voyage 1 means

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The most distant human-made object

No spacecraft has gone farther than NASA's Voyager 1. Launched in 1977 to fly by Jupiter and Saturn, Voyager 1 crossed into interstellar space in August 2012 and continues to collect data.

Mission Type

What is Voyager 1?

Voyager 1 has been exploring our solar system for more than 45 years. The probe is now in interstellar space, the region outside the heliopause, or the bubble of energetic particles and magnetic fields from the Sun.

• Voyager 1 was the first spacecraft to cross the heliosphere, the boundary where the influences outside our solar system are stronger than those from our Sun.
• Voyager 1 is the first human-made object to venture into interstellar space.
• Voyager 1 discovered a thin ring around Jupiter and two new Jovian moons: Thebe and Metis.
• At Saturn, Voyager 1 found five new moons and a new ring called the G-ring.

In Depth: Voyager 1

Voyager 1 was launched after Voyager 2, but because of a faster route, it exited the asteroid belt earlier than its twin, having overtaken Voyager 2 on Dec. 15, 1977.

Voyager 1 at Jupiter

Voyager 1 began its Jovian imaging mission in April 1978 at a range of 165 million miles (265 million km) from the planet. Images sent back by January the following year indicated that Jupiter’s atmosphere was more turbulent than during the Pioneer flybys in 1973–1974.

Beginning on January 30, Voyager 1 took a picture every 96 seconds for a span of 100 hours to generate a color timelapse movie to depict 10 rotations of Jupiter. On Feb. 10, 1979, the spacecraft crossed into the Jovian moon system and by early March, it had already discovered a thin (less than 30 kilometers thick) ring circling Jupiter.

Voyager 1’s closest encounter with Jupiter was at 12:05 UT on March 5, 1979 at a range of about 174,000 miles (280,000 km). It encountered several of Jupiter’s Moons, including Amalthea, Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto, returning spectacular photos of their terrain, opening up completely new worlds for planetary scientists.

The most interesting find was on Io, where images showed a bizarre yellow, orange, and brown world with at least eight active volcanoes spewing material into space, making it one of the most (if not the most) geologically active planetary body in the solar system. The presence of active volcanoes suggested that the sulfur and oxygen in Jovian space may be a result of the volcanic plumes from Io which are rich in sulfur dioxide. The spacecraft also discovered two new moons, Thebe and Metis.

Voyager 1 at Saturn

Following the Jupiter encounter, Voyager 1 completed an initial course correction on April 9, 1979 in preparation for its meeting with Saturn. A second correction on Oct. 10, 1979 ensured that the spacecraft would not hit Saturn’s moon Titan.

Its flyby of the Saturn system in November 1979 was as spectacular as its previous encounter. Voyager 1 found five new moons, a ring system consisting of thousands of bands, wedge-shaped transient clouds of tiny particles in the B ring that scientists called “spokes,” a new ring (the “G-ring”), and “shepherding” satellites on either side of the F-ring—satellites that keep the rings well-defined.

During its flyby, the spacecraft photographed Saturn’s moons Titan, Mimas, Enceladus, Tethys, Dione, and Rhea. Based on incoming data, all the moons appeared to be composed largely of water ice. Perhaps the most interesting target was Titan, which Voyager 1 passed at 05:41 UT on November 12 at a range of 2,500 miles (4,000 km). Images showed a thick atmosphere that completely hid the surface. The spacecraft found that the moon’s atmosphere was composed of 90% nitrogen. Pressure ad temperature at the surface was 1.6 atmospheres and 356 °F (–180°C), respectively.

Atmospheric data suggested that Titan might be the first body in the solar system (apart from Earth) where liquid might exist on the surface. In addition, the presence of nitrogen, methane, and more complex hydrocarbons indicated that prebiotic chemical reactions might be possible on Titan.

Voyager 1’s closest approach to Saturn was at 23:46 UT on 12 Nov. 12, 1980 at a range of 78,000 miles(126,000 km).

Voyager 1’s ‘Family Portrait’ Image

Following the encounter with Saturn, Voyager 1 headed on a trajectory escaping the solar system at a speed of about 3.5 AU per year, 35° out of the ecliptic plane to the north, in the general direction of the Sun’s motion relative to nearby stars. Because of the specific requirements for the Titan flyby, the spacecraft was not directed to Uranus and Neptune.

The final images taken by the Voyagers comprised a mosaic of 64 images taken by Voyager 1 on Feb. 14, 1990 at a distance of 40 AU of the Sun and all the planets of the solar system (although Mercury and Mars did not appear, the former because it was too close to the Sun and the latter because Mars was on the same side of the Sun as Voyager 1 so only its dark side faced the cameras).

This was the so-called “pale blue dot” image made famous by Cornell University professor and Voyager science team member Carl Sagan (1934-1996). These were the last of a total of 67,000 images taken by the two spacecraft.

Voyager 1’s Interstellar Mission

All the planetary encounters finally over in 1989, the missions of Voyager 1 and 2 were declared part of the Voyager Interstellar Mission (VIM), which officially began on Jan. 1, 1990.

The goal was to extend NASA’s exploration of the solar system beyond the neighborhood of the outer planets to the outer limits of the Sun’s sphere of influence, and “possibly beyond.” Specific goals include collecting data on the transition between the heliosphere, the region of space dominated by the Sun’s magnetic field and solar field, and the interstellar medium.

On Feb. 17, 1998, Voyager 1 became the most distant human-made object in existence when, at a distance of 69.4 AU from the Sun when it “overtook” Pioneer 10.

On Dec. 16, 2004, Voyager scientists announced that Voyager 1 had reported high values for the intensity for the magnetic field at a distance of 94 AU, indicating that it had reached the termination shock and had now entered the heliosheath.

The spacecraft finally exited the heliosphere and began measuring the interstellar environment on Aug. 25, 2012, the first spacecraft to do so.

On Sept. 5, 2017, NASA marked the 40th anniversary of its launch, as it continues to communicate with NASA’s Deep Space Network and send data back from four still-functioning instruments—the cosmic ray telescope, the low-energy charged particles experiment, the magnetometer, and the plasma waves experiment.

The Golden Record

Each of the Voyagers contain a “message,” prepared by a team headed by Carl Sagan, in the form of a 12-inch (30 cm) diameter gold-plated copper disc for potential extraterrestrials who might find the spacecraft. Like the plaques on Pioneers 10 and 11, the record has inscribed symbols to show the location of Earth relative to several pulsars.

The records also contain instructions to play them using a cartridge and a needle, much like a vinyl record player. The audio on the disc includes greetings in 55 languages, 35 sounds from life on Earth (such as whale songs, laughter, etc.), 90 minutes of generally Western music including everything from Mozart and Bach to Chuck Berry and Blind Willie Johnson. It also includes 115 images of life on Earth and recorded greetings from then U.S. President Jimmy Carter (1924– ) and then-UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim (1918–2007).

By January 2024, Voyager 1 was about 136 AU (15 billion miles, or 20 billion kilometers) from Earth, the farthest object created by humans, and moving at a velocity of about 38,000 mph (17.0 kilometers/second) relative to the Sun.

National Space Science Data Center: Voyager 1

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

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

By Orlando Mayorquin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The mission to Jupiter and Saturn was a success.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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After Months of Gibberish, Voyager 1 Is Communicating Well Again

NASA scientists spent months coaxing the 46-year-old Voyager 1 spacecraft back into healthy communication

By Meghan Bartels

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

NASA/JPL-Caltech

After months of nonsensical transmissions from humanity’s most distant emissary, NASA’s iconic Voyager 1 spacecraft is finally communicating intelligibly with Earth again.

Voyager 1 launched in 1977 , zipped past Jupiter and Saturn within just a few years and has been trekking farther from our sun ever since; the craft crossed into interstellar space in 2012. But in mid-November 2023 Voyager 1’s data transmissions became garbled , sending NASA engineers on a slow quest to troubleshoot the distant spacecraft. Finally, that work has paid off, and NASA has clear information on the probe’s health and status, the agency announced on April 22.

“It’s the most serious issue we’ve had since I’ve been the project manager, and it’s scary because you lose communication with the spacecraft,” said Suzanne Dodd, Voyager project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in an interview with Scientific American when the team was still tracking down the issue.

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The Voyager 1 spacecraft is a scientific legend : It discovered that Jupiter’s moon Io, far from being a dead world like our own companion, is instead a supervolcanic world . The craft’s data suggested that Saturn’s moon Titan might have liquid on its surface. And for more than a decade, Voyager 1 has given scientists a glimpse at what space looks like beyond the influence of our sun.

Yet its long years in the harsh environment of space have done a number on the probe, which was designed to last just four years. In particular, degraded performance and low power supplies have forced NASA to turn off six of its 10 instruments, and its communication has gotten even spottier than can be explained by the fact that cosmic mechanics mean a signal takes nearly one Earth day to travel between humans and the probe.

When the latest communications glitch occurred last fall, scientists could still send signals to the distant probe, and they could tell that the spacecraft was operating. But all they got from Voyager 1 was gibberish—what NASA described in December 2023 as “a repeating pattern of ones and zeros.” The team was able to trace the issue back to a part of the spacecraft’s computer system called the flight data subsystem, or FDS, and identified that a particular chip within that system had failed.

Mission personnel couldn’t repair the chip. They were, however, able to break the code held on the failed chip into pieces they could tuck into spare corners of the FDS’s memory, according to NASA. The first such fix was transmitted to Voyager 1 on April 18. With a total distance of 30 billion miles to cross from Earth to the spacecraft and back, the team had to wait nearly two full days for a response from the probe. But on April 20 NASA got confirmation that the initial fix worked. Additional commands to rewrite the rest of the FDS system’s lost code are scheduled for the coming weeks, according to the space agency, including commands that will restore the spacecraft’s ability to send home science data.

Although, for now, Voyager 1 appears to be on the mend, NASA scientists know it won’t last forever. Sooner or later, a glitch they can’t fix will occur, or the spacecraft’s ever dwindling fuel supply will run out for good. Until then NASA is determined to get as much data as possible out of the venerable spacecraft—and its twin, Voyager 2, which experienced its own communications glitch earlier in 2023 .

Voyager 1 had a problem. Here's how NASA fixed it from 15 billion miles away.

Working from more than 15 billion miles away, NASA engineers have solved a computer problem aboard Voyager 1 , allowing the probe to send readable data five months after a chip error made its transmissions impossible to decipher.

Voyager 1, along with its sister craft, Voyager 2, are  robotic probes  that were launched in 1977. Voyager 1 reached interstellar space in 2012. It's now 15.1 billion miles away, the farthest from Earth a human-made object has ever traveled.

Learn more: Closer look at Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 .

Voyager 2 entered interstellar space − the space between the stars, starting at abou t 11 billion miles from our sun − in 2018. It's now 12.7 billion miles away.

Voyager 1's computer glitch garbled the science and engineering data the craft sends to Earth, which rendered it unreadable. That started on Nov. 14, 2023.

How did engineers fix Voyager's problem?

Engineers from NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory discovered a single computer chip inside the spacecraft’s Flight Data Subsystem – which collects science and engineering information and transmits it to Earth – had malfunctioned.

Can't see our graphics? Click here .

The chip stored part of the Flight Data Subsystem's memory and software code. Engineers could still receive data from Voyager 1, but it was scrambled.

The chip could not be repaired. Instead, engineers moved software code from the chip into a different part of the subsystem's memory system.

The code was too large to to be stored in a single location in the spacecraft. Engineers divided the code into sections and stored them in different places within the subsystem. The code sections were adjusted to make sure they worked as a whole.

Engineers tested the fix by moving a code that transmits data about the spacecraft. They were rewarded with a transmission from Voyager that contained readable data about the craft's status.

All that took time. Voyager is moving about 38,000 mph. Because it's so far away, it takes 22.5 hours for a radio signal to reach Voyager. It takes another 22.5 hours for the spacecraft’s reply to reach antenna networks on Earth.

What happens next?

Engineers will reposition and synchronize the other parts of the code. That should allow Voyager 1 to start sending readable data on what it finds as it moves farther away from Earth.

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

Engineers Investigating NASA’s Voyager 1 Telemetry Data

NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft, shown in this illustration, has been exploring our solar system since 1977, along with its twin, Voyager 2.

While the spacecraft continues to return science data and otherwise operate as normal, the mission team is searching for the source of a system data issue.

The engineering team with NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft is trying to solve a mystery: The interstellar explorer is operating normally, receiving and executing commands from Earth, along with gathering and returning science data. But readouts from the probe’s attitude articulation and control system (AACS) don’t reflect what’s actually happening onboard.

The AACS controls the 45-year-old spacecraft’s orientation. Among other tasks, it keeps Voyager 1’s high-gain antenna pointed precisely at Earth, enabling it to send data home. All signs suggest the AACS is still working, but the telemetry data it’s returning is invalid. For instance, the data may appear to be randomly generated, or does not reflect any possible state the AACS could be in.

The issue hasn’t triggered any onboard fault protection systems, which are designed to put the spacecraft into “safe mode” – a state where only essential operations are carried out, giving engineers time to diagnose an issue. Voyager 1’s signal hasn’t weakened, either, which suggests the high-gain antenna remains in its prescribed orientation with Earth.

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The team will continue to monitor the signal closely as they continue to determine whether the invalid data is coming directly from the AACS or another system involved in producing and sending telemetry data. Until the nature of the issue is better understood, the team cannot anticipate whether this might affect how long the spacecraft can collect and transmit science data.

Voyager 1 is currently 14.5 billion miles (23.3 billion kilometers) from Earth, and it takes light 20 hours and 33 minutes to travel that difference. That means it takes roughly two days to send a message to Voyager 1 and get a response – a delay the mission team is well accustomed to.

“A mystery like this is sort of par for the course at this stage of the Voyager mission,” said Suzanne Dodd, project manager for Voyager 1 and 2 at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “The spacecraft are both almost 45 years old, which is far beyond what the mission planners anticipated. We’re also in interstellar space – a high-radiation environment that no spacecraft have flown in before. So there are some big challenges for the engineering team. But I think if there’s a way to solve this issue with the AACS, our team will find it.”

It’s possible the team may not find the source of the anomaly and will instead adapt to it, Dodd said. If they do find the source, they may be able to solve the issue through software changes or potentially by using one of the spacecraft’s redundant hardware systems.

It wouldn’t be the first time the Voyager team has relied on backup hardware: In 2017, Voyager 1’s primary thrusters showed signs of degradation, so engineers switched to another set of thrusters that had originally been used during the spacecraft’s planetary encounters . Those thrusters worked, despite having been unused for 37 years.

Voyager 1’s twin, Voyager 2 (currently 12.1 billion miles, or 19.5 billion kilometers, from Earth), continues to operate normally.

Launched in 1977, both Voyagers have operated far longer than mission planners expected, and are the only spacecraft to collect data in interstellar space. The information they provide from this region has helped drive a deeper understanding of the heliosphere, the diffuse barrier the Sun creates around the planets in our solar system.

Each spacecraft produces about 4 fewer watts of electrical power a year, limiting the number of systems the craft can run. The mission engineering team has switched off various subsystems and heaters in order to reserve power for science instruments and critical systems. No science instruments have been turned off yet as a result of the diminishing power, and the Voyager team is working to keep the two spacecraft operating and returning unique science beyond 2025.

While the engineers continue to work at solving the mystery that Voyager 1 has presented them, the mission’s scientists will continue to make the most of the data coming down from the spacecraft’s unique vantage point.

More About the Mission

The Voyager spacecraft were built by JPL, which continues to operate both. JPL is a division of Caltech in Pasadena. The Voyager missions are a part of the NASA Heliophysics System Observatory, sponsored by the Heliophysics Division of the Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

For more information about the Voyager spacecraft, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov/voyager

News Media Contact

Calla Cofield

Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

626-808-2469

[email protected]

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

golden record

Where are they now.

• frequently asked questions
• Q&A with Ed Stone

The Voyager Planetary Mission

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

To accomplish their two-planet mission, the spacecraft were built to last five years. But as the mission went on, and with the successful achievement of all its objectives, the additional flybys of the two outermost giant planets, Uranus and Neptune, proved possible -- and irresistible to mission scientists and engineers at the Voyagers' home at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

As the spacecraft flew across the solar system, remote-control reprogramming was used to endow the Voyagers with greater capabilities than they possessed when they left the Earth. Their two-planet mission became four. Their five-year lifetimes stretched to 12 and more.

Eventually, between them, Voyager 1 and 2 would explore all the giant outer planets of our solar system, 48 of their moons, and the unique systems of rings and magnetic fields those planets possess.

Had the Voyager mission ended after the Jupiter and Saturn flybys alone, it still would have provided the material to rewrite astronomy textbooks. But having doubled their already ambitious itineraries, the Voyagers returned to Earth information over the years that has revolutionized the science of planetary astronomy, helping to resolve key questions while raising intriguing new ones about the origin and evolution of the planets in our solar system.

History of the Voyager Mission

The Voyager mission was designed to take advantage of a rare geometric arrangement of the outer planets in the late 1970s and the 1980s which allowed for a four-planet tour for a minimum of propellant and trip time. This layout of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, which occurs about every 175 years, allows a spacecraft on a particular flight path to swing from one planet to the next without the need for large onboard propulsion systems. The flyby of each planet bends the spacecraft's flight path and increases its velocity enough to deliver it to the next destination. Using this "gravity assist" technique, first demonstrated with NASA's Mariner 10 Venus/Mercury mission in 1973-74, the flight time to Neptune was reduced from 30 years to 12.

While the four-planet mission was known to be possible, it was deemed to be too expensive to build a spacecraft that could go the distance, carry the instruments needed and last long enough to accomplish such a long mission. Thus, the Voyagers were funded to conduct intensive flyby studies of Jupiter and Saturn only. More than 10,000 trajectories were studied before choosing the two that would allow close flybys of Jupiter and its large moon Io, and Saturn and its large moon Titan; the chosen flight path for Voyager 2 also preserved the option to continue on to Uranus and Neptune.

From the NASA Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida, Voyager 2 was launched first, on August 20, 1977; Voyager 1 was launched on a faster, shorter trajectory on September 5, 1977. Both spacecraft were delivered to space aboard Titan-Centaur expendable rockets.

The prime Voyager mission to Jupiter and Saturn brought Voyager 1 to Jupiter on March 5, 1979, and Saturn on November 12, 1980, followed by Voyager 2 to Jupiter on July 9, 1979, and Saturn on August 25, 1981.

Voyager 1's trajectory, designed to send the spacecraft closely past the large moon Titan and behind Saturn's rings, bent the spacecraft's path inexorably northward out of the ecliptic plane -- the plane in which most of the planets orbit the Sun. Voyager 2 was aimed to fly by Saturn at a point that would automatically send the spacecraft in the direction of Uranus.

After Voyager 2's successful Saturn encounter, it was shown that Voyager 2 would likely be able to fly on to Uranus with all instruments operating. NASA provided additional funding to continue operating the two spacecraft and authorized JPL to conduct a Uranus flyby. Subsequently, NASA also authorized the Neptune leg of the mission, which was renamed the Voyager Neptune Interstellar Mission.

Voyager 2 encountered Uranus on January 24, 1986, returning detailed photos and other data on the planet, its moons, magnetic field and dark rings. Voyager 1, meanwhile, continues to press outward, conducting studies of interplanetary space. Eventually, its instruments may be the first of any spacecraft to sense the heliopause -- the boundary between the end of the Sun's magnetic influence and the beginning of interstellar space. (Voyager 1 entered Interstellar Space on August 25, 2012.)

Following Voyager 2's closest approach to Neptune on August 25, 1989, the spacecraft flew southward, below the ecliptic plane and onto a course that will take it, too, to interstellar space. Reflecting the Voyagers' new transplanetary destinations, the project is now known as the Voyager Interstellar Mission.

Voyager 1 is now leaving the solar system, rising above the ecliptic plane at an angle of about 35 degrees at a rate of about 520 million kilometers (about 320 million miles) a year. Voyager 2 is also headed out of the solar system, diving below the ecliptic plane at an angle of about 48 degrees and a rate of about 470 million kilometers (about 290 million miles) a year.

Both spacecraft will continue to study ultraviolet sources among the stars, and the fields and particles instruments aboard the Voyagers will continue to search for the boundary between the Sun's influence and interstellar space. The Voyagers are expected to return valuable data for two or three more decades. Communications will be maintained until the Voyagers' nuclear power sources can no longer supply enough electrical energy to power critical subsystems.

The cost of the Voyager 1 and 2 missions -- including launch, mission operations from launch through the Neptune encounter and the spacecraft's nuclear batteries (provided by the Department of Energy) -- is $865 million. NASA budgeted an additional $30 million to fund the Voyager Interstellar Mission for two years following the Neptune encounter.

Voyagers 1 and 2 are identical spacecraft. Each is equipped with instruments to conduct 10 different experiments. The instruments include television cameras, infrared and ultraviolet sensors, magnetometers, plasma detectors, and cosmic-ray and charged-particle sensors. In addition, the spacecraft radio is used to conduct experiments.

The Voyagers travel too far from the Sun to use solar panels; instead, they were equipped with power sources called radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs). These devices, used on other deep space missions, convert the heat produced from the natural radioactive decay of plutonium into electricity to power the spacecraft instruments, computers, radio and other systems.

The spacecraft are controlled and their data returned through the Deep Space Network (DSN), a global spacecraft tracking system operated by JPL for NASA. DSN antenna complexes are located in California's Mojave Desert; near Madrid, Spain; and in Tidbinbilla, near Canberra, Australia.

The Voyager project manager for the Interstellar Mission is George P. Textor of JPL. The Voyager project scientist is Dr. Edward C. Stone of the California Institute of Technology. The assistant project scientist for the Jupiter flyby was Dr. Arthur L. Lane, followed by Dr. Ellis D. Miner for the Saturn, Uranus and Neptune encounters. Both are with JPL.

JUPITER Voyager 1 made its closest approach to Jupiter on March 5, 1979, and Voyager 2 followed with its closest approach occurring on July 9, 1979. The first spacecraft flew within 277,400 kilometers (172,368 miles) of the planet's cloud tops, and Voyager 2 came within 650,180 kilometers (404,003 miles).

Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system, composed mainly of hydrogen and helium, with small amounts of methane, ammonia, water vapor, traces of other compounds and a core of melted rock and ice. Colorful latitudinal bands and atmospheric clouds and storms illustrate Jupiter's dynamic weather system. The giant planet is now known to possess 16 moons. The planet completes one orbit of the Sun each 11.8 years and its day is 9 hours, 55 minutes.

Although astronomers had studied Jupiter through telescopes on Earth for centuries, scientists were surprised by many of the Voyager findings.

The Great Red Spot was revealed as a complex storm moving in a counterclockwise direction. An array of other smaller storms and eddies were found throughout the banded clouds.

Discovery of active volcanism on the satellite Io was easily the greatest unexpected discovery at Jupiter. It was the first time active volcanoes had been seen on another body in the solar system. Together, the Voyagers observed the eruption of nine volcanoes on Io, and there is evidence that other eruptions occurred between the Voyager encounters.

Plumes from the volcanoes extend to more than 300 kilometers (190 miles) above the surface. The Voyagers observed material ejected at velocities up to a kilometer per second.

Io's volcanoes are apparently due to heating of the satellite by tidal pumping. Io is perturbed in its orbit by Europa and Ganymede, two other large satellites nearby, then pulled back again into its regular orbit by Jupiter. This tug-of-war results in tidal bulging as great as 100 meters (330 feet) on Io's surface, compared with typical tidal bulges on Earth of one meter (three feet).

It appears that volcanism on Io affects the entire jovian system, in that it is the primary source of matter that pervades Jupiter's magnetosphere -- the region of space surrounding the planet influenced by the jovian magnetic field. Sulfur, oxygen and sodium, apparently erupted by Io's many volcanoes and sputtered off the surface by impact of high-energy particles, were detected as far away as the outer edge of the magnetosphere millions of miles from the planet itself.

Europa displayed a large number of intersecting linear features in the low-resolution photos from Voyager 1. At first, scientists believed the features might be deep cracks, caused by crustal rifting or tectonic processes. The closer high-resolution photos from Voyager 2, however, left scientists puzzled: The features were so lacking in topographic relief that as one scientist described them, they "might have been painted on with a felt marker." There is a possibility that Europa may be internally active due to tidal heating at a level one-tenth or less than that of Io. Europa is thought to have a thin crust (less than 30 kilometers or 18 miles thick) of water ice, possibly floating on a 50-kilometer-deep (30-mile) ocean.

Ganymede turned out to be the largest moon in the solar system, with a diameter measuring 5,276 kilometers (3,280 miles). It showed two distinct types of terrain -- cratered and grooved -- suggesting to scientists that Ganymede's entire icy crust has been under tension from global tectonic processes.

Callisto has a very old, heavily cratered crust showing remnant rings of enormous impact craters. The largest craters have apparently been erased by the flow of the icy crust over geologic time. Almost no topographic relief is apparent in the ghost remnants of the immense impact basins, identifiable only by their light color and the surrounding subdued rings of concentric ridges.

A faint, dusty ring of material was found around Jupiter. Its outer edge is 129,000 kilometers (80,000 miles) from the center of the planet, and it extends inward about 30,000 kilometers (18,000 miles).

Two new, small satellites, Adrastea and Metis, were found orbiting just outside the ring. A third new satellite, Thebe, was discovered between the orbits of Amalthea and Io.

Jupiter's rings and moons exist within an intense radiation belt of electrons and ions trapped in the planet's magnetic field. These particles and fields comprise the jovian magnetosphere, or magnetic environment, which extends three to seven million kilometers toward the Sun, and stretches in a windsock shape at least as far as Saturn's orbit -- a distance of 750 million kilometers (460 million miles).

As the magnetosphere rotates with Jupiter, it sweeps past Io and strips away about 1,000 kilograms (one ton) of material per second. The material forms a torus, a doughnut-shaped cloud of ions that glow in the ultraviolet. Some of the torus's heavy ions migrate outward, and their pressure inflates the Jovian magnetosphere, while the more energetic sulfur and oxygen ions fall along the magnetic field into the planet's atmosphere, resulting in auroras.

Io acts as an electrical generator as it moves through Jupiter's magnetic field, developing 400,000 volts across its diameter and generating an electric current of 3 million amperes that flows along the magnetic field to the planet's ionosphere.

SATURN The Voyager 1 and 2 Saturn flybys occurred nine months apart, with the closest approaches falling on November 12 and August 25, 1981. Voyager 1 flew within 64,200 kilometers (40,000 miles) of the cloud tops, while Voyager 2 came within 41,000 kilometers (26,000 miles).

Saturn is the second largest planet in the solar system. It takes 29.5 Earth years to complete one orbit of the Sun, and its day was clocked at 10 hours, 39 minutes. Saturn is known to have at least 17 moons and a complex ring system. Like Jupiter, Saturn is mostly hydrogen and helium. Its hazy yellow hue was found to be marked by broad atmospheric banding similar to but much fainter than that found on Jupiter. Close scrutiny by Voyager's imaging systems revealed long-lived ovals and other atmospheric features generally smaller than those on Jupiter.

Perhaps the greatest surprises and the most puzzles were found by the Voyagers in Saturn's rings. It is thought that the rings formed from larger moons that were shattered by impacts of comets and meteoroids. The resulting dust and boulder- to house-size particles have accumulated in a broad plane around the planet varying in density.

The irregular shapes of Saturn's eight smallest moons indicates that they too are fragments of larger bodies. Unexpected structure such as kinks and spokes were found in addition to thin rings and broad, diffuse rings not observed from Earth. Much of the elaborate structure of some of the rings is due to the gravitational effects of nearby satellites. This phenomenon is most obviously demonstrated by the relationship between the F-ring and two small moons that "shepherd" the ring material. The variation in the separation of the moons from the ring may the ring's kinked appearance. Shepherding moons were also found by Voyager 2 at Uranus.

Radial, spoke-like features in the broad B-ring were found by the Voyagers. The features are believed to be composed of fine, dust-size particles. The spokes were observed to form and dissipate in time-lapse images taken by the Voyagers. While electrostatic charging may create spokes by levitating dust particles above the ring, the exact cause of the formation of the spokes is not well understood.

Winds blow at extremely high speeds on Saturn -- up to 1,800 kilometers per hour (1,100 miles per hour). Their primarily easterly direction indicates that the winds are not confined to the top cloud layer but must extend at least 2,000 kilometers (1,200 miles) downward into the atmosphere. The characteristic temperature of the atmosphere is 95 kelvins.

Saturn holds a wide assortment of satellites in its orbit, ranging from Phoebe, a small moon that travels in a retrograde orbit and is probably a captured asteroid, to Titan, the planet-sized moon with a thick nitrogen-methane atmosphere. Titan's surface temperature and pressure are 94 kelvins (-292 Fahrenheit) and 1.5 atmospheres. Photochemistry converts some atmospheric methane to other organic molecules, such as ethane, that is thought to accumulate in lakes or oceans. Other more complex hydrocarbons form the haze particles that eventually fall to the surface, coating it with a thick layer of organic matter. The chemistry in Titan's atmosphere may strongly resemble that which occurred on Earth before life evolved.

The most active surface of any moon seen in the Saturn system was that of Enceladus. The bright surface of this moon, marked by faults and valleys, showed evidence of tectonically induced change. Voyager 1 found the moon Mimas scarred with a crater so huge that the impact that caused it nearly broke the satellite apart.

Saturn's magnetic field is smaller than Jupiter's, extending only one or two million kilometers. The axis of the field is almost perfectly aligned with the rotation axis of the planet.

URANUS In its first solo planetary flyby, Voyager 2 made its closest approach to Uranus on January 24, 1986, coming within 81,500 kilometers (50,600 miles) of the planet's cloud tops.

Uranus is the third largest planet in the solar system. It orbits the Sun at a distance of about 2.8 billion kilometers (1.7 billion miles) and completes one orbit every 84 years. The length of a day on Uranus as measured by Voyager 2 is 17 hours, 14 minutes.

Uranus is distinguished by the fact that it is tipped on its side. Its unusual position is thought to be the result of a collision with a planet-sized body early in the solar system's history. Given its odd orientation, with its polar regions exposed to sunlight or darkness for long periods, scientists were not sure what to expect at Uranus.

Voyager 2 found that one of the most striking influences of this sideways position is its effect on the tail of the magnetic field, which is itself tilted 60 degrees from the planet's axis of rotation. The magnetotail was shown to be twisted by the planet's rotation into a long corkscrew shape behind the planet.

The presence of a magnetic field at Uranus was not known until Voyager's arrival. The intensity of the field is roughly comparable to that of Earth's, though it varies much more from point to point because of its large offset from the center of Uranus. The peculiar orientation of the magnetic field suggests that the field is generated at an intermediate depth in the interior where the pressure is high enough for water to become electrically conducting.

Radiation belts at Uranus were found to be of an intensity similar to those at Saturn. The intensity of radiation within the belts is such that irradiation would quickly darken (within 100,000 years) any methane trapped in the icy surfaces of the inner moons and ring particles. This may have contributed to the darkened surfaces of the moons and ring particles, which are almost uniformly gray in color.

A high layer of haze was detected around the sunlit pole, which also was found to radiate large amounts of ultraviolet light, a phenomenon dubbed "dayglow." The average temperature is about 60 kelvins (-350 degrees Fahrenheit). Surprisingly, the illuminated and dark poles, and most of the planet, show nearly the same temperature at the cloud tops.

Voyager found 10 new moons, bringing the total number to 15. Most of the new moons are small, with the largest measuring about 150 kilometers (about 90 miles) in diameter.

The moon Miranda, innermost of the five large moons, was revealed to be one of the strangest bodies yet seen in the solar system. Detailed images from Voyager's flyby of the moon showed huge fault canyons as deep as 20 kilometers (12 miles), terraced layers, and a mixture of old and young surfaces. One theory holds that Miranda may be a reaggregration of material from an earlier time when the moon was fractured by an violent impact.

The five large moons appear to be ice-rock conglomerates like the satellites of Saturn. Titania is marked by huge fault systems and canyons indicating some degree of geologic, probably tectonic, activity in its history. Ariel has the brightest and possibly youngest surface of all the Uranian moons and also appears to have undergone geologic activity that led to many fault valleys and what seem to be extensive flows of icy material. Little geologic activity has occurred on Umbriel or Oberon, judging by their old and dark surfaces.

All nine previously known rings were studied by the spacecraft and showed the Uranian rings to be distinctly different from those at Jupiter and Saturn. The ring system may be relatively young and did not form at the same time as Uranus. Particles that make up the rings may be remnants of a moon that was broken by a high-velocity impact or torn up by gravitational effects.

NEPTUNE When Voyager flew within 5,000 kilometers (3,000 miles) of Neptune on August 25, 1989, the planet was the most distant member of the solar system from the Sun. (Pluto once again will become most distant in 1999.)

Neptune orbits the Sun every 165 years. It is the smallest of our solar system's gas giants. Neptune is now known to have eight moons, six of which were found by Voyager. The length of a Neptunian day has been determined to be 16 hours, 6.7 minutes.

Even though Neptune receives only three percent as much sunlight as Jupiter does, it is a dynamic planet and surprisingly showed several large, dark spots reminiscent of Jupiter's hurricane-like storms. The largest spot, dubbed the Great Dark Spot, is about the size of Earth and is similar to the Great Red Spot on Jupiter. A small, irregularly shaped, eastward-moving cloud was observed "scooting" around Neptune every 16 hours or so; this "scooter," as Voyager scientists called it, could be a cloud plume rising above a deeper cloud deck.

Long, bright clouds, similar to cirrus clouds on Earth, were seen high in Neptune's atmosphere. At low northern latitudes, Voyager captured images of cloud streaks casting their shadows on cloud decks below.

The strongest winds on any planet were measured on Neptune. Most of the winds there blow westward, or opposite to the rotation of the planet. Near the Great Dark Spot, winds blow up to 2,000 kilometers (1,200 miles) an hour.

The magnetic field of Neptune, like that of Uranus, turned out to be highly tilted -- 47 degrees from the rotation axis and offset at least 0.55 radii (about 13,500 kilometers or 8,500 miles) from the physical center. Comparing the magnetic fields of the two planets, scientists think the extreme orientation may be characteristic of flows in the interiors of both Uranus and Neptune -- and not the result in Uranus's case of that planet's sideways orientation, or of any possible field reversals at either planet. Voyager's studies of radio waves caused by the magnetic field revealed the length of a Neptunian day. The spacecraft also detected auroras, but much weaker than those on Earth and other planets.

Triton, the largest of the moons of Neptune, was shown to be not only the most intriguing satellite of the Neptunian system, but one of the most interesting in all the solar system. It shows evidence of a remarkable geologic history, and Voyager 2 images showed active geyser-like eruptions spewing invisible nitrogen gas and dark dust particles several kilometers into the tenuous atmosphere. Triton's relatively high density and retrograde orbit offer strong evidence that Triton is not an original member of Neptune's family but is a captured object. If that is the case, tidal heating could have melted Triton in its originally eccentric orbit, and the moon might even have been liquid for as long as one billion years after its capture by Neptune.

An extremely thin atmosphere extends about 800 kilometer (500 miles) above Triton's surface. Nitrogen ice particles may form thin clouds a few kilometers above the surface. The atmospheric pressure at the surface is about 14 microbars, 1/70,000th the surface pressure on Earth. The surface temperature is about 38 kelvins (-391 degrees Fahrenheit) the coldest temperature of any body known in the solar system.

The new moons found at Neptune by Voyager are all small and remain close to Neptune's equatorial plane. Names for the new moons were selected from mythology's water deities by the International Astronomical Union, they are: Naiad, Thalassa, Despina, Galatea, Larissa, Proteus.

Voyager 2 solved many of the questions scientists had about Neptune's rings. Searches for "ring arcs," or partial rings, showed that Neptune's rings actually are complete, but are so diffuse and the material in them so fine that they could not be fully resolved from Earth. From the outermost in, the rings have been designated Adams, Plateau, Le Verrier and Galle.

Interstellar Mission

The spacecraft are continuing to return data about interplanetary space and some of our stellar neighbors near the edges of the Milky Way.

As the Voyagers cruise gracefully in the solar wind, their fields, particles and waves instruments are studying the space around them. In May 1993, scientists concluded that the plasma wave experiment was picking up radio emissions that originate at the heliopause -- the outer edge of our solar system.

The heliopause is the outermost boundary of the solar wind, where the interstellar medium restricts the outward flow of the solar wind and confines it within a magnetic bubble called the heliosphere. The solar wind is made up of electrically charged atomic particles, composed primarily of ionized hydrogen, that stream outward from the Sun.

Exactly where the heliopause is has been one of the great unanswered questions in space physics. By studying the radio emissions, scientists now theorize the heliopause exists some 90 to 120 astronomical units (AU) from the Sun. (One AU is equal to 150 million kilometers (93 million miles), or the distance from the Earth to the Sun.

The Voyagers have also become space-based ultraviolet observatories and their unique location in the universe gives astronomers the best vantage point they have ever had for looking at celestial objects that emit ultraviolet radiation.

The Ultraviolet Spectrometer (UVS) is the only experiment on the scan platform that is still functioning. The scan platform is parked at a fixed position and is not being articulated. The Infrared Spectrometer and Radiometer (IRIS) heater was turned off to save power on Voyager 1 on December 7, 2011. On January 21, 2014 the Scan Platform Supplemental Heater was also turned off to conserve power. The IRIS heater and the Scan Platform Heater were used to keep UVS warm. The UVS temperature has dropped to below the measurement limits of the sensor; however, UVS is still operating. The scientist expect to continue to receive data from the UVS until 2016, at which time the instrument will be turned off to save power.

Yet there are several other fields and particle instruments that can continue to send back data as long as the spacecraft stay alive. They include: the cosmic ray subsystem, the low-energy charge particle instrument, the magnetometer, the plasma subsystem, the plasma wave subsystem and the planetary radio astronomy instrument. Barring any catastrophic events, JPL should be able to retrieve this information for at least the next 20 and perhaps even the next 30 years.

Welcome Back, Voyager

In what is probably the longest-distance tech support operation in history, the Voyager mission team succeeded in hacking their way around some defective memory and convincing their space probe to send sensor data back to earth again . And for the record, Voyager is a 46-year old system at a distance of now 24 billion kilometers, 22.5 light-hours, from the earth.

While the time delay that distance implies must have made for quite a tense couple days of waiting between sending the patch and finding out if it worked, the age of the computers onboard probably actually helped, in a strange way. Because the code is old-school machine language, one absolutely has to know all the memory addresses where each subroutine starts and ends. You don’t call a function like do_something(); but rather by loading an address in memory and jumping to it.

This means that the ground crew, in principle, knows where every instruction lives. If they also knew where all of the busted memory cells were, it would be a “simple” programming exercise to jump around the bad bits, and re-write all of the subroutine calls accordingly if larger chunks had to be moved. By “simple”, I of course mean “incredibly high stakes, and you’d better make sure you’ve got it right the first time.”

In a way, it’s a fantastic testament to simpler systems that they were able to patch their code around the memory holes. Think about trying to do this with a modern operating system that uses address space layout randomization , for instance. Of course, the purpose there is to make hacking directly on the memory harder, and that’s the opposite of what you’d want in a space probe.

Nonetheless, it’s a testament to careful work and clever software hacking that they managed to get Voyager back online. May she send for another 46 years!

59 thoughts on “ Welcome Back, Voyager ”

Amazing hack job by the support team! And what a testament to the engineers who designed Voyager! As a ham radio operator who builds my own gear from scratch, I am astonished that the meager signals transmitted by Voyager can be received here on Earth 24 billion kilometers distant! That is the ultimate record of miles-per-watt. How amazing that Voyager can still generate enough power to stay alive, let alone transmit and receive across 24,000,000,000 kilometers, traveling beyond the solar system.

As an amateur stove operator who cooks my own breakfast from basic ingredients, I am also astonished. Great work NASA. Go Science!

They have several 70+ meter antennas through the world, that helps a lot to catch those signals

It is a classic Finite State Machine situation, given a machine with a known initial State, and not knowing its current state, how can the operator of the machine return it to a state where it’s outputs are intelligible by strategically choosing input states

Well, no. If the program is corrupted then you don’t know what states are even possible.

Activate the reset input.

As I understand it, this thing has a bootloader, and it is hard wired (Literally, by threading a wire though specific cores). The memory that got corrupted was of another type that was susceptible to wear, similar to Flash is now.

No, the CCS/AACS both run on plated wire memory, which is still reprogrammable. Plated wire is just core memory except instead of literal magnetic cores you plate the magnets on the wire, meaning that you can thread things automatically. They don’t need power to retain data, though.

You’re thinking of core rope, which is hard wired, like what Apollo used.

The memory that got corrupted was in the FDS, and it was CMOS RAM: so not flash, but just like normal SRAM (doesn’t need refreshing, does need power).

“Think about trying to do this with a modern operating system…” BADRAM option on GRUB, memmap on the linux kernel options… on windows, you’re probably screwed

Not really.

https://github.com/prsyahmi/BadMemory

If you’re using *nix, your head is likely screwed, too. Linux hits you harder, even. It’s sect like. Windows is honest about being bad, at least.

What on earth are you wobbling on about?

You could write a RTOS for a modern hardware and it will behave pretty much like a C64 hahahaha. It will be just way faster and with way more memory.

I dont know it the hardware itself it would be that reliable tho.

Re: BADRAM. Ah cool! Well that solves that.

Getting around problems that should be solved at a different level.

(E.g power regulator issues on the motherboard causing marginally functional RAM to fail at some places)

>on windows, you’re probably screwed

“Starting in Windows version 19042, bad memory pages are stored in the registry under HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\WHEA\BadPages. In previous versions of Windows, this information is stored in the BCD system store. This list contains the PFNs for all memory pages that the PFA has predicted are likely to fail. When Windows starts, it excludes these memory pages from system use.”

In a system that’s complex enough to have ASLR, it wouldn’t be an issue; the OS would just be told which physical page has the issue and would not map that into the MMU. The application code wouldn’t care.

>trying to do this with a modern operating system Actually its pretty easy… since the kernel knows the exact physical addresses it can simply not allocate anything into that region. Linux has the badram option for example.

>address space layout randomization Please actually read the article you link. It has nothing to do with how (where) things are laid out in the PHYSICAL memory.

“In a way, it’s a fantastic testament to simpler systems that they were able to patch their code around the memory holes. Think about trying to do this with a modern operating system that uses address space layout randomization, for instance. Of course, the purpose there is to make hacking directly on the memory harder, and that’s the opposite of what you’d want in a space probe. ”

There’s another, lesser known technique: using processor registers as a storage. It’s possible to write code in such a way that it can work without any RAM. The most popular example that comes to mind is a diagnostic software meant for the IBM PC 5150. It comes as ROM set and is being installed in place of the PC BIOS.

Also like the dead test cartridge for the C64. Operates only out of the ROM to test the RAM first to make sure it can use the stack before calling subroutines. If it fails, it uses screen flashes to indicate which RAM chip is bad. Pretty smart.

> You don’t call a function like do_something(); but rather by loading an address in memory and jumping to it.

Normally you use an assembler. Which counts instructions for you, and assigns that address a symbolic name like “do_something”.

I don’t think they wrote that thing in raw hex 1802 machine code. You could, but you wouldn’t.

> This means that the ground crew, in principle, knows where every instruction lives.

You know that for any compiled code, too, if you have a decent tool chain. Even with ASLR, you should be able to extract the addresses if you’re authorized. But I don’t think anybody’s going to ASLR embedded code in a space probe, precisely because they might need to do something like this.

I have patched compiled code live in running systems in the field. It’s unforgiving, but it’s not magic.

The real win is that the code is, by necessity, *simple*, and there’s not that much of it.

It wasn’t actually high stakes in the sense that a mistake wouldn’t have really done anything bad. Voyager isolated commanding in one computer, attitude/alignment in another, and flight data in a third.

The issue was with flight data, because it used CMOS. Screwing it up would’ve just meant programming it (via the other computers) again.

HI ! sorry, there’s never been Cosmac1802 on board of both Voyagers !!

True. The Galileo used six of them:

The CPUs of Spacecraft

https://www.cpushack.com/space-craft-cpu.html

The Voyager flight software would have been written around 1975 and had to fit in a few kilowords of RAM. I can guarantee you that no assembler was used, nor did any such thing as a “tool chain” even exist. The programmers almost certainly worked with quadrille pads (or if they were really fancy custom printed worksheets) organized to account for every word, and possibly even every bit, of that RAM. Since it was a real-time system running at kilohertz rates they probably also accounted for instruction processing cycles in some of the more critical routines. The full listing for such a system, ready for markup if necessary, would fit comfortably on a clipboard.

My understanding is that one of the modern Voyager team’s handicaps is that they did not have these detailed handwritten listings. However, after the “poke” experiment part of the response they got was a memory dump, which is probably one of the factors that allowed them to recreate them in enough detail to perform the real fix.

This kind of programming remained common through the early 1980’s because there were lots of embedded systems with just a few kilowords of memory and no runtime human user interface.

The big handicap they have is that they don’t have a working simulator for the FDS, since it, well, broke. The other issue is that I’m pretty sure both the FDS and CCS/AACS are custom processors so yeah, you’re totally right that there’s almost certainly no toolchain since the extant userbase is a total count of 1.

Voyager’s 18-bit CCS command computer was borrowed from the earlier Viking Orbiter. The Orbiter only had a CCS computer (and its backup), no AACS or FDS computers.

Operations on the Voyager spacecraft and Viking Orbiters were done using “sequences”. For example, orient the spacecraft just so, turn on the tape recorder, turn on the camera, wait N seconds, turn off the camera, and turn off the tape recorder. Think of the CCS flight code as a BASH executable and the sequences as shell scripts.

Sequences were designed by sequence engineers. Commonly used sequences were stored online in a library. Sequence engineers designing new sequences could pull in existing sequences from the library in the same way a C program calls C Library functions.

The memory load for a sequence includes (i) the sequence of operations to perform and (ii) the flight software (if not already resident) needed to perform those operations. For example, between planets, you don’t need the camera software loaded. On approaching a planet, the first sequence that uses the camera has to also load the flight software for the camera.

This 1975 paper, “Viking Orbiter Uplink Command Generation and Validation via Simulation”, by Maurice B. McEvoy describes the support software for Viking Orbiter sequencing in some detail. [https://informs-sim.org/wsc75papers/1975_0054.pdf] (There are other papers about Voyager sequencing, but none I’ve found go into as much detail about the software as McEvoy did for Viking.)

Since Voyager uses the same CCS computer as the Orbiter, I assume the same or similar support software could also be borrowed from Viking. (You’ll see similar program names in the Voyager and Orbiter papers with the Orbiter names all having an “O” prefix. The corresponding programs for the Viking Lander had an “L” prefix.)

Anyway, the UNIVAC mainframe-based toolchain described by McEvoy is pretty sophisticated. As noted above, a sequence includes the flight software needed for the operations in the sequence. For a sequence in the library, its flight software is stored as macro-assembly language source. When a finalized sequence is processed into a memory load, all of the new flight software source is assembled and fed to a relocatable linker and loader.

That was for the Viking Orbiter and I assume the same or something similar was done for Voyager sequences.

Voyager’s 18-bit AACS attitude control computer was a modified CCS computer. I don’t know if the modifications required a modified CCS assembler or if the vanilla CCS assembler could have been used.

As you have noted, even with an assembler the programmers would still have been paying close attention to RAM and counting instruction cycles.

The 16-bit FDS computer, as Pat says, was custom-designed. A friend of mine was designing 8080-based hardware and assembly language software using one of those blue-box Intel development systems for NASA in 1977, so I’m pretty sure the Voyager folks at JPL could have written an FDS assembler fairly easily.

All the above being said, a 1995 paper published prior to Voyager 2’s encounter with Uranus, “Voyager Flight Engineering: Preparing for Uranus”, by McLaughlin and Wolff said this: “The AACS and CCS programs were modified without being reassembled as is the case with all AACS and CCS changes since launch.” Interestingly, in addition to in-lab simulations, they also used Voyager 1 as a testbed for some of the planned Voyager 2 operations! [https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/abs/10.2514/6.1985-287] (abstract; the full text can be found if you search around on the internet)

———- “Computers in Spaceflight” by James Tomayko is a good source for the flight computers:

Chapter 5.6, “Viking Computer Systems”, has the details of the CCS computer also used on Voyager. [https://web.archive.org/web/20231123211500/https://history.nasa.gov/computers/Ch5-6.html]

Chapter 6.2, “Voyager – The flying computer center”, has additional information about the CCS and AACS computers and details the FDS computer. [https://web.archive.org/web/20231123211500/https://history.nasa.gov/computers/Ch6-2.html]

Awesome detail! Thanks for all of this.

> The Voyager flight software would have been written around 1975 and had to fit in a few kilowords of RAM. I can guarantee you that no assembler was used, nor did any such thing as a “tool chain” even exist.

You’re thinking of more like 1955. Maybe earlier.

I *wrote* a certain amount of machine code starting in maybe 1979, and spent a lot of time with people who were writing more than I was and had been doing it for a while. Assemblers were commonplace and expected, not anything new or fancy. So were actual compilers, for that matter, although you wouldn’t have used one for a space probe.

Those of us poor hobbyists who didn’t actually have access to assemblers or big enough machines to run them on– a group which did not include NASA– would usually still write out symbolic assembly code and then manually do what an assembler would have done, as opposed to trying to get the whole memory layout right on the first pass.

I knew people who could read various kinds of octal or hex machine code at sight… but even they still tended to annotate both their own code and code that they were reverse-engineering with symbolic instructions… and labels. Often on quadrille pads, actually.

Yes, you did pay attention to bytes, but you tried *really hard* not to put yourself in a position where needing to add or remove a couple of bytes a routine forced you to go through and manually change numbers scattered all over your whole program. If you were going to write a lot of machine-level code, the first thing you’d write would be an assembler. Or, more realistically, you’d get it from whoever sold you the processor.

You did try to give yourself the ability to patch binaries later. You might even tell your assembler to leave some free bytes between routines, rather than leaving all of the unused memory at the end. But that wasn’t actually a very common strategy as far as I could tell.

Working with raw machine code is a royal pain in the ass even if the instruction decoder is really simple. Once people had computers, it didn’t take very long to hit on the idea of making them help with their own programming.

I don’t remember anybody saying “toolchain”, but we had tool chains. And the bit about tool chains was actually about *modern* access to addresses, anyway. The real point is that machine code *is* still patchable, even now and even in code compiled from very high level languages. You can absolutely do it with modern code. That’s how you exploit memory safety bugs.

best OTA update ever. but not signed.

Danger of becoming a bitcoin miner.

so very much lol; thanks for that

A lot of what drove the design constraints of the day is weight. Old stuff was heavy, so there was a limit as to how much you could put on the satellite. If you took an equivalent weight budget and used modern technology you could have several multiples worth of spare everything available should a problem occur, and as others have pointed out have automatic remapping around failures.

It’s almost a 50 year old spacecraft. They had redundancies – they’ve just burned through them already. Both the spacecraft have a *ton* of failed components.

But the good part of this is, that we now have long-timedata about certain parts are lasting.

The next “Voyager” probe could then made with that same technology again, while other parts that didn’t last could be replaced by something else, something more enduring (modern, high-capacity core memory).

Assuming that we (humans) are still able to reproduce 1970s technology 1:1 using the old fabrication processes. Maybe NASA/JPL needs help by other states who still have the “know how” to produce 1970s technology.

(The USA aren’t exactly good at preserving “things”, I’m afraid. Everything old gets trashed, not saved. Storage costs. People rather love to produce cheap and sub-standard, to save money and exploit everyone as much as possible. Quality is too costly, after all. Except for military use. But that’s another story.)

What’s also being needed, of course, is a power source that will last for centuries. Considering the travel time and mission length, that might be a priority.

The RTGs on the Voyagers did last longer than expected, but not as long as the isotope itself possibly could still last. The RTG material itself was sort of a limiting factor, too.

Of course that won’t be happening, though, because “of progress”. People don’t like to set a specific standard into stone, for centuries (data format, transceiver technology).

But that’s exactly what’s being needed for a multi century mission.: The radio stations on earth must keep supporting same type of communication.

Similarly to how Latin was common language for centuries. Or how morse code can still be understood in emergency.

Alas, they won’t do that, I’m afraid. Instead, people will be improving specs on paper over and over again (“it needs to run on Linux!”), the years will be passing by, nothing happens.

In the end, a hundred years have passed by and there still won’t be a successor mission to the Voyagers. Then some catastrophe happens and the space programs will end altogether.

Or, we will see a couple of half-thought-through probes being sent out into deep space who will fail halfway on their mission or the money suddenly is getting short and actibe probes will be abandoned.

That’s just my point of view, of course. I’d love to be proven wrong.

“The USA aren’t exactly good at preserving “things”, I’m afraid. Everything old gets trashed, not saved. Storage costs. People rather love to produce cheap and sub-standard, to save money and exploit everyone as much as possible. Quality is too costly, after all. ”

Germany isn’t that much better in that respect. I ought to know. I’m an American. I’ve lived in Germany now for over 30 years. I am in a position to compare the two countries. There’s crap products there and here.

I’d really appreciate it if you’d cease bashing the USA in every conversation you take part in.

The insanity of saying “USA isn’t exactly good at preserving things” in an article about a 50-year old spacecraft which is still being actively used for science is pretty insane.

Anyone who starts out by saying “why haven’t we been sending out more Voyagers” doesn’t fully understand how amazing those missions are.

In 1964, JPL realized that the planets were going to align in the 1970s *exactly right* to allow sequential gravity assists to hit all the outer planets. This is literally a once-in-a-lifetime setup – the periodicity of that alignment is 175 years. The paper on this was published in 1966.

The Voyager craft were launched in ’77. This means that the US realized the importance and rarity of this mission and funded and built in *11 years* 2 probes that would last almost *50 years* so far.

The Voyager probes aren’t just a testament to engineering. They’re a testament to *humanity itself*.

“The RTGs on the Voyagers did last longer than expected”

What the heck are you talking about? They’re lasting exactly as long as expected. It’s an RTG. It’s not like a battery, you don’t get “lucky” with charge/discharge wear or something. They knew the power curve 30 years ago. They chose to use a few tricks in the power system to buy themselves more time, but that has nothing to do with the RTG.

“In the end, a hundred years have passed by and there still won’t be a successor mission to the Voyagers.”

Golly gee, I wonder why that is! It might have something to do with the fact that the planetary alignment used by the Voyagers *only happens once every 175 years*.

That alignment is what allowed them to get out as far as they did, since that’s how they got the *speed* they did.

I think you may enjoy reading “We are Bob”

IIRC the reason there will never be another Voyager is that the alignment of planets required for Voyager to “slingshot” out of the solar system will not reoccur for 27000 years….

“is probably the longest-distance tech support operation in history”

leave out the ‘probably’ !

> May she send for another 46 years! Voyager’s last message to Earth will be sometime near 2035 (half-life of the power source reducing and distance, AKA “Free Space Path Loss”, being the limiting factors). Unless we launch a massive number of relays to chase after them but the first relay would need a truly massive antenna massive.

But it would be a cool idea for a future probe to the nearest star system, Alpha Centauri (Only 4.246 light years). Send a probe followed by a new relay every few years to keep in touch. Of course they would need to be bunched close enough to allow for multiple relays failing over the duration of the trip there and the duration of the messages being relayed back to earth.

For reference Voyager 1 (traveling at 17.1 kilometers per second; 10.6 miles per second) will only need another 18,050 years until it is 1 light year away from earth! And 19,390 years until Voyager 2 (15.4 kilometers per second; 9.6 miles per second) is 1 light year away from earth!

Voyager’s science team is very clearly aiming for 2027, the 50-year anniversary. I’d imagine they will probably begin staffing down after that because there’s just no science return at that point.

2035 is when they’re expected to run out of power to run a single science instrument. The DSN has enough margin to stay in contact with the Voyagers to a distance of 200 AU, which won’t be reached for another 25 years.

Oh, thanks.

There’s virtually no chance that Voyager could actually reach the 2050s limit, though, since they’ll run out of hydrazine in the 2040s. According to the Voyager Communication document in the Voyager library at GSFC ( https://voyager.gsfc.nasa.gov/Library/ ), estimates for hydrazine for V1/V2 are 2040 and 2048 respectively.

It’s likely that as the science instruments shut down the staffing will drop and they’ll just check in on Voyager periodically as a PR thing, much like they did with Pioneer.

The same data table you referenced also estimates both spacecraft will run out of electrical power in 2023, so I might take those figures with a grain of salt.

That’s nominal power, for all the VIM instruments – they *did* nominally run out of power in ’23.

https://www.theregister.com/2023/04/27/nasa_tweaks_voyager_2s_power/

It’s different for V1 because it lost a scientific instrument earlier anyway so it didn’t matter.

My favorite is not that they are the farthest computers, but they are the longest continuously operating computers. They’ve been up for 50 years without going down once. Sure they step back into a safer operating mode, but they’ve never powered down and stopped completely.

There’s a nice documentary on the remaining Voyager team “it’s quieter in the twilight” on Amazon prime.

And checkout “Good Night Oppy” as well when there, it is about Opportunity on a 90 sols (92.5 Earth days) mission that lasted for 5352 sols (8 Mars years), 5498 days (15 Earth years).

Yeah ..that’s a good one too.

Thanks. Didn’t know about that one and it’s freeview with Amazon Prime.

PBS has a 90-minute 2017 documentary, “The Farthest”, that presents a general overall history of Voyager with a lot of old news clips. A good complement to the lower-key, more personal (and sadder to me) Twilight movie. [https://www.pbs.org/the-farthest/] (Watch for free if you have a local PBS station. If you don’t, there’s a way to search for and select a station – just pick an arbitrary state and choose one of its stations.)

“probably the longest-distance tech support operation in history”

Is the word “probably” really necessary?

I am glad to see Voyager is still out there. I know deep in my heart Voyager is connecting and expanding knowledge of Earth’s existence and place in the Cosmos for the Better of all and not for the worse.

As ever, really enjoying all the experts in the comments section who know better than NASA how their probe works and how they should have done it better.

I have written in machine code on 8086 processors

Would love to know how they diagnosed a faulty bit/block of memory. Fantastic job!

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10 Interesting Facts about the Voyager 1 Probe

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

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

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

Voyager 1 is the furthest space craft from Earth

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

Voyager 1 was originally part of the Mariner 11 program

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

Voyager 1 has three nuclear reactors that generate power

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

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

Voyager 1 discovered the source of Saturn’s excess heat

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

Voyager 1 also discovered volcanoes in the Jovian system

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

Voyager 1 took the first solar system “family portrait”

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

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

Voyager 1 is now officially in outer space

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

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

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

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

Voyager 1 carries a message of love

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NASA's Voyager 1 team is trying to work out why the spacecraft appears to be confused about its location in space, but the mission's distance from Earth makes solving the issue challenging.

The Voyager 1 mission launched in 1977 with a design lifetime of five years. Nearly 45 years and a series of planetary flybys later, the spacecraft is now around 14.5 billion miles (23.3 billion kilometers) from Earth , exploring interstellar space. The spacecraft has made countless discoveries, but has also suffered a number of anomalies and mysteries. The latest of these is junk telemetry data being sent back to Earth .

"We have a problem with the Voyager 1 spacecraft," Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA's associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate, said at a meeting of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine's Space Studies Board on Thursday (June 9), where he offered more details about the situation and what it might mean for the mission.

Voyager at 40 : 40 photos from NASA's epic 'grand tour' mission

While the spacecraft is operating well, messages from the Voyager's Attitude Articulation and Control System, which keeps the spacecraft and its antenna in the proper orientation, are "not reflecting what's actually happening on board," Zurbuchen said.

Getting to the bottom of this confusion is no easy matter, however, due to the vast distance between Earth and Voyager 1, meaning long delays in the time it takes to communicate with Voyager 1, almost making the spacecraft a victim of its longevity. "Imagine you have a conversation with somebody in which you can only say a word every day," Zurbuchen said. "And you only hear back every other day. That's the kind of discussion that we have."

Zurbuchen is confident that the Voyager team will solve the mystery, but noted that the spacecraft cannot continue forever. In addition to the current communications issue, Voyager 1 is also running at much colder temperatures than it was designed to because of the decay of the spacecraft's nuclear power source.

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"I'm not telling you that it's the end of that mission," he emphasized, noting that the team behind the mission has addressed many glitches over Voyager's long life.

"Make no mistake, there were issues, even since I'm at NASA, that really were concerning about Voyager; the team has solved it," he said. "But also, if one day, it's no longer solved, it is an immediate success and we should take out the champagne."

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Andrew is a freelance space journalist with a focus on reporting on China's rapidly growing space sector. He began writing for Space.com in 2019 and writes for SpaceNews, IEEE Spectrum, National Geographic, Sky & Telescope, New Scientist and others. Andrew first caught the space bug when, as a youngster, he saw Voyager images of other worlds in our solar system for the first time. Away from space, Andrew enjoys trail running in the forests of Finland. You can follow him on Twitter  @AJ_FI .

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NASA's Voyager 1 is sending mysterious data from beyond our solar system. Scientists are unsure what it means.

• NASA said Voyager 1 is sending data that doesn't match the spacecraft's movements.
• The veteran spacecraft has been exploring our solar system and interstellar space since 1977.
• It is now 14.5 billion miles away from Earth, making it the most distant human-made object.

NASA's Voyager 1 is continuing its journey beyond our solar system, 45 years after it was launched. But now the veteran spacecraft is sending back strange data, puzzling its engineers.

NASA said on Wednesday that while the probe is still operating properly, readouts from its attitude articulation and control system — AACS for short — don't seem to match the spacecraft's movements and orientation, suggesting the craft is confused about its location in space. The AACS is essential for Voyager to send NASA data about its surrounding interstellar environment as it keeps the craft's antenna pointing right at our planet.

"A mystery like this is sort of par for the course at this stage of the Voyager mission," Suzanne Dodd, a project manager for Voyager 1 and 2 at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a statement . "The spacecraft are both almost 45 years old, which is far beyond what the mission planners anticipated." NASA said Voyager 1's twin, the Voyager 2 probe, is behaving normally.

Related stories

Launched in 1977 to explore the outer planets in our solar system, Voyager 1 has remained operational long past expectations and continues to send information about its journeys back to Earth. The trailblazing craft left our solar system and entered interstellar space in 2012 . It is now 14.5 billion miles away from Earth, making it the most distant human-made object.

NASA said that from what its engineers can tell, Voyager 1's AACS is sending randomly generated data that does not "reflect what's actually happening onboard." But even if system data suggests otherwise, the spacecraft's antenna seems to be properly aligned — it is receiving and executing commands from NASA and sending data back to Earth. It said that so far the system issue hasn't triggered the aging spacecraft to go into "safe mode," during which it carries out only essential operations.

"Until the nature of the issue is better understood, the team cannot anticipate whether this might affect how long the spacecraft can collect and transmit science data," NASA said.

Dodd and her team hope to figure out what's prompting the robot emissary from Earth to send junky data. "There are some big challenges for the engineering team," Dodd said. A major one: It takes light 20 hours and 33 minutes to get to Voyager's current interstellar location, so a round-trip message between the space agency and Voyager takes two days.

"But I think if there's a way to solve this issue with the AACS, our team will find it," Dodd added.

Watch: NASA is flying a $1.5 billion spacecraft into the sun — here's why

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Definition of voyage noun from the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary

• an around-the-world voyage
• a voyage in space
• The Titanic sank on its maiden voyage (= first journey) .
• (figurative) Going to college can be a voyage of self-discovery.
• Darwin’s epic voyage of exploration
• reconnaissance
• Lady Franklin kept a journal during the voyage.
• The ship completed her maiden voyage in May.
• There were mainly scientists on the voyage.
• Bering's voyage of discovery was one of many scientific expeditions in the 18th century.
• The ship began its return voyage to Europe.
• The ship was badly damaged during the voyage from Plymouth.
• They set off on their voyage around the world.
• Writing a biography can be an absorbing voyage of discovery.
• during a/​the voyage
• on a/​the voyage
• voyage from
• a voyage of discovery

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Meaning of voyage in English

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• break-journey
• circumnavigation
• around Robin Hood's barn idiom
• communication
• super-commuting
• transoceanic
• well travelled

voyage | American Dictionary

Translations of voyage.

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a name someone uses instead of their real name, especially on a written work

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Definition of voyage

 (Entry 1 of 2)

Definition of voyage  (Entry 2 of 2)

intransitive verb

transitive verb

• peregrinate

Examples of voyage in a Sentence

These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'voyage.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Word History

Middle English viage, veyage , from Anglo-French veiage , from Late Latin viaticum , from Latin, traveling money, from neuter of viaticus of a journey, from via way — more at way

14th century, in the meaning defined at sense 1

15th century, in the meaning defined at intransitive sense

Phrases Containing voyage

Dictionary entries near voyage.

vox populi vox Dei

voyage charter party

Cite this Entry

“Voyage.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary , Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/voyage. Accessed 3 May. 2024.

Kids Definition

Kids definition of voyage.

Kids Definition of voyage  (Entry 2 of 2)

More from Merriam-Webster on voyage

Nglish: Translation of voyage for Spanish Speakers

Britannica English: Translation of voyage for Arabic Speakers

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[ voi -ij ]

Synonyms: cruise

• a passage through air or space, as a flight in an airplane or space vehicle.
• a journey or expedition from one place to another by land.

the voyages of Marco Polo.

• Obsolete. an enterprise or undertaking.

verb (used without object)

• to make or take a voyage; travel; journey.

verb (used with object)

to voyage the seven seas.

/ ˈvɔɪɪdʒ /

• a journey, travel, or passage, esp one to a distant land or by sea or air
• obsolete. an ambitious project

we will voyage to Africa

Discover More

Derived forms.

• ˈvoyager , noun

Other Words From

• voyag·er noun
• outvoyage verb (used with object) outvoyaged outvoyaging
• re·voyage noun verb revoyaged revoyaging
• un·voyag·ing adjective

Word History and Origins

Origin of voyage 1

Idioms and Phrases

Synonym study, example sentences.

The preserve is such hardy stuff, in fact, that Christopher Columbus packed it alongside salt cod and hardtack on his transatlantic voyages.

Other data do suggest that ancient humans could have deliberately made the voyage to the Ryukyu Islands.

It is unlikely that ancient mariners would have set out on an ocean voyage with a major storm on the horizon, say paleoanthropologist Yousuke Kaifu of the University of Tokyo and colleagues.

Days after the Diamond Princess evacuation, a ship from the same company, the Grand Princess, set sail from San Francisco on another ill-fated voyage.

A statue of its namesake explorer stands in the lobby, near a chart of Cook’s voyages.

It used to carry livestock but sailed its final voyage with a hold full of Syrian men, women, and children.

People might be surprised that during that period “Maiden Voyage,” one of your most well-loved standards, began as a TV jingle.

It has now been revealed that Princess Beatrice will not be among those who will ultimately voyage with Virgin Galactic.

The turbulent waters caused one of his oars to crack, which—without a motor or a sail—can be severely detrimental to his voyage.

The voyage is a new one, certainly for Tambor, but also for Hollywood, in many ways.

Roman Pane who accompanied Columbus on his second voyage alludes to another method of using the herb.

Henry Hudson sailed from Gravesend on his first voyage for the discovery of a northwest passage to India.

I shipped for a voyage to Japan and China, and spent several more years trying to penetrate the forbidden fastnesses of Tibet.

The Swedish boatswain consoled him, and he modified his opinions as the voyage went on.

Capt. Ross sailed from Shetland, on his first voyage for the discovery of the north-west passage.

Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023

Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

Definition of 'voyage'

voyage in American English

Voyage in british english, examples of 'voyage' in a sentence voyage, trends of voyage.

View usage over: Since Exist Last 10 years Last 50 years Last 100 years Last 300 years

In other languages voyage

• American English : voyage / ˈvɔɪɪdʒ /
• Brazilian Portuguese : viagem
• Chinese : 航程
• European Spanish : travesía
• French : voyage
• German : Reise
• Italian : viaggio in nave, nello spazio
• Japanese : 旅
• Korean : 긴 여행
• European Portuguese : viagem
• Spanish : travesía
• Thai : การเดินทาง

Browse alphabetically voyage

• voyage charter
• All ENGLISH words that begin with 'V'

Related terms of voyage

• maiden voyage
• ocean voyage
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