino

Senior Editor

“I thought it was a brilliant idea from the beginning,” says Timothy Ferris. Produce a phonograph record containing the sounds and images of humankind and fling it out into the solar system.

By the 1970s, astronomers Carl Sagan and Frank Drake already had some experience with sending messages out into space. They had created two gold-anodized aluminum plaques that were affixed to the Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 spacecraft. Linda Salzman Sagan, an artist and Carl’s wife, etched an illustration onto them of a nude man and woman with an indication of the time and location of our civilization.

The “Golden Record” would be an upgrade to Pioneer’s plaques. Mounted on Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, twin probes launched in 1977, the two copies of the record would serve as time capsules and transmit much more information about life on Earth should extraterrestrials find it.

NASA approved the idea. So then it became a question of what should be on the record. What are humanity’s greatest hits? Curating the record’s contents was a gargantuan task, and one that fell to a team including the Sagans, Drake, author Ann Druyan, artist Jon Lomberg and Ferris, an esteemed science writer who was a friend of Sagan’s and a contributing editor to Rolling Stone .

The exercise, says Ferris, involved a considerable number of presuppositions about what aliens want to know about us and how they might interpret our selections. “I found myself increasingly playing the role of extraterrestrial,” recounts Lomberg in Murmurs of Earth , a 1978 book on the making of the record. When considering photographs to include, the panel was careful to try to eliminate those that could be misconstrued. Though war is a reality of human existence, images of it might send an aggressive message when the record was intended as a friendly gesture. The team veered from politics and religion in its efforts to be as inclusive as possible given a limited amount of space.

Over the course of ten months, a solid outline emerged. The Golden Record consists of 115 analog-encoded photographs, greetings in 55 languages, a 12-minute montage of sounds on Earth and 90 minutes of music. As producer of the record, Ferris was involved in each of its sections in some way. But his largest role was in selecting the musical tracks. “There are a thousand worthy pieces of music in the world for every one that is on the record,” says Ferris. I imagine the same could be said for the photographs and snippets of sounds.

The following is a selection of items on the record:

Silhouette of a Male and a Pregnant Female

The team felt it was important to convey information about human anatomy and culled diagrams from the 1978 edition of The World Book Encyclopedia. To explain reproduction, NASA approved a drawing of the human sex organs and images chronicling conception to birth. Photographer Wayne F. Miller’s famous photograph of his son’s birth, featured in Edward Steichen’s 1955 “Family of Man” exhibition, was used to depict childbirth. But as Lomberg notes in Murmurs of Earth , NASA vetoed a nude photograph of “a man and a pregnant woman quite unerotically holding hands.” The Golden Record experts and NASA struck a compromise that was less compromising— silhouettes of the two figures and the fetus positioned within the woman’s womb.

DNA Structure

At the risk of providing extraterrestrials, whose genetic material might well also be stored in DNA, with information they already knew, the experts mapped out DNA’s complex structure in a series of illustrations.

Demonstration of Eating, Licking and Drinking

When producers had trouble locating a specific image in picture libraries maintained by the National Geographic Society, the United Nations, NASA and Sports Illustrated , they composed their own. To show a mouth’s functions, for instance, they staged an odd but informative photograph of a woman licking an ice-cream cone, a man taking a bite out of a sandwich and a man drinking water cascading from a jug.

Olympic Sprinters

Images were selected for the record based not on aesthetics but on the amount of information they conveyed and the clarity with which they did so. It might seem strange, given the constraints on space, that a photograph of Olympic sprinters racing on a track made the cut. But the photograph shows various races of humans, the musculature of the human leg and a form of both competition and entertainment.

Photographs of huts, houses and cityscapes give an overview of the types of buildings seen on Earth. The Taj Mahal was chosen as an example of the more impressive architecture. The majestic mausoleum prevailed over cathedrals, Mayan pyramids and other structures in part because Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan built it in honor of his late wife, Mumtaz Mahal, and not a god.

Golden Gate Bridge

Three-quarters of the record was devoted to music, so visual art was less of a priority. A couple of photographs by the legendary landscape photographer Ansel Adams were selected, however, for the details captured within their frames. One, of the Golden Gate Bridge from nearby Baker Beach, was thought to clearly show how a suspension bridge connected two pieces of land separated by water. The hum of an automobile was included in the record’s sound montage, but the producers were not able to overlay the sounds and images.

A Page from a Book

An excerpt from a book would give extraterrestrials a glimpse of our written language, but deciding on a book and then a single page within that book was a massive task. For inspiration, Lomberg perused rare books, including a first-folio Shakespeare, an elaborate edition of Chaucer from the Renaissance and a centuries-old copy of Euclid’s  Elements  (on geometry), at the Cornell University Library. Ultimately, he took MIT astrophysicist Philip Morrison’s suggestion: a  page  from Sir Isaac Newton’s  System of the World , where the means of launching an object into orbit is described for the very first time.

Greeting from Nick Sagan

To keep with the spirit of the project, says Ferris, the wordings of the 55 greetings were left up to the speakers of the languages. In  Burmese , the message was a simple, “Are you well?” In  Indonesian , it was, “Good night ladies and gentlemen. Goodbye and see you next time.” A woman speaking the Chinese dialect of  Amoy  uttered a welcoming, “Friends of space, how are you all? Have you eaten yet? Come visit us if you have time.” It is interesting to note that the final greeting, in  English , came from then-6-year-old Nick Sagan, son of Carl and Linda Salzman Sagan. He said, “Hello from the children of planet Earth.”

Whale Greeting

Biologist Roger Payne provided a whale song (“the most beautiful whale greeting,” he said, and “the one that should last forever”) captured with hydrophones off the coast of Bermuda in 1970. Thinking that perhaps the whale song might make more sense to aliens than to humans, Ferris wanted to include more than a slice and so mixed some of the song behind the greetings in different languages. “That strikes some people as hilarious, but from a bandwidth standpoint, it worked quite well,” says Ferris. “It doesn’t interfere with the greetings, and if you are interested in the whale song, you can extract it.”

Reportedly, the trickiest sound to record was a  kiss . Some were too quiet, others too loud, and at least one was too disingenuous for the team’s liking. Music producer Jimmy Iovine kissed his arm. In the end, the kiss that landed on the record was actually one that Ferris planted on Ann Druyan’s cheek.

Druyan had the idea to record a person’s brain waves, so that should extraterrestrials millions of years into the future have the technology, they could decode the individual’s thoughts. She was the guinea pig. In an hour-long session hooked to an EEG at New York University Medical Center, Druyan meditated on a series of prepared thoughts. In  Murmurs of Earth , she admits that “a couple of irrepressible facts of my own life” slipped in. She and Carl Sagan had gotten engaged just days before, so a love story may very well be documented in her neurological signs. Compressed into a minute-long segment, the  brain waves  sound, writes Druyan, like a “string of exploding firecrackers.”

Georgian Chorus—“Tchakrulo”

The team discovered a beautiful recording of “Tchakrulo” by Radio Moscow and wanted to include it, particularly since Georgians are often credited with introducing polyphony, or music with two or more independent melodies, to the Western world. But before the team members signed off on the tune, they had the lyrics translated. “It was an old song, and for all we knew could have celebrated bear-baiting,” wrote Ferris in  Murmurs of Earth . Sandro Baratheli, a Georgian speaker from Queens, came to the rescue. The word “tchakrulo” can mean either “bound up” or “hard” and “tough,” and the song’s narrative is about a peasant protest against a landowner.

Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode”

According to Ferris, Carl Sagan had to warm up to the idea of including Chuck Berry’s 1958 hit “Johnny B. Goode” on the record, but once he did, he defended it against others’ objections. Folklorist Alan Lomax was against it, arguing that rock music was adolescent. “And Carl’s brilliant response was, ‘There are a lot of adolescents on the planet,’” recalls Ferris.

On April 22, 1978,  Saturday Night Live  spoofed the Golden Record in a  skit  called “Next Week in Review.” Host Steve Martin played a psychic named Cocuwa, who predicted that  Time  magazine would reveal, on the following week’s cover, a four-word message from aliens. He held up a mock cover, which read, “Send More Chuck Berry.”

More than four decades later, Ferris has no regrets about what the team did or did not include on the record. “It means a lot to have had your hand in something that is going to last a billion years,” he says. “I recommend it to everybody. It is a healthy way of looking at the world.”

According to the writer, NASA approached him about producing another record but he declined. “I think we did a good job once, and it is better to let someone else take a shot,” he says.

So, what would you put on a record if one were being sent into space today?

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Megan Gambino | | READ MORE

Megan Gambino is a senior web editor for Smithsonian magazine.

11 Pieces of Media on the Voyager Golden Record

By michele debczak | apr 11, 2021.

At this moment, two gold-plated copper records are hurtling through space, speeding beyond our solar system. The Voyager 1 and 2 probes launched in 1977 , and they’ve since traveled billions of miles from Earth. They are currently the loneliest human-made objects in the universe—and they may stay that way forever—but they were built to make a connection.

The purpose of NASA ’s Voyager mission is to illustrate life on Earth to any intelligent aliens that come across the spacecraft. The records on board contain media selected by a committee chaired by scientist Carl Sagan. If extraterrestrials can use the instructions engraved on the disc's cover to access its contents, they’ll be exposed to animal noises, classical music, and photographs of people from around the world. Here are some pieces of media that were chosen to represent our planet.

1. Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony

Ludwig van Beethoven is one of many classical artists representing the music of Earth on the Voyager record. In addition to his Fifth Symphony , the composer’s String Quartet No. 13, Opus 130, is also included on the track list.

2. Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode”

Though there are many musical compositions on the Voyager Golden Record , the inclusion of “Johnny B. Goode” stirred controversy. Critics claimed rock n’ roll was too adolescent for a project of such significance. Carl Sagan responded by saying, “There are a lot of adolescents on the planet.”

3. A Mandarin Greeting and Invitation

The Voyager project recorded UN delegates from around the world saying greetings in 54 different languages. Most are straightforward, but the Mandarin message includes an invitation. Translated to English, it says: "Hope everyone's well. We are thinking about you all. Please come here to visit when you have time."

4. Humpback Whale Songs

The greetings section of the record features one language that doesn’t belong to humans. Interspersed between the spoken audio clips are the sounds of singing humpback whales . There’s a reason whales were included with the greetings rather than the other animal noises on the record—it was the committee’s way of acknowledging that humans aren’t the only intelligent life on Earth.

5. The UN Building

The Voyager committee chose the UN Building to represent modern urban architecture. The record includes two images of the New York City skyscraper, both taken at the same angle. One depicts the structure during the day and the other shows it at night .

6. A Traffic Jam

The Voyager record highlights many technological marvels from the time it was made, including a rocket and an airplane. The photo of a traffic jam in Thailand that was included may seem less impressive, but it accurately depicts how we use cars on our planet.

7. A Bulgarian Folk Song

The Voyager committee wanted the record's music to represent a wide range of eras and cultures. One track, titled "Izlel je Delyo Hagdutin," is a traditional folk song from Bulgaria . Sung by Valya Balkanska, it’s about a famous rebel leader from the country’s history. Folk music from Azerbaijan, Georgia, and the Navajo people also made it onto the compilation.

8. Ann Druyan’s Brainwaves

While working on the Voyager committee, Ann Druyan had the idea to record her brainwaves, turn them into audio, and copy them onto the record. She spent an hour hooked up to electrical impulse-measuring systems while thinking various thoughts, including what it’s like to fall in love. She and Sagan—her collaborator on the Voyager record project—had recently gotten engaged.

9. A Map of the Solar System

The Voyager mission is designed to travel far, but it will always hold evidence of where it came from. One of the images on the record shows a picture of our solar system with a map illustrating Earth’s location.

10. People Eating

Some human behaviors are tricky to capture in one image. To show the different ways people consume food and drink, the Voyager committee included a photo of someone licking ice cream, someone else biting into a sandwich, and a third person pouring water into their mouth.

11. A Morse Code Message

Another type of communication represented on the Voyager record is Morse code . The message translates to the Latin saying ad astra per aspera , or “to the stars through hard work.”

Explore the World: How to Use the French Verb “Voyager”

Introduction: Voyager, meaning “to travel,” is a popular and essential verb in the French language. Whether you are planning a vacation, discussing past adventures, or dreaming of future journeys, knowing how to use the verb “voyager” will greatly enhance your French language skills. In this blog post, we will explore different ways to use “voyager” in various contexts, providing you with the necessary tools to talk about your travel experiences with confidence.

• Je voyage en Europe. (I am traveling in Europe.)
• Ils voyagent en Asie. (They are traveling in Asia.)
• Je vais voyager en Afrique. (I am going to travel to Africa.)
• Elle va voyager en Amérique du Sud. (She is going to travel to South America.)
• J’ai voyagé en Italie l’année dernière. (I traveled to Italy last year.)
• Nous avions voyagé en Chine il y a dix ans. (We traveled to China ten years ago.)
• Je voyage en avion. (I travel by plane.)
• Ils voyagent en train. (They travel by train.)
• Elle voyage en voiture. (She travels by car.)
• C’était incroyable de voyager en Inde. (It was incredible to travel to India.)
• Je suis enchanté(e) d’avoir voyagé autant. (I am delighted to have traveled so much.)
• Nous sommes fatigués de voyager toute la journée. (We are tired from traveling all day.)

Conclusion: Mastering the verb “voyager” is crucial for any aspiring French traveler or conversation enthusiast. Whether you’re discussing current trips, sharing future plans, or reminiscing about past adventures, understanding how to use “voyager” in different contexts will greatly enhance your ability to communicate effectively in French. So, bon voyage and enjoy exploring the world with the power of the verb “voyager”!

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Conjugate the French Verb "Voyager"

• Pronunciation & Conversation
• Resources For Teachers

In French, the verb  voyager  means "to travel." This is easy to remember if you associate traveling with a voyage. When you want to say things such as "I traveled" or "we are traveling" in French, the verb needs to be conjugated . A short lesson will introduce you to the most basic conjugations of  voyager .

The Basic Conjugations of  Voyager

Some French verb conjugations are easier than others and voyager falls in the middle. It follows the rules of all verbs that end in - ger and is classified as a spelling change verb .

As you study these conjugations, you'll notice that the  e  after the  g  is retained in many places where it would be dropped in others, such as the regular - er  verbs . This is because the  e  is vital to retaining the soft  g  sound when the infinitive ending begins with an  a  or  o . Without that  e , the  g  would sound like it does in the word gold and that is not a proper pronunciation.

Other than that small change in some of the forms, you'll find that conjugating  voyager  is rather standard. Begin by committing the basic present, future, and imperfect past tenses to memory as these will be the most useful forms you'll need.

Using the chart, pair the subject pronoun with the appropriate tense for your subject. For instance, "I am traveling" is  je voyage  and "we will travel" is  nous voyagerons .

The Present Participle of Voyager

Once again, the  e  remains attached to the verb stem when forming voyager 's present participle . The ending - ant  is added to create the word  voyageant.

Voyager  in the Compound Past Tense

You also have the option of using the French compound past tense, known as the  passé composé . It can be easier than memorizing all those imperfect forms, though you will need the  auxiliary verb   avoir  and the  past participle   voyagé .

For this construction, you only need to conjugate  avoir  in the present tense to fit the subject pronoun. The past participle remains the same no matter the subject and implies that the action happened in the past. For example, "I traveled" is  j'ai voyagé  and "we traveled" is nous avons voyagé .

More Simple Conjugations of Voyager

While the conjugations above should be every French student's first priority, there are a few more simple conjugations you might need as well. For example, when you want to imply that the action of traveling is uncertain, use the subjunctive . If, however, someone's travels are dependent on something else, you'll use the conditional .

There may also be times when you encounter the passé simple  or the imperfect subjunctive . These are most often found in more formal French but are good to know.

Should you find yourself wanting to use  voyager  in direct commands or short requests,  the imperative  is useful. This is also easier because there's no need to include the subject pronoun: simplify  tu voyage  to  voyage .

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Why NASA Needs a Programmer Fluent In 60-Year-Old Languages

To keep the Voyager 1 and 2 crafts going, NASA's new hire has to know FORTRAN and assembly languages.

UPDATE: The Voyager team has hired internally for Zottarelli's replacement, and the retirement is not anticipated until next year. "I go down the hallway and I meet people and I say, 'Wow, Voyager was the best project I've ever worked on. I wish I could get back on it again.' Those are the kind of people that I seek out when I have to replace people," Dodd said in the previous interview.

Yes, it's going to require coding, but it won't be in Ruby on Rails or Python. Not C or C++. Go a little further back, to the assembly languages used in early computing. Know Cobol? Can you breeze through Fortran? Remember your Algol? Those fancy new languages from the late 1950s? Then you might be the person for the job. 

"It was state of the art in 1975, but that's basically 40 years old if you want to think of it that way," Suzanne Dodd, program manager for the Voyager program, said in a phone interview. "Although, some people can program an assembly language and understand the intricacy of the spacecraft, most younger people can't or really don't want to."

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As the new engineer, you have a few tasks ahead of you and about 64 kilobytes of memory to work with. The Voyager twins sport NASA's earliest on-board computers, a step away from the sequencers used on projects like ISEE-3. A sequencer uses radio or audio tones to turn on an instrument but with an onboard computer, more functions can be automatic, which is especially helpful if your spacecraft is more than 12 billion miles away—17 hours by radio—and only certain antennas work with it. Voyager 2, now moving downward from the ecliptic of the solar system, can only be reached by the Canberra antenna of the Deep Space Network. 

The last true software overhaul was in 1990, after the 1989 Neptune encounter and at the beginning of the interstellar mission. "The flight software was basically completely re-written in order to have a spacecraft that could be nearly autonomous and continue sending back data to us even if we lost communication with it," Dodd said. "It has a looping routine of activities that it does automatically on board and then we augment that with sequences that we send up every three months."

Both spacecrafts are "very healthy for senior citizens" Dodd says and they have enough power left to run for another decade, though beyond that the future is uncertain. To try and prolong their lives, a new engineer would have to help figure out a way to make a sort of "energy audit" from afar, check to see the energy requirements of remaining instruments, and help institute shutdown procedures that make the most of what's left of the onboard energy. 

"[The original engineers] said, 'This subsystem takes 3.2 watts of power.' Well, it really took 3 watts, but they wanted to be conservative when they built the spacecraft," Dodd says. "Now, we are at the point in the mission where we are trying to get rid of the margins and get the actual numbers."

The clock is ticking.

That's when it's time to turn back to old documents to figure out the logic behind some of the engineering decisions. Dodd says it's easy to find the engineering decisions, but harder to find the reasoning. This means combing through secondary documents and correspondence hoping to find the solution, trying to get in another engineer's head.

The last resort is picking those engineers' brains directly. Many are retired, and are working on 40-year-old memories. Still, the small team working on Voyager today has a list of engineers and others on-hand to call in emergencies. Dodd herself has worked on the spacecraft off and on since 1984, just before the Uranus flyby.

"People's memories 40 years later aren't always accurate," Dodd says. "It's good to have that data point, but you can't guarantee 100% that that was the correct rationale when somebody's trying to recall it."

The clock is ticking. It's time to find a new engineer as Zottarelli prepares to retire. There will be six months to a year of on-the-job training, but that's about it. Dodd isn't holding out hope for some up-and-coming young coder who work on the project for decades to come. She says instead its closer to walking up and down the halls of JPL, hoping to nab an experienced someone slightly younger than the retirees with enough of a basis in assembly languages to keep the spacecraft going. 

"I'm typically not getting a fresh college grad, but people in their early 50s as opposed to people in their 70s."

"I'm typically not getting a fresh college grad, I'm more or less getting people in their early 50s as opposed to people that are in their 70s," she says. 

Just a warning for would-be programmers: these languages aren't on code academy. 

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English translation of 'le voyage'

Browse Collins French collocations voyage

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• vouvoyer qn
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Inside NASA's 5-month fight to save the Voyager 1 mission in interstellar space

After working for five months to re-establish communication with the farthest-flung human-made object in existence, NASA announced this week that the Voyager 1 probe had finally phoned home.

For the engineers and scientists who work on NASA’s longest-operating mission in space, it was a moment of joy and intense relief.

“That Saturday morning, we all came in, we’re sitting around boxes of doughnuts and waiting for the data to come back from Voyager,” said Linda Spilker, the project scientist for the Voyager 1 mission at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “We knew exactly what time it was going to happen, and it got really quiet and everybody just sat there and they’re looking at the screen.”

When at long last the spacecraft returned the agency’s call, Spilker said the room erupted in celebration.

“There were cheers, people raising their hands,” she said. “And a sense of relief, too — that OK, after all this hard work and going from barely being able to have a signal coming from Voyager to being in communication again, that was a tremendous relief and a great feeling.”

The problem with Voyager 1 was first detected in November . At the time, NASA said it was still in contact with the spacecraft and could see that it was receiving signals from Earth. But what was being relayed back to mission controllers — including science data and information about the health of the probe and its various systems — was garbled and unreadable.

That kicked off a monthslong push to identify what had gone wrong and try to save the Voyager 1 mission.

Spilker said she and her colleagues stayed hopeful and optimistic, but the team faced enormous challenges. For one, engineers were trying to troubleshoot a spacecraft traveling in interstellar space , more than 15 billion miles away — the ultimate long-distance call.

“With Voyager 1, it takes 22 1/2 hours to get the signal up and 22 1/2 hours to get the signal back, so we’d get the commands ready, send them up, and then like two days later, you’d get the answer if it had worked or not,” Spilker said.

The team eventually determined that the issue stemmed from one of the spacecraft’s three onboard computers. Spilker said a hardware failure, perhaps as a result of age or because it was hit by radiation, likely messed up a small section of code in the memory of the computer. The glitch meant Voyager 1 was unable to send coherent updates about its health and science observations.

NASA engineers determined that they would not be able to repair the chip where the mangled software is stored. And the bad code was also too large for Voyager 1's computer to store both it and any newly uploaded instructions. Because the technology aboard Voyager 1 dates back to the 1960s and 1970s, the computer’s memory pales in comparison to any modern smartphone. Spilker said it’s roughly equivalent to the amount of memory in an electronic car key.

The team found a workaround, however: They could divide up the code into smaller parts and store them in different areas of the computer’s memory. Then, they could reprogram the section that needed fixing while ensuring that the entire system still worked cohesively.

That was a feat, because the longevity of the Voyager mission means there are no working test beds or simulators here on Earth to test the new bits of code before they are sent to the spacecraft.

“There were three different people looking through line by line of the patch of the code we were going to send up, looking for anything that they had missed,” Spilker said. “And so it was sort of an eyes-only check of the software that we sent up.”

The hard work paid off.

NASA reported the happy development Monday, writing in a post on X : “Sounding a little more like yourself, #Voyager1.” The spacecraft’s own social media account responded , saying, “Hi, it’s me.”

So far, the team has determined that Voyager 1 is healthy and operating normally. Spilker said the probe’s scientific instruments are on and appear to be working, but it will take some time for Voyager 1 to resume sending back science data.

Voyager 1 and its twin, the Voyager 2 probe, each launched in 1977 on missions to study the outer solar system. As it sped through the cosmos, Voyager 1 flew by Jupiter and Saturn, studying the planets’ moons up close and snapping images along the way.

Voyager 2, which is 12.6 billion miles away, had close encounters with Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune and continues to operate as normal.

In 2012, Voyager 1 ventured beyond the solar system , becoming the first human-made object to enter interstellar space, or the space between stars. Voyager 2 followed suit in 2018.

Spilker, who first began working on the Voyager missions when she graduated college in 1977, said the missions could last into the 2030s. Eventually, though, the probes will run out of power or their components will simply be too old to continue operating.

Spilker said it will be tough to finally close out the missions someday, but Voyager 1 and 2 will live on as “our silent ambassadors.”

Both probes carry time capsules with them — messages on gold-plated copper disks that are collectively known as The Golden Record . The disks contain images and sounds that represent life on Earth and humanity’s culture, including snippets of music, animal sounds, laughter and recorded greetings in different languages. The idea is for the probes to carry the messages until they are possibly found by spacefarers in the distant future.

“Maybe in 40,000 years or so, they will be getting relatively close to another star,” Spilker said, “and they could be found at that point.”

Denise Chow is a reporter for NBC News Science focused on general science and climate change.

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Well, hello, Voyager 1! The venerable spacecraft is once again making sense

Nell Greenfieldboyce

Members of the Voyager team celebrate at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory after receiving data about the health and status of Voyager 1 for the first time in months. NASA/JPL-Caltech hide caption

Members of the Voyager team celebrate at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory after receiving data about the health and status of Voyager 1 for the first time in months.

NASA says it is once again able to get meaningful information back from the Voyager 1 probe, after months of troubleshooting a glitch that had this venerable spacecraft sending home messages that made no sense.

The Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 probes launched in 1977 on a mission to study Jupiter and Saturn but continued onward through the outer reaches of the solar system. In 2012, Voyager 1 became the first spacecraft to enter interstellar space, the previously unexplored region between the stars. (Its twin, traveling in a different direction, followed suit six years later.)

Voyager 1 had been faithfully sending back readings about this mysterious new environment for years — until November, when its messages suddenly became incoherent .

NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft is talking nonsense. Its friends on Earth are worried

It was a serious problem that had longtime Voyager scientists worried that this historic space mission wouldn't be able to recover. They'd hoped to be able to get precious readings from the spacecraft for at least a few more years, until its power ran out and its very last science instrument quit working.

For the last five months, a small team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California has been working to fix it. The team finally pinpointed the problem to a memory chip and figured out how to restore some essential software code.

"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," NASA stated in an update.

The usable data being returned so far concerns the workings of the spacecraft's engineering systems. In the coming weeks, the team will do more of this software repair work so that Voyager 1 will also be able to send science data, letting researchers once again see what the probe encounters as it journeys through interstellar space.

After a 12.3 billion-mile 'shout,' NASA regains full contact with Voyager 2

• interstellar mission

Voyager 1 talking to Earth again after NASA engineers 24 billion kilometres away devise software fix

NASA's Voyager 1 probe — the most distant man-made object in the universe — is returning usable information to ground control following months of spouting gibberish, the US space agency says.

The spaceship stopped sending readable data back to Earth on November 14, 2023, even though controllers could tell it was still receiving their commands.

In March, teams working at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory discovered that a single malfunctioning chip was to blame.

They then had to devise a clever coding fix that worked within the tight memory constraints of its 46-year-old computer system.

"There was a section of the computer memory no longer working," project leader Dr Linda Spilker told the ABC.

"So we had to reprogram what was in that memory, move it to a different location, link everything back together and send everything up in a patch.

"And then on Saturday morning, we watched as Voyager 1 sent its first commands back and we knew we were back in communication once again."

Dr Spilker said they were receiving engineering data, so they knew the health and safety of the spacecraft.

"The next step is going to be to develop a patch so we can send back the science data," she said.

"That will really be exciting, to once again learn about interstellar space and what has been going on there that we've missed since November."

Dr Spilker said Voyager sent back data in real time, so the team had no facility to retrieve data covering the time since transmission was lost.

Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 was mankind's first spacecraft to enter the interstellar medium , in 2012, and is currently more than 24 billion kilometres from Earth.

Messages sent from Earth take about 22.5 hours to reach the spacecraft.

Its twin, Voyager 2, also left the solar system in 2018 as it was tracked by Australia's Parkes radio telescope.

Australia was also vital to a 2023 search for Voyager 2 after signals were lost, with Canberra's Deep Space Communication Complex monitoring for signals and then sending a successful command to shift the spacecraft's antenna 2 degrees . 

Both Voyager spacecraft carry " Golden Records ": 12-inch, gold-plated copper disks intended to convey the story of our world to extraterrestrials.

These include a map of our solar system, a piece of uranium that serves as a radioactive clock allowing recipients to date the spaceship's launch, and symbolic instructions that convey how to play the record.

The contents of the record, selected for NASA by a committee chaired by legendary astronomer Carl Sagan, include encoded images of life on Earth, as well as music and sounds that can be played using an included stylus.

Their power banks were expected to be depleted sometime after 2025, but Dr Spilker said several systems had been turned off, so they were hopeful the two spacecraft would function into the 2030s.

They will then continue to wander the Milky Way, potentially for eternity, in silence.

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NASA's Voyager 1 resumes sending engineering updates to Earth

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.

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 22.5 hours to reach Voyager 1, which is over 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, and another 22.5 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 had worked: For the first time in five months, they were able to check the health and status of the spacecraft.

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.

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Language in Different Languages. Learn How to Say and Translate

Language in Different Languages: Please find below many ways to say language in different languages. This page features translation of the word "language" to over 100 other languages. We also invite you to listen to audio pronunciation in more than 40 languages, so you could learn how to pronounce language and how to read it.

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Ieee spectrum, follow ieee spectrum, support ieee spectrum, enjoy more free content and benefits by creating an account, saving articles to read later requires an ieee spectrum account, the institute content is only available for members, downloading full pdf issues is exclusive for ieee members, downloading this e-book is exclusive for ieee members, access to spectrum 's digital edition is exclusive for ieee members, following topics is a feature exclusive for ieee members, adding your response to an article requires an ieee spectrum account, create an account to access more content and features on ieee spectrum , including the ability to save articles to read later, download spectrum collections, and participate in conversations with readers and editors. for more exclusive content and features, consider joining ieee ., join the world’s largest professional organization devoted to engineering and applied sciences and get access to all of spectrum’s articles, archives, pdf downloads, and other benefits. learn more →, join the world’s largest professional organization devoted to engineering and applied sciences and get access to this e-book plus all of ieee spectrum’s articles, archives, pdf downloads, and other benefits. learn more →, access thousands of articles — completely free, create an account and get exclusive content and features: save articles, download collections, and talk to tech insiders — all free for full access and benefits, join ieee as a paying member., 50 years later, this apollo-era antenna still talks to voyager 2, dss-43 is the only antenna that can communicate with the probe.

The Deep Space Station 43 radio antenna, located at the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex in Australia, keeps open the line of communication between humans and probes during NASA missions.

For more than 50 years, Deep Space Station 43 has been an invaluable tool for space probes as they explore our solar system and push into the beyond. The DSS-43 radio antenna, located at the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex , near Canberra, Australia, keeps open the line of communication between humans and probes during NASA missions.

Today more than 40 percent of all data retrieved by celestial explorers, including Voyagers , New Horizons , and the Mars Curiosity rover , comes through DSS-43.

“As Australia’s largest antenna, DSS-43 has provided two-way communication with dozens of robotic spacecraft,” IEEE President-Elect Kathleen Kramer said during a ceremony where the antenna was recognized as an IEEE Milestone . It has supported missions, Kramer noted, “from the Apollo program and NASA’s Mars exploration rovers such as Spirit and Opportunity to the Voyagers’ grand tour of the solar system.

“In fact,” she said, “it is the only antenna remaining on Earth capable of communicating with Voyager 2 .”

Why NASA needed DSS-43

Maintaining two-way contact with spacecraft hurtling billions of kilometers away across the solar system is no mean feat. Researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory , in Pasadena, Calif., knew that communication with distant space probes would require a dish antenna with unprecedented accuracy. In 1964 they built DSS-42—DSS-43’s predecessor—to support NASA’s Mariner 4 spacecraft as it performed the first-ever successful flyby of Mars in July 1965. The antenna had a 26-meter-diameter dish. Along with two other antennas at JPL and in Spain, DSS-42 obtained the first close-up images of Mars. DSS-42 was retired in 2000.

NASA engineers predicted that to carry out missions beyond Mars, the space agency needed more sensitive antennas. So in 1969 they began work on DSS-43, which has a 64-meter-diameter dish.

DSS-43 was brought online in December 1972—just in time to receive video and audio transmissions sent by Apollo 17 from the surface of the moon. It had greater reach and sensitivity than DSS-42 even after 42’s dish was upgraded in the early 1980s.

The gap between the two antennas’ capabilities widened in 1987, when DSS-43 was equipped with a 70-meter dish in anticipation of Voyager 2’s 1989 encounter with the planet Neptune.

DSS-43 has been indispensable in maintaining contact with the deep-space probe ever since.

The dish’s size isn’t its only remarkable feature. The dish’s manufacturer took great pains to ensure that its surface had no bumps or rough spots. The smoother the dish surface, the better it is at focusing incident waves onto the signal detector so there’s a higher signal-to-noise ratio.

DSS-43 boasts a pointing accuracy of 0.005 degrees (18 arc seconds)—which is important for ensuring that it is pointed directly at the receiver on a distant spacecraft. Voyager 2 broadcasts using a 23-watt radio. But by the time the signals traverse the multibillion-kilometer distance from the heliopause to Earth, their power has faded to a level 20 billion times weaker than what is needed to run a digital watch. Capturing every bit of the incident signals is crucial to gathering useful information from the transmissions.

The antenna has a transmitter capable of 400 kilowatts, with a beam width of 0.0038 degrees. Without the 1987 upgrade, signals sent from DSS-43 to a spacecraft venturing outside the solar system likely never would reach their target.

NASA’s Deep Space Network

The Canberra Deep Space Complex, where DSS-43 resides, is one of three such tracking stations operated by JPL. The other two are DSS-11 at the Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex near Barstow, Calif., and DSS-63 at the Madrid Deep Space Communications Complex in Robledo de Chavela, Spain. Together, the facilities make up the Deep Space Network, which is the most sensitive scientific telecommunications system on the planet, according to NASA. At any given time, the network is tracking dozens of spacecraft carrying out scientific missions. The three facilities are spaced about 120 degrees longitude apart. The strategic placement ensures that as the Earth rotates, at least one of the antennas has a line of sight to an object being tracked, at least for those close to the plane of the solar system.

But DSS-43 is the only member of the trio that can maintain contact with Voyager 2 . Ever since its flyby of Neptune’s moon Triton in 1989, Voyager 2 has been on a trajectory below the plane of the planets, so that it no longer has a line of sight with any radio antennas in the Earth’s Northern Hemisphere.

To ensure that DSS-43 can still place the longest of long-distance calls, the antenna underwent a round of updates in 2020. A new X-band cone was installed. DSS-43 transmits radio signals in the X (8 to 12 gigahertz) and S (2 to 4 GHz) bands; it can receive signals in the X, S, L (1 to 2 GHz), and K (12 to 40 GHz) bands. The dish’s pointing accuracy also was tested and recertified.

Once the updates were completed, test commands were sent to Voyager 2. After about 37 hours, DSS-43 received a response from the space probe confirming it had received the call, and it executed the test commands with no issues.

DSS-43 is still relaying signals between Earth and Voyager 2, which passed the heliopause in 2018 and is now some 20 billion km from Earth.

Other important missions

DSS-43 has played a vital role in missions closer to Earth as well, including NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory mission. When the space agency sent Curiosity , a golf cart–size rover, to explore the Gale crater and Mount Sharp on Mars in 2011, DSS-43 tracked Curiosity as it made its nail-biting seven-minute descent into Mars’s atmosphere. It took roughly 20 minutes for radio signals to traverse the 320-million km distance between Mars and Earth, and then DSS-43 delivered the good news: The rover had landed safely and was operational.

“NASA plans to send future generations of astronauts from the Moon to Mars, and DSS-43 will play an important role as part of NASA’s Deep Space Network,” says Ambarish Natu , an IEEE senior member who is a past chair of the IEEE Australian Capital Territory (ACT) Section.

DSS-43 was honored with an IEEE Milestone in March during a ceremony held at the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex.

“This is the second IEEE Milestone recognition given in Australia, and the first for ACT,” Lance Fung , IEEE Region 10 director, said during the ceremony. A plaque recognizing the technology is now displayed at the complex. It reads:

First operational in 1972 and later upgraded in 1987, Deep Space Station 43 (DSS-43) is a steerable parabolic antenna that supported the Apollo 17 lunar mission, Viking Mars landers, Pioneer and Mariner planetary probes, and Voyager’s encounters with Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Planning for many robotic and human missions to explore the solar system and beyond has included DSS-43 for critical communications and tracking in NASA’s Deep Space Network.

Administered by the IEEE History Center and supported by donors, the Milestone program recognizes outstanding technical developments around the world. The IEEE Australian Capital Territory Section sponsored the nomination.

• Ethernet is Still Going Strong After 50 Years ›
• The Story Behind Pixar’s RenderMan CGI Software ›
• Deep Space Station 43 - Canberra Deep Space Communication ... ›

Willie Jones is an associate editor at IEEE Spectrum . In addition to editing and planning daily coverage, he manages several of Spectrum 's newsletters and contributes regularly to the monthly Big Picture section that appears in the print edition.

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Inside NASA's 5-month fight to save the Voyager 1 mission in interstellar space

After working for five months to re-establish communication with the farthest-flung human-made object in existence, NASA announced this week that the Voyager 1 probe had finally phoned home.

For the engineers and scientists who work on NASA’s longest-operating mission in space, it was a moment of joy and intense relief.

“That Saturday morning, we all came in, we’re sitting around boxes of doughnuts and waiting for the data to come back from Voyager,” said Linda Spilker, the project scientist for the Voyager 1 mission at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “We knew exactly what time it was going to happen, and it got really quiet and everybody just sat there and they’re looking at the screen.”

When at long last the spacecraft returned the agency’s call, Spilker said the room erupted in celebration.

“There were cheers, people raising their hands,” she said. “And a sense of relief, too — that OK, after all this hard work and going from barely being able to have a signal coming from Voyager to being in communication again, that was a tremendous relief and a great feeling.”

The problem with Voyager 1 was first detected in November . At the time, NASA said it was still in contact with the spacecraft and could see that it was receiving signals from Earth. But what was being relayed back to mission controllers — including science data and information about the health of the probe and its various systems — was garbled and unreadable.

That kicked off a monthslong push to identify what had gone wrong and try to save the Voyager 1 mission.

Spilker said she and her colleagues stayed hopeful and optimistic, but the team faced enormous challenges. For one, engineers were trying to troubleshoot a spacecraft traveling in interstellar space , more than 15 billion miles away — the ultimate long-distance call.

“With Voyager 1, it takes 22 1/2 hours to get the signal up and 22 1/2 hours to get the signal back, so we’d get the commands ready, send them up, and then like two days later, you’d get the answer if it had worked or not,” Spilker said.

The team eventually determined that the issue stemmed from one of the spacecraft’s three onboard computers. Spilker said a hardware failure, perhaps as a result of age or because it was hit by radiation, likely messed up a small section of code in the memory of the computer. The glitch meant Voyager 1 was unable to send coherent updates about its health and science observations.

NASA engineers determined that they would not be able to repair the chip where the mangled software is stored. And the bad code was also too large for Voyager 1's computer to store both it and any newly uploaded instructions. Because the technology aboard Voyager 1 dates back to the 1960s and 1970s, the computer’s memory pales in comparison to any modern smartphone. Spilker said it’s roughly equivalent to the amount of memory in an electronic car key.

The team found a workaround, however: They could divide up the code into smaller parts and store them in different areas of the computer’s memory. Then, they could reprogram the section that needed fixing while ensuring that the entire system still worked cohesively.

That was a feat, because the longevity of the Voyager mission means there are no working test beds or simulators here on Earth to test the new bits of code before they are sent to the spacecraft.

“There were three different people looking through line by line of the patch of the code we were going to send up, looking for anything that they had missed,” Spilker said. “And so it was sort of an eyes-only check of the software that we sent up.”

The hard work paid off.

NASA reported the happy development Monday, writing in a post on X : “Sounding a little more like yourself, #Voyager1.” The spacecraft’s own social media account responded , saying, “Hi, it’s me.”

So far, the team has determined that Voyager 1 is healthy and operating normally. Spilker said the probe’s scientific instruments are on and appear to be working, but it will take some time for Voyager 1 to resume sending back science data.

Voyager 1 and its twin, the Voyager 2 probe, each launched in 1977 on missions to study the outer solar system. As it sped through the cosmos, Voyager 1 flew by Jupiter and Saturn, studying the planets’ moons up close and snapping images along the way.

Voyager 2, which is 12.6 billion miles away, had close encounters with Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune and continues to operate as normal.

In 2012, Voyager 1 ventured beyond the solar system , becoming the first human-made object to enter interstellar space, or the space between stars. Voyager 2 followed suit in 2018.

Spilker, who first began working on the Voyager missions when she graduated college in 1977, said the missions could last into the 2030s. Eventually, though, the probes will run out of power or their components will simply be too old to continue operating.

Spilker said it will be tough to finally close out the missions someday, but Voyager 1 and 2 will live on as “our silent ambassadors.”

Both probes carry time capsules with them — messages on gold-plated copper disks that are collectively known as The Golden Record . The disks contain images and sounds that represent life on Earth and humanity’s culture, including snippets of music, animal sounds, laughter and recorded greetings in different languages. The idea is for the probes to carry the messages until they are possibly found by spacefarers in the distant future.

“Maybe in 40,000 years or so, they will be getting relatively close to another star,” Spilker said, “and they could be found at that point.”

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com

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