voyager 1 radius

Voyager 1: Facts about Earth's farthest spacecraft

Voyager 1 continues to explore the cosmos along with its twin probe, Voyager 2.

The Grand Tour

Voyager 1 jupiter flyby, voyager 1 visits saturn and its moons, voyager 1 enters interstellar space, voyager 1's interstellar adventures, additional resources.

Voyager 1 is the first spacecraft to travel beyond the solar system and reach interstellar space . 

The probe launched on Sept. 5, 1977 — about two weeks after its twin Voyager 2 — and as of August 2022 is approximately 14.6 billion miles (23.5 billion kilometers) away from our planet, making it Earth 's farthest spacecraft. Voyager 1 is currently zipping through space at around 38,000 mph (17 kilometers per second), according to NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory .

When Voyager 1 launched a mission to explore the outer planets in our solar system nobody knew how important the probe would still be 45 years later The probe has remained operational long past expectations and continues to send information about its journeys back to Earth. 

Related: Celebrate 45 years of Voyager with these amazing images of our solar system (gallery)

Elizabeth Howell, Ph.D., is a staff writer in the spaceflight channel since 2022. She was contributing writer for  Space.com  for 10 years before that, since 2012. Elizabeth's on-site reporting includes two human spaceflight launches from Kazakhstan, three space shuttle missions in Florida, and embedded reporting from a simulated Mars mission in Utah. 

Size: Voyager 1's body is about the size of a subcompact car. The boom for its magnetometer instrument extends 42.7 feet (13 meters). Weight (at launch): 1,797 pounds (815 kilograms). Launch date: Sept. 5, 1977

Jupiter flyby date: March 5, 1979

Saturn flyby date: Nov. 12, 1980.

Entered interstellar space: Aug. 25, 2012. 

The spacecraft entered interstellar space in August 2012, almost 35 years after its voyage began. The discovery wasn't made official until 2013, however, when scientists had time to review the data sent back from Voyager 1.

Voyager 1 was the second of the twin spacecraft to launch, but it was the first to race by Jupiter and Saturn . The images Voyager 1 sent back have been used in schoolbooks and by many media outlets for a generation. The spacecraft also carries a special record — The Golden Record — that's designed to carry voices and music from Earth out into the cosmos. 

According to NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) , Voyager 1 has enough fuel to keep its instruments running until at least 2025. By then, the spacecraft will be approximately 13.8 billion miles (22.1 billion kilometers) away from the sun.  

The Voyager missions took advantage of a special alignment of the outer planets that happens just once every 176 years. This alignment allows spacecraft to gravitationally "slingshot" from one planet to the next, making the most efficient use of their limited fuel.

NASA originally planned to send two spacecraft past Jupiter, Saturn and Pluto and two other probes past Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune . Budgetary reasons forced the agency to scale back its plans, but NASA still got a lot out of the two Voyagers it launched.

Voyager 2 flew past Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune , while Voyager 1 focused on Jupiter and Saturn.

Recognizing that the Voyagers would eventually fly to interstellar space, NASA authorized the production of two Golden Records to be placed on board the spacecraft. Sounds ranging from whale calls to the music of Chuck Berry were placed on board, as well as spoken greetings in 55 languages. 

The 12-inch-wide (30 centimeters), gold-plated copper disks also included pictorials showing how to operate them and the position of the sun among nearby pulsars (a type of fast-spinning stellar corpse known as a neutron star ), in case extraterrestrials someday stumbled onto the spacecraft and wondered where they came from.

Both spacecraft are powered by three radioisotope thermoelectric generators , devices that convert the heat released by the radioactive decay of plutonium to electricity. Both probes were outfitted with 10 scientific instruments, including a two-camera imaging system, multiple spectrometers, a magnetometer and gear that detects low-energy charged particles and high-energy cosmic rays . Mission team members have also used the Voyagers' communications system to help them study planets and moons, bringing the total number of scientific investigations on each craft to 11.

Voyager 1 almost didn't get off the ground at its launch , as its rocket came within 3.5 seconds of running out of fuel on Sept. 5, 1977.

But the probe made it safely to space and raced past its twin after launch, getting beyond the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter before Voyager 2 did. Voyager 1's first pictures of Jupiter beamed back to Earth in April 1978, when the probe was 165 million miles (266 million kilometers) from home.

According to NASA , each voyager probe has about 3 million times less memory than a mobile phone and transmits data approximately 38,000 times slower than a 5g internet connection.  

To NASA's surprise, in March 1979 Voyager 1 spotted a thin ring circling the giant planet. It found two new moons as well — Thebe and Metis. Additionally, Voyager 1 sent back detailed pictures of Jupiter's big Galilean moons ( Io , Europa , Ganymede and Callisto ) as well as Amalthea .

Like the Pioneer spacecraft before it , Voyager's look at Jupiter's moons revealed them to be active worlds of their own. And Voyager 1 made some intriguing discoveries about these natural satellites. For example, Io's many volcanoes and mottled yellow-brown-orange surface showed that, like planets, moons can have active interiors.

Additionally, Voyager 1 sent back photos of Europa showing a relatively smooth surface broken up by lines, hinting at ice and maybe even an ocean underneath. (Subsequent observations and analyses have revealed that Europa likely harbors a huge subsurface ocean of liquid water, which may even be able to support Earth-like life .)

Voyager 1's closest approach to Jupiter was on March 5, 1979, when it came within 174,000 miles (280,000 km) of the turbulent cloud tops. Then it was time for the probe to aim for Saturn.

Scientists only had to wait about a year, until 1980, to get close-up pictures of Saturn. Like Jupiter, the ringed planet turned out to be full of surprises.

One of Voyager 1's targets was the F ring, a thin structure discovered only the year previously by NASA's Pioneer 11 probe. Voyager's higher-resolution camera spotted two new moons, Prometheus and Pandora, whose orbits keep the icy material in the F ring in a defined orbit. It also discovered Atlas and a new ring, the G ring, and took images of several other Saturn moons.

One puzzle for astronomers was Titan , the second-largest moon in the solar system (after Jupiter's Ganymede). Close-up pictures of Titan showed nothing but orange haze, leading to years of speculation about what it was like underneath. It wouldn't be until the mid-2000s that humanity would find out, thanks to photos snapped from beneath the haze by the European Space Agency's Huygens atmospheric probe .

The Saturn encounter marked the end of Voyager 1's primary mission. The focus then shifted to tracking the 1,590-pound (720 kg) craft as it sped toward interstellar space.

Two decades before it notched that milestone, however, Voyager 1 took one of the most iconic photos in spaceflight history. On Feb. 14, 1990, the probe turned back toward Earth and snapped an image of its home planet from 3.7 billion miles (6 billion km) away. The photo shows Earth as a tiny dot suspended in a ray of sunlight. 

Voyager 1 took dozens of other photos that day, capturing five other planets and the sun in a multi-image "solar system family portrait." But the Pale Blue Dot picture stands out, reminding us that Earth is a small outpost of life in an incomprehensibly vast universe.

Voyager 1 left the heliosphere — the giant bubble of charged particles that the sun blows around itself — in August 2012, popping free into interstellar space. The discovery was made public in a study published in the journal Science the following year.

The results came to light after a powerful solar eruption was recorded by Voyager 1's plasma wave instrument between April 9 and May 22, 2013. The eruption caused electrons near Voyager 1 to vibrate. From the oscillations, researchers discovered that Voyager 1's surroundings had a higher density than what is found just inside the heliosphere.

It seems contradictory that electron density is higher in interstellar space than it is in the sun's neighborhood. But researchers explained that, at the edge of the heliosphere, the electron density is dramatically low compared with locations near Earth. 

Researchers then backtracked through Voyager 1's data and nailed down the official departure date to Aug. 25, 2012. The date was fixed not only by the electron oscillations but also by the spacecraft's measurements of charged solar particles. 

On that fateful day — which was the same day that Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong died — the probe saw a 1,000-fold drop in these particles and a 9% increase in galactic cosmic rays that come from outside the solar system . At that point, Voyager 1 was 11.25 billion miles (18.11 billion km) from the sun, or about 121 astronomical units (AU).

One AU is the average Earth-sun distance — about 93 million miles (150 million km).

You can keep tabs on the Voyager 1's current distance and mission status on this NASA website .

Since flying into interstellar space, Voyager 1 has sent back a variety of valuable information about conditions in this zone of the universe . Its discoveries include showing that cosmic radiation out there is very intense, and demonstrating how charged particles from the sun interact with those emitted by other stars , mission project scientist Ed Stone, of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, told Space.com in September 2017 .

The spacecraft's capabilities continue to astound engineers. In December 2017, for example, NASA announced that Voyager 1 successfully used its backup thrusters to orient itself to "talk" with Earth . The trajectory correction maneuver (TCM) thrusters hadn't been used since November 1980, during Voyager 1's flyby of Saturn. Since then, the spacecraft had primarily used its standard attitude-control thrusters to swing the spacecraft in the right orientation to communicate with Earth. 

As the performance of the attitude-control thrusters began to deteriorate, however, NASA decided to test the TCM thrusters — an idea that could extend Voyager 1's operational life. That test ultimately succeeded. 

"With these thrusters that are still functional after 37 years without use, we will be able to extend the life of the Voyager 1 spacecraft by two to three years," Voyager project manager Suzanne Dodd, of NASA's Jet Propulsion, Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, said in a statement in December 2017 .

Mission team members have taken other measures to extend Voyager 1's life as well. For example, they turned off the spacecraft's cameras shortly after the Pale Blue Dot photo was taken to help conserve Voyager 1's limited power supply. (The cameras wouldn't pick up much in the darkness of deep space anyway.) Over the years, the mission team has turned off five other scientific instruments as well, leaving Voyager 1 with four that are still functioning — the Cosmic Ray Subsystem, the Low-Energy Charged Particles instrument, the Magnetometer and the Plasma Wave Subsystem. (Similar measures have been taken with Voyager 2, which currently has five operational instruments .)

The Voyager spacecraft each celebrated 45 years in space in 2022, a monumental milestone for the twin probes.

"Over the last 45 years, the Voyager missions have been integral in providing this knowledge and have helped change our understanding of the sun and its influence in ways no other spacecraft can," says Nicola Fox, director of the Heliophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington, in a NASA statement .

"Today, as both Voyagers explore interstellar space, they are providing humanity with observations of uncharted territory," said Linda Spilker, Voyager's deputy project scientist at JPL in the same NASA statement.

"This is the first time we've been able to directly study how a star, our Sun, interacts with the particles and magnetic fields outside our heliosphere, helping scientists understand the local neighborhood between the stars, upending some of the theories about this region, and providing key information for future missions." Spilker continues.

Voyager 1's next big encounter will take place in 40,000 years when the probe comes within 1.7 light-years of the star AC +79 3888. (The star is roughly 17.5 light-years from Earth.) However, Voyager 1's falling power supply means it will probably stop collecting scientific data around 2025.

You can learn much more about both Voyagers' design, scientific instruments and mission goals at JPL's Voyager site . NASA has lots of in-depth information about the Pale Blue Dot photo, including Carl Sagan's large role in making it happen, here . And if you're interested in the Golden Record, check out this detailed New Yorker piece by Timothy Ferris, who produced the historic artifact.  Explore the history of Voyager with this interactive timeline courtesy of NASA.  

Bibliography

• Bell, Jim. " The Interstellar Age: Inside the Forty-Year Voyager Mission ," Dutton, 2015.
• Landau, Elizabeth. "The Voyagers in popular culture," Dec. 1, 2017. https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/the-voyagers-in-popular-culture
• PBS, "Voyager: A history in photos." https://www.pbs.org/the-farthest/mission/voyager-history-photos/

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Elizabeth Howell (she/her), Ph.D., is a staff writer in the spaceflight channel since 2022 covering diversity, education and gaming as well. She was contributing writer for Space.com for 10 years before joining full-time. Elizabeth's reporting includes multiple exclusives with the White House and Office of the Vice-President of the United States, an exclusive conversation with aspiring space tourist (and NSYNC bassist) Lance Bass, speaking several times with the International Space Station, witnessing five human spaceflight launches on two continents, flying parabolic, working inside a spacesuit, and participating in a simulated Mars mission. Her latest book, " Why Am I Taller ?", is co-written with astronaut Dave Williams. Elizabeth holds a Ph.D. and M.Sc. in Space Studies from the University of North Dakota, a Bachelor of Journalism from Canada's Carleton University and a Bachelor of History from Canada's Athabasca University. Elizabeth is also a post-secondary instructor in communications and science at several institutions since 2015; her experience includes developing and teaching an astronomy course at Canada's Algonquin College (with Indigenous content as well) to more than 1,000 students since 2020. Elizabeth first got interested in space after watching the movie Apollo 13 in 1996, and still wants to be an astronaut someday. Mastodon: https://qoto.org/@howellspace

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Voyager 1 Trajectory through the Solar System

• Released Thursday, August 31, 2017
• Visualizations by:
• Tom Bridgman

This visualization tracks the trajectory of the Voyager 1 spacecraft through the solar system. Launched on September 5, 1977, it was one of two spacecraft sent to visit the giant planets of the outer solar system. Voyager 1 flew by Jupiter and Saturn before being directed out of the solar system. To fit the 40 year history of the mission into a short visualization, the pacing of time accelerates through most of the movie, starting at about 5 days per second at the beginning and speeding up to about 11 months per second after the planet flybys are past. The termination shock and heliopause are the 'boundaries' created when the plasma between the stars interacts with the plasma flowing outward from the Sun. They are represented with simple grid models and oriented so their 'nose' is pointed in the direction (Right Ascension = 17h 24m, declination = 17 degrees south) represented by more recent measurements from other missions.

Visualization centered on the Voyager 1 trajectory through the solar system.

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Voyager 1's 'Family Portrait' On Valentine's Day 1990, Voyager 1's camera were pointed back at the solar system to image the planets. Check out Voyager at NASA/JPL for more information.

• Voyager.ChaseV1.clockSlate_Track.UHD3840.00000_print.jpg (1024x576) [104.9 KB]

Opening view of Earth orbit looking outward to the rest of the solar system.

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Voyager 1 (and 2) cross the orbit of Mars, slightly above the ecliptic plane to avoid the asteroid belt between Mars & Jupiter.

• Voyager.ChaseV1.clockSlate_Track.UHD3840.01490_print.jpg (1024x576) [113.3 KB]

The camera moves out ahead of the Voyagers for a view back at the inner solar system.

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Voyager 1 just after the Jupiter flyby on March 5, 1979.

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Voyager 1 just before the Saturn flyby on November 12, 1980.

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With a gravity-assist from the Saturn flyby, Voyager 1 is directed above the plane of the solar system and continues outward. This is near the time of the Voyager 1 'Family Portrait'. The orbit of Pluto is the grey orbit visible above the orbits of the other planets.

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Voyager 1 crosses the termination shock of the solar wind. For simplified and symmetric termination shock model, the timing is not accurate. In reality, this crossing occurred around December of 2004.

• Voyager.ChaseV1.clockSlate_Track.UHD3840.03900_print.jpg (1024x576) [99.4 KB]

Voyager 1 (and 2) beyond the heliopause near the end of 2017.

A slightly sped-up version of the Voyager 1 visualization above, reducing the time for the Voyagers to cross the asteroid belt.

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• Solar System

Please give credit for this item to: NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio

• Tom Bridgman  (Global Science and Technology, Inc.)
• Kathalina Tran  (KBR Wyle Services, LLC)
• Genna Duberstein  (USRA)
• Scott Wiessinger  (USRA)

Project support

• Laurence Schuler  (ADNET Systems, Inc.)
• Ian Jones  (ADNET Systems, Inc.)

Release date

This page was originally published on Thursday, August 31, 2017. This page was last updated on Wednesday, November 15, 2023 at 12:05 AM EST.

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Science News

Voyager’s view.

Spacecraft’s journey to interstellar space helps put the solar system in perspective

Nicolle Rager Fuller

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By Andrew Grant

October 4, 2013 at 4:47 pm

It’s finally official: Voyager 1 has become the first human-made object to enter interstellar space, mission scientists report September 12 in Science . On August 25, 2012, the scientists say, Voyager 1 exited a giant invisible bubble called the heliosphere that is inflated by a torrent of subatomic particles spewing from the sun. Now the probe is surrounded almost exclusively by particles produced by other stars. But whether it’s correct to say that the probe has left the solar system depends on how you define the solar system. “From my perspective, Voyager is nowhere near the edge of the solar system,” says planetary scientist Hal Levison of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo. The sun continues to exert gravitational dominance out to hundreds of times the distance of Voyager 1 from the sun, where trillions of icy pebbles, boulders and comets orbit. In the last 36 years, Voyager has traveled an impressive 25.4 billion kilometers, but it still has a long way to go to unambiguously depart the solar system.

Distance from the sun: 5,000–100,000 AU The sun, planets and Voyager probes sit inside the tiny yellow dot at right, within a giant sphere called the Oort cloud. This reservoir of trillions of ice chunks extends 100,000 astronomical units out, tethered to the sun by gravity. Astronomers believe these objects got thrown out of the inner solar system as the planets took shape 4.5 billion years ago. Occasionally these castaways pass near Earth: The comet ISON, which may light up the night sky this November, started out in the Oort cloud. The Voyagers would have to travel another 30,000 years before clearing this broadest definition of the solar system.

Current distance from the sun: 126 AU 1 astronomical unit = 150 million kilometers (Earth-sun distance) Voyager 1 is now surrounded by a relatively thick fog of subatomic particles produced in the far reaches of the galaxy. Some particles originated in supernova explosions; others got blasted out of black holes. By 2016 astronomers expect the probe’s sibling spacecraft to pop through the solar bubble. Unlike Voyager 1, Voyager 2 carries a working instrument to measure the temperature and density of the interstellar medium. Both probes have enough plutonium power to communicate with Earth until about 2025.

Distance from the sun: about 122 AU Until recently, Voyager 1 was traveling within the heliosphere, bathed in a thin mist of particles from the solar wind. Voyager 1 passed through the boundary between the heliosphere and interstellar space, called the heliopause, last August. But the border crossing was not cut-and-dried:  Astronomers expected the magnetic field to change direction in interstellar space along with the particle population, yet the field has barely budged. Theorists are struggling to understand why.

TERMINATION SHOCK

Distance from the sun:  about 90 AU The solar wind gradually slows as it cruises past the planets. About 13 billion kilometers from where that wind originates, it slows down to about 350,000 kilometers per hour and generates a shock wave analogous to the one produced when a jet crosses the sound barrier. Voyager 1 reached this shock wave, known as the termination shock, in 2004. Beyond it, the solar wind wanes as the gateway to interstellar space approaches.

The sun unleashes a continuous stream of subatomic particles at more than 1.5 million kilometers per hour. This solar wind permeates a radius of billions of kilo­meters in all directions and inflates the heliosphere. For some astrophysicists, the solar system is defined by the presence of the solar wind.

KUIPER BELT

Distance from the sun: 30–100 AU For much of the past quarter century, Voyager 1 has been traversing this disk of icy objects (including Pluto) that were not incorporated into planets when the solar system formed.

The sun, planets and entire heliosphere orbit the center of the galaxy at a brisk 83,000 kilometers per hour. In July NASA’s Interstellar Boundary Explorer satellite discovered that the sun drags behind it a cometlike tail of subatomic particles (not shown) that may stretch 10 times as far from the sun as Voyager 1’s current position. The finding shows that the solar bubble is shaped more like an elongated bullet than a sphere. Fortunately Voyager 1 trekked toward the leading edge of the bubble, where the distance to interstellar space is comparatively short.

THE PLANETS

Neptune’s distance from sun: 30 AU The notion of the solar system as the sun plus eight planets (or nine, depending on your age) largely gets abandoned after grade school. Voyager 1 passed Neptune’s orbit in May 1987 and has since logged 14.2 billion kilometers.

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DATA INTERFACES

Through the Rate, Flux and Spectra User Interfaces you may generate figures and download CRS data for the lifetime of the Voyager mission. These interfaces have been tested with Microsoft Edge, Chrome and Firefox browsers.

Note: Voyager-1 and Voyager-2 flux data are not available after 04/28/2022. The Voyager-1 data requires recalibration as a result of the V1 CRS Heater Turn Off.

Warning: the voyager crs team is working on correcting early misssion data (voyager 1 and voyager 2) which contain a ground communication facility error flag. recent reprocessing of data for the entire mission has resulted in incorrect fluxes occasionally appearing in our public database when these flags are present. data for 1984, 1985 and 1993 are particularly affected. please use caution if you are working with data from these years., notice: the data interface portions of this website are unavailable pending software updates., documentation.

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Voyager signal spotted by earth radio telescopes.

The signal of NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft — the most distant human-made object — has been spotted from Earth by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory’s 5,000-mile-wide (8,000-kilometer-wide) Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), which links radio telescopes from Hawaii to St. Croix.

These radio telescopes cannot see Voyager 1 in visible light, but rather “see” the spacecraft signal in radio light. Antennas make up a radio telescope like mirrors and pixels make up an optical one. The telescopes made a special attempt to look for Voyager 1’s signal to test their sensitivity.

Voyager 1’s main transmitter radiates around 22 watts, which is comparable to a typical ham radio or a refrigerator light bulb. Though incredibly weak by the standards of modern wireless communications, Voyager 1’s signal is bright when compared to most natural objects studied by radio telescopes.

The VLBA made this image of Voyager 1’s signal on Feb. 21, 2013. At the time, Voyager 1 was 11.5 billion miles (18.5 billion kilometers) away.

The image is about 0.5 arcseconds on a side. An arcsecond is the apparent size of a penny as seen from 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) away. The slightly oblong shape of the image is a result of the array’s configuration.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., communicates with Voyager 1 practically every day via NASA’s Deep Space Network. The spacecraft, launched in 1977, is currently nearly 12 billion miles (19 billion kilometers) away from the sun.

The Voyager spacecraft were built and continue to be operated by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, Calif. Caltech manages JPL for NASA. The Voyager missions are a part of NASA’s Heliophysics System Observatory, sponsored by the Heliophysics Division of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. 

For more information about Voyager, visit: https://www.nasa.gov/voyager and http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov .

For more on the National Radio Astronomy Observatory’s finding, visit: http://www.nrao.edu .

Image credit: NRAO/AUI/NSF.

NASA Voyager 1 Encounters New Region in Deep Space

NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft has entered a new region at the far reaches of our solar system that scientists feel is the final area the spacecraft has to cross before reaching interstellar space.

Scientists refer to this new region as a magnetic highway for charged particles because our sun's magnetic field lines are connected to interstellar magnetic field lines. This connection allows lower-energy charged particles that originate from inside our heliosphere -- or the bubble of charged particles the sun blows around itself -- to zoom out and allows higher-energy particles from outside to stream in. Before entering this region, the charged particles bounced around in all directions, as if trapped on local roads inside the heliosphere.

The Voyager team infers this region is still inside our solar bubble because the direction of the magnetic field lines has not changed. The direction of these magnetic field lines is predicted to change when Voyager breaks through to interstellar space. The new results were described at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco on Monday.

"Although Voyager 1 still is inside the sun's environment, we now can taste what it's like on the outside because the particles are zipping in and out on this magnetic highway," said Edward Stone, Voyager project scientist based at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena. "We believe this is the last leg of our journey to interstellar space. Our best guess is it's likely just a few months to a couple years away. The new region isn't what we expected, but we've come to expect the unexpected from Voyager." Since December 2004, when Voyager 1 crossed a point in space called the termination shock, the spacecraft has been exploring the heliosphere's outer layer, called the heliosheath. In this region, the stream of charged particles from the sun, known as the solar wind, abruptly slowed down from supersonic speeds and became turbulent. Voyager 1's environment was consistent for about five and a half years. The spacecraft then detected that the outward speed of the solar wind slowed to zero. The intensity of the magnetic field also began to increase at that time. Voyager data from two onboard instruments that measure charged particles showed the spacecraft first entered this magnetic highway region on July 28, 2012. The region ebbed away and flowed toward Voyager 1 several times. The spacecraft entered the region again Aug. 25 and the environment has been stable since. "If we were judging by the charged particle data alone, I would have thought we were outside the heliosphere," said Stamatios Krimigis, principal investigator of the low-energy charged particle instrument, based at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, Md. "But we need to look at what all the instruments are telling us and only time will tell whether our interpretations about this frontier are correct." Spacecraft data revealed the magnetic field became stronger each time Voyager entered the highway region; however, the direction of the magnetic field lines did not change. "We are in a magnetic region unlike any we've been in before -- about 10 times more intense than before the termination shock -- but the magnetic field data show no indication we're in interstellar space," said Leonard Burlaga, a Voyager magnetometer team member based at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "The magnetic field data turned out to be the key to pinpointing when we crossed the termination shock. And we expect these data will tell us when we first reach interstellar space." Voyager 1 and 2 were launched 16 days apart in 1977. At least one of the spacecraft has visited Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Voyager 1 is the most distant human-made object, about 11 billion miles (18 billion kilometers) away from the sun. The signal from Voyager 1 takes approximately 17 hours to travel to Earth. Voyager 2, the longest continuously operated spacecraft, is about 9 billion miles (15 billion kilometers) away from our sun. While Voyager 2 has seen changes similar to those seen by Voyager 1, the changes are much more gradual. Scientists do not think Voyager 2 has reached the magnetic highway. The Voyager spacecraft were built and continue to be operated by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, Calif. Caltech manages JPL for NASA. The Voyager missions are a part of NASA's Heliophysics System Observatory, sponsored by the Heliophysics Division of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. For more information about the Voyager spacecraft, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/voyager and http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov .

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• Published: 01 December 2017

The Voyagers

• Ed Stone 1  

Nature Astronomy volume  1 ,  page 896 ( 2017 ) Cite this article

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Forty years ago, the two Voyager spacecraft left Earth to begin one of the most rewarding voyages of human discovery ever to have been undertaken. Project Scientist Ed Stone recounts his treasured moments from the mission.

Two Voyager spacecraft were launched on humankind’s longest journeys in 1977. At that time, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune were lined up so that the gravity assist of each planetary flyby could serve as a slingshot to speed a spacecraft on its way past all four giant planets in just 12 years rather than 30. This special planetary alignment occurs only every 176 years, and Gary Flandro, a Caltech graduate student working at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in the summer of 1965, found that the outer planets would align in the late 1970s. This led to a decade of planning and construction that eventually culminated in two Mini Cooper-sized spacecraft being launched into the Solar System: Voyager 2 on 20 August 1977 and Voyager 1 two weeks later.

The planetary encounters were the highlights for me personally as Voyager project scientist (Fig. 1 , left). We knew we were on unequalled journeys of discovery, and every day we saw and learned new things. Between the two Voyagers, we had six planetary encounters (Voyager 2 visited all four giant planets, whereas Voyager 1 visited only Jupiter and Saturn). We developed a daily routine to take the public along on the encounters nearly in real time, before there was an Internet. The science team would meet early each afternoon to discuss the latest observations and various explanations and interpretations of the data. This process was a form of real-time peer review, which was very exciting. Once the meeting ended, I would meet with the lead investigators to decide what graphics to develop overnight for release during the press conference the following morning. At the same time, the imaging team would choose images for the overnight production of prints for distribution to the media present at the press conference. At 10:00 the next morning we would present our results to the reporters gathered at JPL. We would then start the cycle again with another science meeting that afternoon.

Among all of the wonders that the Voyagers have shown us, if I had to pick one of those that greatly astonished me and signalled a transformation of our perspective of the Solar System, it was the discovery of eight active volcanoes on Jupiter’s moon Io. Linda Morabito, an optical navigator, had spotted something unusual while looking through images showing the position of Io with respect to background stars. It was 9 March 1979, the final scheduled press conference for the Jupiter encounter had already taken place the day before, and I remember it being a quiet Friday afternoon at JPL. But then Andy Collins from the imaging team told me “you’ve got to see this’’. We went to see Linda and saw Io with a protruding feature that could only be a volcanic plume extending more than one hundred miles above the surface.

This was the first time we had direct evidence of active volcanoes existing anywhere other than on Earth. Jupiter’s moon Io (Fig. 1 , right) is much smaller than Earth, but its volcanic activity is ten times greater. This surprise from the first Voyager encounter serves as a bookend for the many unexpected planetary discoveries that culminated with Neptune’s moon Triton, the other bookend. Our last planetary close-up view revealed that Triton has two active geysers erupting from an icy surface that is only 38 degrees above absolute zero.

Following the Voyager 2 flyby of Neptune and Triton in 1989, the final portrait of the Solar System and the 'pale blue dot' photograph by Voyager 1 in 1990, the Voyagers continued their journeys to the edge of the heliospheric bubble that envelops the Sun and all of the planets. Outside the bubble lies interstellar space, containing matter from supernovae that exploded millions of years ago. The distance to the boundary of the heliosphere was unknown and we did not know if Voyager 1 would still be operating when it entered interstellar space. Fortunately, the boundary was close enough for us to observe it. On 25 August 2012, after a 35-year journey, Voyager 1 became the first human made object to enter interstellar space. In a few years, Voyager 2 will join Voyager 1 in exploring nearby interstellar space. As they near the end of their operational life, we will begin to power down heaters and instruments as the electrical power source continues its slow decline.

When there is no longer enough power for the spacecraft, the two Voyagers will be our silent ambassadors, orbiting the centre of the Milky Way every 225 million years for billions of years and carrying golden records that are time capsules of the world that launched them on their epic journeys. Their success is due to exceptional engineering, transformative science and extraordinary inspiration. For many of us it has been the journey of a lifetime.

NASA/JPL-Caltech (left); US Geological Survey/Science Photo Library (right)

Professor Ed Stone in front of a replica of one of the Voyager spacecraft (left) and a Voyager image of Jupiter’s volcanic moon Io (right).

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How Voyager opened the door to the ice giants

Voyager 2 flew past Uranus on January 24, 1986, more than four years after the probe visited Saturn. Following the excitement at that ringed world (and Jupiter before it), scientists were eager to see what Voyager would reveal at the more distant and enigmatic uranian system.

Suzy Dodd, the project manager for Voyager’s interstellar mission, worked on the sequencing teams for Uranus and Neptune. The group determined exactly when Voyager’s instruments should take data in order to return the information the science team wanted. This meant understanding in minute detail how the planets and their moons moved. The sequencing team orchestrated the various instruments to use every second of the precious flyby windows to image the most valuable targets: the limb or edge of the planets, the terminators where day and night meet, the moons in their orbits, and the planets’ own broad faces.

After the rich and complex atmospheres of Jupiter and Saturn, Uranus seemed pretty bland, Dodd recalls. “You didn’t get all the great storms you got at the other planets,” she says. Instead, Uranus “looked like a fuzzy, blue tennis ball.”

Voyager did reveal a previously undetected magnetic field around Uranus, comparable in strength to Earth’s. Due to its nearly 90° axial tilt, Uranus rolls around its orbit like a ball. And while Earth’s orbital and magnetic fields are offset by roughly 12°, Uranus’ are 60° apart. This results in a corkscrewing magnetic field trailing millions of miles behind the planet.

What’s more, scientists still aren’t sure why the magnetic field exists at all, since Uranus lacks the standard liquid metallic inner layer that powers such fields on other planets. Voyager also revealed intense radiation belts around the planet, similar to those seen at Saturn.

Astronomers at Cornell University discovered Uranus’ ring system in early 1977, just before Voyager’s launch. The sighting was a happy accident, when a chance alignment carried Uranus in front of a distant star. Scientists had planned to use the occultation to study Uranus’ atmosphere, but the star’s repeated appearance and disappearance before it slid out of view behind the planet made astronomers realize that a series of rings surrounded our far-off neighbor. The flyby was a chance to investigate them up close.

Voyager imaged the ring system for the first time, informing astronomers of its detailed structure. The spacecraft also discovered two entirely new rings. The close-up views confirmed that Uranus’ subtle bands are not like Saturn’s bright icy rings; they are dark and reflect little light, making them difficult to see. Scientists think the rings are probably made mostly of ice, like Saturn’s, but covered in organic material such as methane, and then baked dark by the planet’s radiation belts.

Uranus’ moons, too, camouflage well against the dark of space. When Voyager left Earth, astronomers knew of only five satellites around the planet. From observations during its brief visit, the spacecraft tripled that number, yielding 10 new moons. “I really think the satellites were the highlight of Uranus,” says Dodd. Voyager images lent the five larger known moons detail and character, telling varied stories of violent pasts.

Two of the new moons, Cordelia and Ophelia, were identified as shepherd moons. They orbit on either side of Uranus’ outer Epsilon ring, and their gravitational pull herds the small particles in that ring along their orbital path and keeps them from dissipating into space. Uranus’ rings are uncommonly narrow; without shepherd moons, the small particles would disperse over long timescales.

Last year, astronomers from the University of Idaho revisited the Voyager data. Thirty years after the flyby, they found evidence for two more tiny moonlets shaping Uranus’ rings. “Nobody — or not many people — had looked at this in a very long time,” says Robert Chancia, who led the investigation. In fact, the Voyager data were taken before he was born. Chancia and his adviser, Matthew Hedman, usually study Saturn’s rings. But recent discoveries by the Cassini spacecraft have added greatly to astronomers’ understanding of planetary rings. So Chancia and Hedman decided to take another look at the Voyager findings, applying new theories to old data.

“There are several narrow ringlets within the rings of Saturn” that provide reasonable proxies for Uranus’ system, Chancia explains. So he and Hedman adopted techniques that planetary scientist Mark Showalter used to find the moonlet Pan in Voyager 2’s observations of Saturn’s ring system.

They found distinct patterns in Uranus’ rings consistent with “wakes” carved by moonlets circling a planet within a ring system. The predicted moonlets are tiny, only 2 to 9 miles (4 to 14 kilometers) across. And they are likely dark, like the rest of the moons and ring system. Confirming the moonlets will be a challenge. But even 30 years later, Voyager is still helping to crack Uranus’ secrets.

Voyager’s last planetary encounter came August 24, 1989. Far from Uranus’ “fuzzy tennis ball,” Neptune was alive with storms and bright, quick-moving clouds, delighting unsuspecting astronomers. Clouds not only appeared clearly in Voyager images, but they also cast shadows on deeper cloud layers, allowing scientists to measure the planet’s atmosphere in great detail. The “Great Dark Spot,” as astronomers termed the largest tempest, was as big as Earth, swirling in Neptune’s southern hemisphere and boasting wind speeds as high as 750 mph (1,200 km/h). In the decades since, that storm has died, while new storms have risen in its place.

“That was a bit of a surprise to me when you consider the Great Red Spot on Jupiter has been going on for 400 years,” Dodd says.

More surprises waited on Triton, Neptune’s biggest moon. Triton was already a hotbed of intrigue; it’s by far the solar system’s largest retrograde satellite, meaning it orbits in the direction opposite to its planet’s rotation. This is usually a sign of a captured object, but most other retrograde moons are small, misshapen asteroids. Triton is three-quarters the size of our Moon, and survived its capture intact. Scientists wanted close-up views of the satellite, and since it was the last target, they were free to adjust Voyager’s trajectory as needed. So the spacecraft swooped only 3,075 miles (4,950km) above Neptune’s north pole — its closest approach to any object during the mission — and flew toward its encounter with Triton.

The last world Voyager 2 visited stunned scientists. The moon boasted a thin atmosphere, polar caps, and active geysers that spewed icy material miles high. The active cryovolcanism puts Triton in a select group of satellites, in the company of other dynamic moons such as Europa and Enceladus.

Voyager also discovered six new moons orbiting Neptune and delivered clear pictures of its ring system for the first time, revealing the rings to be clumpy but complete, unlike those at Uranus.

And as it did at Uranus, Voyager discovered that Neptune’s magnetic pole is misaligned from its rotational pole, causing extreme variations in its magnetic field as the planet rotates. Furthermore, both planets’ magnetospheres are offset from center by a large fraction: about one-third the planet’s radius for Uranus, and nearly half a radius for Neptune. Both planets could have oceans of conductive icy slush that perform the work of the liquid metallic cores at Earth and Jupiter, but inconclusive models and observations have left scientists with little more than guesswork as to what exactly drives the magnetic fields that Voyager observed.

Voyager also detected aurorae on Neptune. Due to the strange and complex nature of the planet’s magnetic field, these aurorae don’t occur only at the poles; instead they are scattered across Neptune’s upper atmosphere.

Voyager also closed a contentious chapter in astronomy history by revising Neptune’s mass downward by around half a percent — or roughly the mass of Mars. This miscalculation had sent astronomers on a wild goose chase through the years as they tried to make sense of Uranus’ and Neptune’s orbits, usually by invoking the existence of a mysterious Planet X tugging on both of them. (Pluto was found as a direct result of this hunt, but its small size was never enough to resolve the initial problem.) Voyager settled the issue, as Neptune’s smaller mass means it and Uranus orbit just as they should.

To mark the final flyby, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory hosted a special event celebrating Voyager’s journey and accomplishments. Scientists shared images with the public, and rock-’n’-roll legend Chuck Berry, whose music lives on as part of Voyager’s Golden Record, played in a special concert.

At the edge of our planetary system, 2.75 billion miles (4.43 billion km) from Earth, Voyager turned its cameras back for a last look, imaging farewell shots of a crescent Neptune. Dodd recalls her reaction to the images: “Wow. The planetary mission is done. We’re going off into the deep dark and cold realms of space. Who knows how long the mission will last?”

When she left her position with the Neptune team, Dodd says, no one then imagined Voyager would continue as long as it has. She returned to Voyager’s interstellar mission in 2010, 21 years after she left the project. In many ways, she admits that the spacecraft is an artifact — memory and power limited, with many of its specialists long since retired or passed on. Since Voyager’s departure from Neptune, many of its instruments have gone quiet. There is no need for imaging cameras in the dark void of space. But that does not mean the project is defunct.

Voyager continues to measure magnetic fields, charged particles, plasma density, and more as it cruises the solar system’s hinterlands, teaching scientists about the subtle edges of the solar system’s boundaries. Voyager 1 has passed beyond the reach of the solar wind, and thus is sampling aspects of interstellar space, though it still lies well within the Sun’s gravitational influence. Voyager 2, following a slower trajectory from its two-planet detour, tags behind, still sampling the solar wind. From their distance, it takes more than 15 hours for their signals to reach Earth.

Sometime in the next decade, the spacecraft will lose power and begin to shut down. Dodd’s team will turn the Voyagers’ heaters off first, and one by one, the science instruments will succumb to the cold of space. But the spacecraft themselves and their Golden Records will journey on, carrying humanity’s imprint into the cosmos.

It will be years before any spacecraft retreads Voyager’s path to Uranus or Neptune. With at least half a century of technological advances behind it, any future craft will undoubtedly revolutionize our understanding of the ice giants all over again. But it’s safe to say that nothing will match Voyager for sheer adventure and scope. Decades after its primary mission, Voyager continues to teach, to inspire, and to explore.

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

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This artist's impression shows one of the Voyager spacecraft moving through the darkness of space. NASA/JPL-Caltech hide caption

This artist's impression shows one of the Voyager spacecraft moving through the darkness of space.

The last time Stamatios "Tom" Krimigis saw the Voyager 1 space probe in person, it was the summer of 1977, just before it launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Now Voyager 1 is over 15 billion miles away, beyond what many consider to be the edge of the solar system. Yet the on-board instrument Krimigis is in charge of is still going strong.

"I am the most surprised person in the world," says Krimigis — after all, the spacecraft's original mission to Jupiter and Saturn was only supposed to last about four years.

These days, though, he's also feeling another emotion when he thinks of Voyager 1.

"Frankly, I'm very worried," he says.

Ever since mid-November, the Voyager 1 spacecraft has been sending messages back to Earth that don't make any sense. It's as if the aging spacecraft has suffered some kind of stroke that's interfering with its ability to speak.

"It basically stopped talking to us in a coherent manner," says Suzanne Dodd of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who has been the project manager for the Voyager interstellar mission since 2010. "It's a serious problem."

Instead of sending messages home in binary code, Voyager 1 is now just sending back alternating 1s and 0s. Dodd's team has tried the usual tricks to reset things — with no luck.

It looks like there's a problem with the onboard computer that takes data and packages it up to send back home. All of this computer technology is primitive compared to, say, the key fob that unlocks your car, says Dodd.

"The button you press to open the door of your car, that has more compute power than the Voyager spacecrafts do," she says. "It's remarkable that they keep flying, and that they've flown for 46-plus years."

Each of the Voyager probes carries an American flag and a copy of a golden record that can play greetings in many languages. NASA/JPL-Caltech hide caption

Each of the Voyager probes carries an American flag and a copy of a golden record that can play greetings in many languages.

Voyager 1 and its twin, Voyager 2, have outlasted many of those who designed and built them. So to try to fix Voyager 1's current woes, the dozen or so people on Dodd's team have had to pore over yellowed documents and old mimeographs.

"They're doing a lot of work to try and get into the heads of the original developers and figure out why they designed something the way they did and what we could possibly try that might give us some answers to what's going wrong with the spacecraft," says Dodd.

She says that they do have a list of possible fixes. As time goes on, they'll likely start sending commands to Voyager 1 that are more bold and risky.

"The things that we will do going forward are probably more challenging in the sense that you can't tell exactly if it's going to execute correctly — or if you're going to maybe do something you didn't want to do, inadvertently," says Dodd.

Linda Spilker , who serves as the Voyager mission's project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, says that when she comes to work she sees "all of these circuit diagrams up on the wall with sticky notes attached. And these people are just having a great time trying to troubleshoot, you know, the 60's and 70's technology."

"I'm cautiously optimistic," she says. "There's a lot of creativity there."

Still, this is a painstaking process that could take weeks, or even months. Voyager 1 is so distant, it takes almost a whole day for a signal to travel out there, and then a whole day for its response to return.

"We'll keep trying," says Dodd, "and it won't be quick."

In the meantime, Voyager's 1 discombobulation is a bummer for researchers like Stella Ocker , an astronomer with Caltech and the Carnegie Observatories

"We haven't been getting science data since this anomaly started," says Ocker, "and what that means is that we don't know what the environment that the spacecraft is traveling through looks like."

After 35 Years, Voyager Nears Edge Of Solar System

That interstellar environment isn't just empty darkness, she says. It contains stuff like gas, dust, and cosmic rays. Only the twin Voyager probes are far out enough to sample this cosmic stew.

"The science that I'm really interested in doing is actually only possible with Voyager 1," says Ocker, because Voyager 2 — despite being generally healthy for its advanced age — can't take the particular measurements she needs for her research.

Even if NASA's experts and consultants somehow come up with a miraculous plan that can get Voyager 1 back to normal, its time is running out.

The two Voyager probes are powered by plutonium, but that power system will eventually run out of juice. Mission managers have turned off heaters and taken other measures to conserve power and extend the Voyager probes' lifespan.

"My motto for a long time was 50 years or bust," says Krimigis with a laugh, "but we're sort of approaching that."

In a couple of years, the ebbing power supply will force managers to start turning off science instruments, one by one. The very last instrument might keep going until around 2030 or so.

When the power runs out and the probes are lifeless, Krimigis says both of these legendary space probes will basically become "space junk."

"It pains me to say that," he says. While Krimigis has participated in space missions to every planet, he says the Voyager program has a special place in his heart.

Spilker points out that each spacecraft will keep moving outward, carrying its copy of a golden record that has recorded greetings in many languages, along with the sounds of Earth.

"The science mission will end. But a part of Voyager and a part of us will continue on in the space between the stars," says Spilker, noting that the golden records "may even outlast humanity as we know it."

Krimigis, though, doubts that any alien will ever stumble across a Voyager probe and have a listen.

"Space is empty," he says, "and the probability of Voyager ever running into a planet is probably slim to none."

It will take about 40,000 years for Voyager 1 to approach another star; it will come within 1.7 light years of what NASA calls "an obscure star in the constellation Ursa Minor" — also known as the Little Dipper.

If NASA greenlights this interstellar mission, it could last 100 years

Knowing that the Voyager probes are running out of time, scientists have been drawing up plans for a new mission that, if funded and launched by NASA, would send another probe even farther out into the space between stars.

"If it happens, it would launch in the 2030s," says Ocker, "and it would reach twice as far as Voyager 1 in just 50 years."

• space science
• space exploration

NASA hopes to get the Voyager spacecraft to their 50th anniversary with clever engineering and difficult choices

• NASA's Voyager 1 and 2 are the only human-made objects to reach interstellar space.
• The two probes launched in 1977 and may soon lose communication with Earth.
• NASA hopes to stay in contact with the probes at least until their 50th anniversary in 2027.

In 1977, NASA launched Voyager 1 and 2 for what were meant to be four-year missions. For over 46 years, the pair have been delivering spectacular science far beyond what their first teams of researchers could have hoped.

From close-up views of Jupiter to a stunning look a Saturn's rings , the Voyager probes have helped shape our understanding of the solar system. Voyager 2 is still the only spacecraft to visit Uranus and Neptune . They've traveled farther from Earth than any other human-made object.

Solar wind streaming out from the sun and interstellar wind flowing back toward it creates a bubble known as the heliosphere. In 2012, Voyager 1 ventured beyond the heliosphere into interstellar space . Voyager 2 followed in 2018.

Both probes are slowly draining power and will soon lose contact with Earth.

But NASA is coming up with unique solutions to keep communicating with the two Voyagers.

"That's what's most important is keeping these spacecraft operating as long as possible," Suzanne Dodd , NASA's project manager for Voyager, told Business Insider.

Decades of data

Early in their travels, the two spacecraft parted ways. Voyager 1 is now 15 billion miles from Earth, and Voyager 2 is 12 billion.

As the probes journey farther from our planet, their data becomes more and more valuable. The Voyagers are picking up information on charged particles in interstellar space, including their energy levels, their abundance, and the direction of their magnetic fields.

"They're out of the effects of charged particles from our sun and truly measuring data in interstellar space and measuring how that data changes as they travel further away from us," Dodd said.

She compared it to seeing the difference between waves breaking on the shore and smoothing out deeper in the ocean.

"You would never know that unless you got further out of the ocean, how those waves change," she said.

It would take another 50 years for another vehicle to reach interstellar space, Dodd said. That's why the Voyagers are so valuable.

"They're doing very unique science," she said.

NASA has been turning instruments off to conserve power

The nuclear-powered Voyagers use radioisotope thermoelectric generators that turn heat from decaying plutonium-238 into energy. Originally, the generators provided about 450 watts of power, Dodd said.

Each year, as the plutonium decays, the generators produce about 4 watts less.

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"They're down to about 220 watts of power available," Dodd said.

Operating the probes' transmitters requires about 200 watts. Their instruments can use as much as 6 watts each.

Voyager 1 has four instruments running, and Voyager 2 has five.

To conserve power, engineers have shut off heaters and powered down other systems.

"We've done a lot of clever engineering things to be able to keep these instruments on as long as possible, knowing that we have a limited power supply," Dodd said.

"Something could fail that would be catastrophic kind of at any time," she added.

There have been a few near-misses, like when both probes almost failed at launch and when NASA lost communication with Voyager 2 for a few weeks in summer 2023.

By 2026, NASA may have to turn off at least one of Voyager 2's instruments.

"What we're looking at is making the two spacecraft complementary to each other," Dodd said. "You might keep one instrument operating on one spacecraft but turn it off on another."

Down the road, the choices about which instruments to keep running will be more difficult. Dodd said the scientists would likely keep powering the ones that took the least energy.

"And then it's also an evaluation of the science," she said. "What's the most critical science that we get?"

Even after the spacecraft power down, they have one more mission left

When the spacecraft lose communication with Earth, it will essentially be the end of the mission, Dodd said.

But the Voyagers will continue traveling, Dodd said, perhaps for hundreds of thousands of years.

"They'll just be floating out in space and floating around the center, traveling away from us with a gold record that, hopefully, some being, somewhere, will find in the future."

The golden records are phonographs containing images, words, and music meant to explain human life to aliens . Each Voyager probe has a copy.

In the meantime, Dodd isn't quite ready to say goodbye to the Voyagers.

"It's pretty remarkable, into our 47th year, just the whole record of discoveries it's made," she said.

The fact that there are two spacecraft means the chances are pretty good that at least one of them can keep communicating for a few more years, Dodd said.

"I'm very optimistic that we'll get to a 50-year anniversary," she said.

Watch: Animated map of the solar system shows just how far humans have explored space

• Main content

NASA's Ingenious Efforts to Restore Voyager 1's Interstellar Communications on May，2022

V oyager 1, the venerable space probe and humanity’s most distant emissary, has encountered a communication hurdle that has persisted for months, leading to a valiant effort by NASA engineers to comprehend and rectify the anomaly.

For over 45 years, Voyager 1 has been gliding through the cosmos, and in its lifetime, it has delivered invaluable data on planets like Jupiter and Saturn, as well as a solitary image of Earth from the outskirts of our solar system. Yet, as it cruises over 15 billion miles from Earth, it faces a unique challenge: a breakdown in the way it communicates its observations and status back to ground control.

In May 2022, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) engineers noticed the glitch when Voyager 1 began transmitting nonsensical data. This data, meant to inform mission controllers about the spacecraft’s operations and scientific findings, is crucial for the continuous assessment of the mission’s health and objectives. A JPL spokesperson highlighted the efforts made to resolve the issue: “The team continues information gathering and are preparing some steps that they’re hopeful will get them on a path to either understand the root of the problem and/or solve it.”

The glitch appears to be a discord between the spacecraft’s flight data system (FDS) and its telemetry modulation unit (TMU). Normally, the FDS would collect and package data for transmission to Earth, but the TMU has been sending a repeating pattern of ones and zeroes, rendering the data unintelligible.

Despite this setback, the mission team has made a breakthrough. In March 2023, after sending a ‘poke’ to the spacecraft, a signal was received that stood out from the garbled data stream. A Deep Space Network engineer decoded this and found it contained a readout of the entire FDS’s memory, a potential treasure trove for diagnosing the problem.

The issue is compounded by the enormous distance signals must travel, taking approximately 22 hours each way, leading to a slow, iterative process of trial and error as engineers send commands and await the spacecraft’s response. It’s a process the JPL spokesperson described, noting, “After they do that, they spend a few days digesting the information they got, consulting old documents to see if they can make sense of the little bits of information they can glean from things (since the telemetry data itself is unusable), and then send another command.”

Despite the challenges, the mission team remains hopeful. The wealth of data collected before the communication breakdown continues to shed light on the conditions of interstellar space, and the Voyager probes’ ongoing journey into the cosmos is a testament to human ingenuity and curiosity.

As NASA’s engineers labor to parse the received memory readout and develop potential solutions, Voyager 1’s mission remains a symbol of human achievement. Although the issue remains unresolved, the data sent back before the problem began provides an extensive understanding of interstellar space, and the work to re-establish complete communication is evidence of NASA’s relentless pursuit of knowledge.

Relevant articles:

– NASA Is Still Fighting to Save Its Historic Voyager 1 … , Gizmodo, Mar 7, 2024

– Voyager 1 sends back surprising response after ‘poke’ from NASA , CNN

– NASA finds clue while solving Voyager 1’s communication breakdown case , Space.com

– How was contact restored between NASA and Voyager 2? Here’s all you need to know about the ‘shout’ across interstellar space which retrieved the spacecraft , economictimes.com

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Voyager Electric Bike Radius Pro Foldable UL-Certified, BIKE Refurbished

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Turn Any Commute into an Adventure with the Radius Pro from Voyager! Ditch the car and make your daily commute fun with the Radius Pro! With a comfortable ride, long range battery, and high speed, your ride will be the most fun it’s ever been! The Radius Pro from Voyager will get you from point A to B in no time at all! The Radius Pro Turns any Bumpy Road into a Smooth Ride! The Radius Pro combines dual hydraulic disc brakes, front and rear suspension, and 16” pneumatic tires to create an extremely comfortable ride, no matter the road conditions. You won’t feel a thing as the thick tires and advanced suspension absorb all the shock from any bump in the road! Easy to Store and Take Anywhere You Go! The Radius Pro can fully collapse and be stored easily, and with a convenient carrying handle you can take it on the go wherever you go! Small enough to carry onto busses and trains, your commute has never been so easy!

• 22 Mile Range and 18 MPH: The Voyager Radius Pro has a long range to get you where you need to go fast!
• Smooth and Comfortable Ride: With the Radius Pro, the comfort seat is adjustable for many different heights!
• Dual Hydraulic Disc Brakes: Have to stop on a dime? The Radius Pro features hydraulic brakes so you can safely stop moving
• Suitable for All Ages
• The Radius Pro from Voyager has a maximum weight limit of 330 pounds, making it suitable for everyone!
• Fully Collapsible: The Voyager Radius Pro can collapse fully and comes with a convenient carry handle when the adventure is over
• Retail/A-Grade Refurbished Condition
• What's in the box: Radius Pro E -Bike, Comfort Seat, Charger, User Manual, Allen Key for assembly and adjustment
• Total Weight 52.9lb

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Warranty: 90 Day Woot Limited Warranty

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• (1) Voyager Electric Bike Radius Pro Foldable UL-Certified, BIKE-4050RP-BLK, Blue, Factory Reconditioned
• (1) Comfort Seat, Charger, User Manual, Allen Key for assembly and adjustment

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