what is the voyager mission

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The Voyager missions

Highlights Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 launched in 1977 and made a grand tour of the solar system's outer planets. They are the only functioning spacecraft in interstellar space, and they are still sending back measurements of the interstellar medium. Each spacecraft carries a copy of the golden record, a missive from Earth to any alien lifeforms that may find the probes in the future.

What are the Voyager missions?

The Voyager program consists of two spacecraft: Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. Voyager 2 was actually launched first, in August 1977, but Voyager 1 was sent on a faster trajectory when it launched about two weeks later. They are the only two functioning spacecraft currently in interstellar space, beyond the environment controlled by the sun.

Voyager 2’s path took it past Jupiter in 1979, Saturn in 1981, Uranus in 1985, and Neptune in 1989. It is the only spacecraft to have visited Uranus or Neptune, and has provided much of the information that we use to characterize them now.

Because of its higher speed and more direct trajectory, Voyager 1 overtook Voyager 2 just a few months after they launched. It visited Jupiter in 1979 and Saturn in 1980. It overtook Pioneer 10 — the only other spacecraft in interstellar space thus far — in 1998 and is now the most distant artificial object from Earth.

How the Voyagers work

The two spacecraft are identical, each with a radio dish 3.7 meters (12 feet) across to transmit data back to Earth and a set of 16 thrusters to control their orientations and point their dishes toward Earth. The thrusters run on hydrazine fuel, but the electronic components of each spacecraft are powered by thermoelectric generators that run on plutonium. Each carries 11 scientific instruments, about half of which were designed just for observing planets and have now been shut off. The instruments that are now off include several cameras and spectrometers to examine the planets, as well as two radio-based experiments. Voyager 2 now has five functioning instruments: a magnetometer, a spectrometer designed to investigate plasmas, an instrument to measure low-energy charged particles and one for cosmic rays, and one that measures plasma waves. Voyager 1 only has four of those, as its plasma spectrometer is broken.

Jupiter findings

Over the course of their grand tours of the solar system, the Voyagers took tens of thousands of images and measurements that significantly changed our understanding of the outer planets.

At Jupiter, they gave us our first detailed ideas of how the planet’s atmosphere moves and evolves, showing that the Great Red Spot was a counter-clockwise rotating storm that interacted with other, smaller storms. They were also the first missions to spot a faint, dusty ring around Jupiter. Finally, they observed some of Jupiter’s moons, discovering Io’s volcanism, finding the linear features on Europa that were among the first hints that it might have an ocean beneath its surface, and granting Ganymede the title of largest moon in the solar system, a superlative that was previously thought to belong to Saturn’s moon Titan.

Saturn findings

Next, each spacecraft flew past Saturn, where they measured the composition and structure of Saturn’s atmosphere , and Voyager 1 also peered into Titan’s thick haze. Its observations led to the idea that Titan might have liquid hydrocarbons on its surface, a hypothesis that has since been verified by other missions. When the two missions observed Saturn’s rings, they found the gaps and waves that are well-known today. Voyager 1 also spotted three previously-unknown moons orbiting Saturn: Atlas, Prometheus, and Pandora.

Uranus and Neptune findings

After this, Voyager 1 headed out of the solar system, while Voyager 2 headed toward Uranus . There, it found 11 previously-unknown moons and two previously-unknown rings. Many of the phenomena it observed on Uranus remained unexplained, such as its unusual magnetic field and an unexpected lack of major temperature changes at different latitudes.

Voyager 2’s final stop, 12 years after it left Earth, was Neptune. When it arrived , it continued its streak of finding new moons with another haul of 6 small satellites, as well as finding rings around Neptune. As it did at Uranus, it observed the planet’s composition and magnetic field. It also found volcanic vents on Neptune’s huge moon Triton before it joined Voyager 1 on the way to interstellar space.

Interstellar space

Interstellar space begins at the heliopause, where the solar wind – a flow of charged particles released by the sun – is too weak to continue pushing against the interstellar medium, and the pressure from the two balances out. Voyager 1 officially entered interstellar space in August 2012, and Voyager 2 joined it  in November 2018.

These exits were instrumental in enabling astronomers to determine where exactly the edge of interstellar space is, something that’s difficult to measure from within the solar system. They showed that interstellar space begins just over 18 billion kilometers (about 11 billion miles) from the sun. The spacecraft continue to send back data on the structure of the interstellar medium.

After its planetary encounters, Voyager 1 took the iconic “Pale Blue Dot” image , showing Earth from about 6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles) away. As of 2021 , Voyager 1 is about 155 astronomical units (14.4 billion miles) from Earth, and Voyager 2 is nearly 129 astronomical units (12 billion miles) away.

The golden records

Each Voyager spacecraft has a golden phonograph record affixed to its side, intended as time capsules from Earth to any extraterrestrial life that might find the probes sometime in the distant future. They are inscribed with a message from Jimmy Carter, the U.S. President at the time of launch, which reads: “This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours.”

The covers of the records have several images inscribed, including visual instructions on how to play them, a map of our solar system’s location with respect to a set of 14 pulsars, and a drawing of a hydrogen atom. They are plated with uranium – its rate of decay will allow any future discoverers of either of the records to calculate when they were created.

The records’ contents were selected by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan. Each contains 115 images, including scientific diagrams of the solar system and its planets, the flora and fauna of Earth, and examples of human culture. There are natural sounds, including breaking surf and birdsong, spoken greetings in 55 languages, an hour of brainwave recordings, and an eclectic selection of music ranging from Beethoven to Chuck Berry to a variety of folk music.

Learn more Voyager Mission Status Bulletin Archives Experience A Message From Earth - Inspired by the Voyager Golden Record Neptune, planet of wind and ice

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Voyager turns 45: What the iconic mission taught us and what's next

Can the first probe to visit Neptune and Uranus make it to its 50th anniversary?

Forty-five years ago, on Aug. 20, 1977, NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on a Titan III-Centaur rocket, embarking on a "grand tour" of the solar system that would include visits to the Jupiter and Saturn systems and would make it the first spacecraft to visit the ice giants Uranus and Neptune and their moons.  

Voyager 2 is now 12.1 billion miles (19.5 billion kilometers) away and still sending back data on the distant and unknown heliopause, and scientists are beginning to wonder how long the iconic space probe can keep going. 

Designed to take advantage of a once-every-176-years alignment in the 1970s that made it possible for spacecraft to take gravity-assist slingshots from planet to planet across the solar system , the Voyager mission consisted of two probes. Voyager 2 was the first to launch, with Voyager 1 following two weeks later. Both carried the famous " Golden Record ," a 12-inch gold-plated copper disc containing sounds and images portraying the diversity of life and culture on Earth . 

Now over 14.5 billion miles (23.3 billion km) away, Voyager 1 is the farthest artificial object from Earth. But Voyager 2 is arguably more iconic because of its incredible multidecade tour of the giant planets. 

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

Voyager's "grand tour"

Though it launched second, Voyager 1 was so called because it was to reach Jupiter and Saturn first — in March 1979 and November 1980, respectively — before exiting the plane of the planets where it took the famous "Pale Blue Dot" photo . Voyager 2 visited four planets: Jupiter in July 1979, Saturn in August 1981, Uranus in January 1986 and Neptune in August 1989. 

"Both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 provided tremendous legacies for planetary exploration," Jonathan Lunine, a planetary scientist and physicist at Cornell University who is working on the Juno , Europa Clipper and James Webb Space Telescope missions, told Space.com. "Not only in what they accomplished in terms of science, but also demonstrating that it was really possible to explore the outer solar system with a couple of spacecraft."

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What did the Voyager probes reveal?

Voyager's discoveries are the stuff of legend among planetary scientists, many of whom still rely on the unique images from the spacecraft's wide-angle and narrow-angle cameras. The probes spotted volcanoes on Jupiter's moon Io , discovered that Jupiter's Great Red Spot is an Earth-size storm and found that the gas giant has faint rings. They studied Saturn's rings ; saw the giant moon Titan's thick, Earth-like atmosphere; and revealed the tiny moon Enceladus to be geologically active. 

Voyager 2 alone then visited Uranus and Neptune. The spacecraft's first-ever images of Uranus revealed dark rings, the planet's tilted magnetic field and its geologically active moon Miranda. Neptune, meanwhile, was also discovered to have rings and many more moons than scientists initially thought. We also got to see Triton , a geologically active moon that is orbiting "backward" and, like Pluto , is now believed to be a captured dwarf planet from the Kuiper Belt .  

Voyager as a catalyst 

In addition to making groundbreaking discoveries, the Voyager mission helped scientists determine what merited deeper exploration. The mission revealed Jupiter to be an incredibly complex planet, thus spurring NASA to launch the Galileo mission in 1989 and the Juno mission in 2011. The Voyager probes' work also helped to inspire the iconic Cassini mission to Saturn.

"Voyager 1's close flyby of Titan was the catalyst for the wonderful Cassini mission to Saturn and its Huygens probe," Lunine said. The Huygens probe landed on the surface of Titan in 2005 and sent back an incredible video . 

Voyager 2 has also been a catalyst for investigations into the role of the ice giant planets — not only in the solar system but also in distant star systems, since most of the exoplanets found so far are roughly the size of Neptune and Uranus. 

Voyager and NASA today 

NASA has spent decades following up on the Voyager missions, and those efforts continue today. The space agency's Dragonfly mission will reach Titan, Saturn's largest moon, in 2034, while Europa Clipper will study Jupiter's ocean moon, first imaged by Voyager, starting in 2030. In April, the National Academies Planetary Science Decadal Survey recommended that NASA send a $4.2 billion Uranus Orbiter and Probe mission to unveil the mysterious ice giant planet and its moons in the 2040s. 

It's the latest mission that's a direct consequence of Voyager 2's brief visit to the Uranus system in January 1986. "Voyager 2's flyby of Uranus was a bull's-eye — it went directly through the plane of the moons' orbits because of the orientation of Uranus' axis to the sun ," Lunine said. That made it unlike flybys at other planets, where the probes were able to visit one moon after another. "Voyager 2 got very brief images from these moons, so they're largely unexplored," Lunine said. 

Ariel and Miranda, in particular, are thought to be ocean worlds and so would be specifically targeted by the Uranus Orbiter and Probe. "It's been 45 years since the launch of Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, and here we are now finally talking about a Uranus Orbiter and Probe mission," Lunine said. "It seems like a long time because these missions take so long to conceive of, fund, build, launch and execute, but it all comes from the intriguing peeks that we got from Voyager 2." 

How long will Voyager last?

Both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 still communicate with NASA's Deep Space Network (which itself was created to communicate with Voyager 2 at Uranus and Neptune), receiving routine commands and occasionally transmitting data to Earth. "We are still getting data from Voyager," Stamatios Krimigis, principal investigator for the Voyager 1 and 2 probes and the Voyager Interstellar Mission, said during a news conference held at COSPAR 22 in July. "We're looking forward to getting data for probably another five or six years."  

— What's next for NASA's Voyager 2 in interstellar space?

— Scientists' predictions for the long-term future of the Voyager Golden Records will blow your mind

— NASA's twin Voyager probes are nearly 45 — and facing some hard decisions  

Around the mid- to late 2020s , the probes' scientific instruments will be entirely switched off, and eventually, the spacecraft will go cold and silent — but their journeys into interstellar space will continue indefinitely. "My motto is, I want to be here after Voyager passes on," said Krimigis, who is in his 80s. "But I'm not sure that's going to happen."  

In around 300 years, Voyager 1 and 2 will enter the Oort cloud , the sphere of comets surrounding the solar system. About 30,000 years later, they'll exit the neighborhood and silently orbit the center of the Milky Way for millions of years. 

Their scientific work may be almost over, but the Voyager spacecraft have only just begun their journeys into the cosmos.

Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook .  

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

Jamie is an experienced science, technology and travel journalist and stargazer who writes about exploring the night sky, solar and lunar eclipses, moon-gazing, astro-travel, astronomy and space exploration. He is the editor of  WhenIsTheNextEclipse.com  and author of  A Stargazing Program For Beginners , and is a senior contributor at Forbes. His special skill is turning tech-babble into plain English.

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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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Science News

‘humanity’s spacecraft’ voyager 1 is back online and still exploring.

After five months of glitching, the spacecraft is talking to Earth again from interstellar space

The Voyager 1 spacecraft (illustrated) is back online after a few months of transmitting garbled data. It’s now poised to continue its exploration of interstellar space.

JPL-Caltech/NASA

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By Ramin Skibba

April 26, 2024 at 11:45 am

After months of challenging trouble-shooting and suspenseful waiting, Voyager 1 is once again talking to Earth.

The aging NASA spacecraft, about 24 billion kilometers from home, began transmitting garbled data in November. On April 20, NASA scientists got the probe back online after uploading new flight software to work around a chunk of onboard computer memory that had failed. They’re now receiving data about the spacecraft’s health and hope to hear from its science instruments again in a few weeks, says Suzanne Dodd, the mission’s project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

That means the iconic craft could be on a path to recovery — and to continue its exploration of interstellar space.

Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 briefly visited Jupiter and Saturn before eventually departing the solar system. It and its twin, Voyager 2, are the longest-operating space probes, now tasked with studying far-flung solar particles and cosmic rays. In particular, the probes have been monitoring the changing of the sun’s magnetic field and the density of plasma beyond the solar system, yielding information about the farthest reaches of the sun’s influence .

“The spacecraft is really remarkable in its longevity. It’s incredible,” Dodd says. “We want to keep Voyager going as long as possible so we have this time record of these changes.”

Voyager 1 and 2, cruising along diverging paths, made history by crossing the heliopause in 2012 and 2018 , respectively ( SN: 9/12/13; SN: 12/10/18 ). At nearly 18 billion kilometers from the sun, that’s long been considered the outer extent of our star’s magnetic field and the solar wind, the boundary before interstellar space.

Since then, Dodd says, the science team has made some surprising findings ( SN: 11/4/19 ). For one, they’ve determined that the heliosphere, the huge bubble of space dominated by the solar wind, might not be spherical but have one or two tails, making it shaped like a comet or a croissant.

And thanks to Voyager, scientists now know that, despite expectations otherwise, the sun’s magnetic field and charged particles actually remain significant even beyond the heliopause, says David McComas, a Princeton University astrophysicist not involved in the mission.

Some theories predicted a serene environment in the distant oceans of interstellar space, but the Voyagers keep passing through waves of charged particles, indicating that the solar magnetic field still holds some sway there. What’s more, the probes’ data have shown how ripples in the field form bubbles at the edge of the solar system, which is more frothy and dynamic than expected.

Other missions have begun building on Voyager’s solar physics research. These include NASA’s Interstellar Boundary Explorer, or IBEX, and the Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe, or IMAP, which is set to launch next year. Earth-orbiting IBEX has been measuring high-energy particles to map the heliosphere for 15 years, whereas IMAP will orbit between the sun and Earth, giving it an uninterrupted view of the sun as it monitors the galactic cosmic rays that manage to filter through the heliosphere.

“There’s a huge synergy between the Voyagers and both IBEX and IMAP,” says McComas, principal investigator of the latter two missions. “We were all really scared when Voyager 1 stopped phoning home.”

It will be decades until another mission could accomplish what the Voyagers have done. NASA’s New Horizons soared by Pluto in 2015 and kept going ( SN:8/9/18 ). It’s heading toward the edge of the solar system, but it’s cruising slowly and will run out of power before it can collect data beyond the heliopause.

The Voyagers can fly forever, but power for their instruments is waning. Over the next few years, NASA will shut some down to conserve energy for the rest.

That means Voyager 1’s days of collecting science data are numbered. “It’s a very beloved mission,” Dodd says. “It’s humanity’s spacecraft, and we need to take care of it.”

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Voyager 1 and 2: The Interstellar Mission

An image of Neptune taken by the Voyager 2 spacecraft. Image credit: NASA

NASA has beautiful photos of every planet in our solar system. We even have images of faraway Neptune , as you can see in the photo above.

Neptune is much too distant for an astronaut to travel there with a camera. So, how do we have pictures from distant locations in our solar system? Our photographers were two spacecraft, called Voyager 1 and Voyager 2!

An artist’s rendering of one of the Voyager spacecraft. Image credit: NASA

The Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft launched from Earth in 1977. Their mission was to explore Jupiter and Saturn —and beyond to the outer planets of our solar system. This was a big task. No human-made object had ever attempted a journey like that before.

The two spacecraft took tens of thousands of pictures of Jupiter and Saturn and their moons. The pictures from Voyager 1 and 2 allowed us to see lots of things for the first time. For example, they captured detailed photos of Jupiter's clouds and storms, and the structure of Saturn's rings .

Image of storms on Jupiter taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft. Image credit: NASA

Voyager 1 and 2 also discovered active volcanoes on Jupiter's moon Io , and much more. Voyager 2 also took pictures of Uranus and Neptune. Together, the Voyager missions discovered 22 moons.

Since then, these spacecraft have continued to travel farther away from us. Voyager 1 and 2 are now so far away that they are in interstellar space —the region between the stars. No other spacecraft have ever flown this far away.

Where will Voyager go next?

Watch this video to find out what's beyond our solar system!

Both spacecraft are still sending information back to Earth. This data will help us learn about conditions in the distant solar system and interstellar space.

The Voyagers have enough fuel and power to operate until 2025 and beyond. Sometime after this they will not be able to communicate with Earth anymore. Unless something stops them, they will continue to travel on and on, passing other stars after many thousands of years.

Each Voyager spacecraft also carries a message. Both spacecraft carry a golden record with scenes and sounds from Earth. The records also contain music and greetings in different languages. So, if intelligent life ever find these spacecraft, they may learn something about Earth and us as well!

A photo of the golden record that was sent into space on both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

More about our universe!

Where does interstellar space begin?

Searching for other planets like ours

Play Galactic Explorer!

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22.5 light hours —

Recoding voyager 1—nasa’s interstellar explorer is finally making sense again, "we're pretty much seeing everything we had hoped for, and that's always good news.”.

Stephen Clark - Apr 23, 2024 5:56 pm UTC

Engineers have partially restored a 1970s-era computer on NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft after five months of long-distance troubleshooting, building confidence that humanity's first interstellar probe can eventually resume normal operations.

Several dozen scientists and engineers gathered Saturday in a conference room at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, or connected virtually, to wait for a new signal from Voyager 1. The ground team sent a command up to Voyager 1 on Thursday to recode part of the memory of the spacecraft's Flight Data Subsystem (FDS) , one of the probe's three computers.

“In the minutes leading up to when we were going to see a signal, you could have heard a pin drop in the room," said Linda Spilker, project scientist for NASA's two Voyager spacecraft at JPL. "It was quiet. People were looking very serious. They were looking at their computer screens. Each of the subsystem (engineers) had pages up that they were looking at, to watch as they would be populated."

Finally, a breakthrough

Launched nearly 47 years ago, Voyager 1 is flying on an outbound trajectory more than 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, and it takes 22-and-a-half hours for a radio signal to cover that distance at the speed of light. This means it takes nearly two days for engineers to uplink a command to Voyager 1 and get a response.

In November, Voyager 1 suddenly stopped transmitting its usual stream of data containing information about the spacecraft's health and measurements from its scientific instruments. Instead, the spacecraft's data stream was entirely unintelligible. Because the telemetry was unreadable, experts on the ground could not easily tell what went wrong. They hypothesized the source of the problem might be in the memory bank of the FDS.

There was a breakthrough last month when engineers sent up a novel command to "poke" Voyager 1's FDS to send back a readout of its memory. This readout allowed engineers to pinpoint the location of the problem in the FDS memory . The FDS is responsible for packaging engineering and scientific data for transmission to Earth.

After a few weeks, NASA was ready to uplink a solution to get the FDS to resume packing engineering data. This data stream includes information on the status of the spacecraft—things like power levels and temperature measurements. This command went up to Voyager 1 through one of NASA's large Deep Space Network antennas Thursday.

Then, the wait for a response. Spilker, who started working on Voyager right out of college in 1977, was in the room when Voyager 1's signal reached Earth Saturday.

"When the time came to get the signal, we could clearly see all of a sudden, boom, we had data, and there were tears and smiles and high fives," she told Ars. "Everyone was very happy and very excited to see that, hey, we're back in communication again with Voyager 1. We're going to see the status of the spacecraft, the health of the spacecraft, for the first time in five months."

Throughout the five months of troubleshooting, Voyager's ground team continued to receive signals indicating the spacecraft was still alive. But until Saturday, they lacked insight into specific details about the status of Voyager 1.

“It’s pretty much just the way we left it," Spilker said. "We're still in the initial phases of analyzing all of the channels and looking at their trends. Some of the temperatures went down a little bit with this period of time that's gone on, but we're pretty much seeing everything we had hoped for. And that's always good news.”

Relocating code

Through their investigation, Voyager's ground team discovered a single chip responsible for storing a portion of the FDS memory stopped working, probably due to either a cosmic ray hit or a failure of aging hardware. This affected some of the computer's software code.

"That took out a section of memory," Spilker said. "What they have to do is relocate that code into a different portion of the memory, and then make sure that anything that uses those codes, those subroutines, know to go to the new location of memory, for access and to run it."

Only about 3 percent of the FDS memory was corrupted by the bad chip, so engineers needed to transplant that code into another part of the memory bank. But no single location is large enough to hold the section of code in its entirety, NASA said.

So the Voyager team divided the code into sections for storage in different places in the FDS. This wasn't just a copy-and-paste job. Engineers needed to modify some of the code to make sure it will all work together. "Any references to the location of that code in other parts of the FDS memory needed to be updated as well," NASA said in a statement.

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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 and Voyager 2

Where are they now.

Both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 have reached "interstellar space" and each continue their unique journey deeper into the cosmos. In NASA's Eyes on the Solar System app, you can see the actual spacecraft trajectories of the Voyagers updated every five minutes.

Mission Status

Instrument status.

Voyager 1 Present Position

Voyager 2 present position, voyager's grand tour: 1977 - today.

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International Edition

Five Things About NASA's Voyager Mission

Here are five things you should know about NASA's twin Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft, the longest continuously-operating spacecraft in deep space.

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