when will the voyager 1 die

How the most distant object ever made by humans is spending its dying days

Voyager 1 continues to observe the farthest corners of the solar system—but it may not for long.

By Rahul Rao | Published Apr 28, 2021 4:00 PM EDT

The eyes of the world might be fixed upon Mars, where last week alone, the Ingenuity helicopter took flight and the Perseverance rover made oxygen . But farther—much farther—Voyager 1, one of the oldest space probes and the most distant human-made object from Earth, is still doing science.

The probe is well into the fourth decade of its mission, and it hasn’t come near a planet since it flew past Saturn in 1980. But even as it drifts farther and farther from a dimming sun, it’s still sending information back to Earth, as scientists recently reported in The Astrophysical Journal.

For decades, Voyager has been sailing away at around 11 miles (17 kilometers) every second. Each year, it travels another 3.5 AU (the distance between Earth and the sun) away from us. Now, it’s sending messages home even as it prepares to leave this solar system behind.

There are multiple ways to think about the “edge of the solar system.” One is a boundary region called the heliopause. That’s the frontier where the solar wind (the soup of charged particles continually thrown off by the sun) is too weak to hold off the interstellar medium—the plasma, dust, and radiation that fill the bulk of space.

When Voyager 1 left Earth in 1977, nobody was certain where the heliopause was, according to Bill Kurth , an astrophysicist at the University of Iowa who has been working with Voyager 1 since before it launched. Some scientists then even thought the heliopause was as close as 10 or even 5 AU—around the orbits of Jupiter, which Voyager 1 passed in 1979, or Saturn.

In reality, the heliopause is around 120 AU away. We know this partly because Voyager 1 crossed the heliopause in August 2012, a whole three and a half decades after it departed Earth. That puts the probe well and truly in interstellar space.

[Related: Voyager 2 can finally probe the rarified plasma surrounding our solar system ]

Out here, space is filled with interstellar medium—but you’ll not see very much of it. A cube of air at sea level on Earth contains more than a trillion times as many molecules as an equal-sized cube of even the interstellar medium’s densest parts. The region that Voyager 1 is traversing is sparser still. And for the most part, it’s quiet.

But every few years, as Voyager 1 records more data about the plasma and dust out here, it finds something . For instance, in 2012 and again in 2014, Voyager 1 felt a shock. According to Kurth, what Voyager 1 recorded was a magnetic spike, accompanied by a burst of energetic electrons that caused intense, oscillating electric fields. These shocks are the most distant effects of the sun, rippling outwards even past the heliopause.

What Voyager 1 encountered in 2020 was another jump in magnetic field strength, but without those intense electrical oscillations. Scientists instead think it’s a pressure front, a much more subtle disturbance moving out into the interstellar medium. Voyager 1 previously encountered something like it in 2017.

According to Jon Richardson , an astrophysicist at MIT who wasn’t an author on the paper, this latest finding shows that Voyager 1 is still capable of surprising scientists. Normally, he says, the probe would need to experience a shock in the surrounding plasma to measure its density. But with observations like this one, scientists have found a way to use Voyager 1 to continually monitor that density—over 13 billion miles away from us.

Richardson also says the findings show that Voyager 1 continues to feel the sun’s tendrils, billions of miles past the heliopause. “The sun is still having a major effect,” he says, “far outside the heliosphere.”

Meanwhile, Voyager 1 is still within the sun’s gravitational influence. In about 300 years, scientists expect, Voyager 1 will start to enter the inner edge of the Oort cloud, that shroud of comets which stretches as far as several light-years away.

We’ve never actually seen evidence of the Oort cloud, but sadly, Voyager 1 likely won’t be the one to reveal it. The probe is quite literally living on borrowed time. Plutonium-238, the radioisotope that powers the probe’s generator, has a half-life of about 88 years. 

[Related: Ask Us Anything: What happens to your body when you die in space? ]

As a result, Voyager 1 is starting to lose fuel. Scientists are already having to make choices about which parts of the probe they should keep functional. By the mid-2020s, it’s likely that the probe won’t be able to power even a single instrument.

Still, scientists like Kurth hope they can eke the probe’s life out to 2027, the 50th anniversary of its launch. That, Kurth says, is a milestone that none of Voyager 1’s designers could ever have foreseen.

Rahul Rao is a former intern and contributing science writer for Popular Science since early 2021. He covers physics, space, technology, and their intersections with each other and everything else. Contact the author here.

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The Sun Spot

NASA Engineers Make Progress Toward Understanding Voyager 1 Issue

Since November 2023, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft has been sending a steady radio signal to Earth, but the signal does not contain usable data. The source of the issue appears to be with one of three onboard computers, the flight data subsystem (FDS), which is responsible for packaging the science and engineering data before it’s sent to Earth by the telemetry modulation unit.

On March 3, the Voyager mission team saw activity from one section of the FDS that differed from the rest of the computer’s unreadable data stream. The new signal was still not in the format used by Voyager 1 when the FDS is working properly, so the team wasn’t initially sure what to make of it. But an engineer with the agency’s Deep Space Network, which operates the radio antennas that communicate with both Voyagers and other spacecraft traveling to the Moon and beyond, was able to decode the new signal and found that it contains a readout of the entire FDS memory.

The FDS memory includes its code, or instructions for what to do, as well as variables, or values used in the code that can change based on commands or the spacecraft’s status. It also contains science or engineering data for downlink. The team will compare this readout to the one that came down before the issue arose and look for discrepancies in the code and the variables to potentially find the source of the ongoing issue.

This new signal resulted from a command sent to Voyager 1 on March 1. Called a “poke” by the team, the command is meant to gently prompt the FDS to try different sequences in its software package in case the issue could be resolved by going around a corrupted section.

Because Voyager 1 is more than 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, it takes 22.5 hours for a radio signal to reach the spacecraft and another 22.5 hours for the probe’s response to reach antennas on the ground. So the team received the results of the command on March 3. On March 7, engineers began working to decode the data, and on March 10, they determined that it contains a memory readout.

The team is analyzing the readout. Using that information to devise a potential solution and attempt to put it into action will take time.

News Media Contact Calla  Cofield Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. 626-808-2469 calla.e. cofield @jpl.nasa.gov

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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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Hope returns —

Nasa knows what knocked voyager 1 offline, but it will take a while to fix, "engineers are optimistic they can find a way for the fds to operate normally.".

Stephen Clark - Apr 6, 2024 12:28 am UTC

Engineers have determined why NASA's Voyager 1 probe has been transmitting gibberish for nearly five months, raising hopes of recovering humanity's most distant spacecraft.

Voyager 1, traveling outbound some 15 billion miles (24 billion km) from Earth, started beaming unreadable data down to ground controllers on November 14. For nearly four months, NASA knew Voyager 1 was still alive—it continued to broadcast a steady signal—but could not decipher anything it was saying.

Confirming their hypothesis, engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California confirmed a small portion of corrupted memory caused the problem. The faulty memory bank is located in Voyager 1's Flight Data System (FDS), one of three computers on the spacecraft. The FDS operates alongside a command-and-control central computer and another device overseeing attitude control and pointing.

The FDS duties include packaging Voyager 1's science and engineering data for relay to Earth through the craft's Telemetry Modulation Unit and radio transmitter. According to NASA, about 3 percent of the FDS memory has been corrupted, preventing the computer from carrying out normal operations.

Optimism growing

Suzanne Dodd, NASA's project manager for the twin Voyager probes, told Ars in February that this was one of the most serious problems the mission has ever faced. That is saying something because Voyager 1 and 2 are NASA's longest-lived spacecraft. They launched 16 days apart in 1977, and after flying by Jupiter and Saturn, Voyager 1 is flying farther from Earth than any spacecraft in history. Voyager 2 is trailing Voyager 1 by about 2.5 billion miles, although the probes are heading out of the Solar System in different directions.

Normally, engineers would try to diagnose a spacecraft malfunction by analyzing data it sent back to Earth. They couldn't do that in this case because Voyager 1 has been transmitting data packages manifesting a repeating pattern of ones and zeros. Still, Voyager 1's ground team identified the FDS as the likely source of the problem.

The Flight Data Subsystem was an innovation in computing when it was developed five decades ago. It was the first computer on a spacecraft to use volatile memory. Most of NASA's missions operate with redundancy, so each Voyager spacecraft launched with two FDS computers. But the backup FDS on Voyager 1 failed in 1982.

Due to the Voyagers' age, engineers had to reference paper documents, memos, and blueprints to help understand the spacecraft's design details. After months of brainstorming and planning, teams at JPL uplinked a command in early March to prompt the spacecraft to send back a readout of the FDS memory.

The command worked, and Voyager1 responded with a signal different from the code it had been transmitting since November. After several weeks of meticulous examination of the new code, engineers pinpointed the location of the bad memory.

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

Voyager 1's distance from Earth complicates the troubleshooting effort. The one-way travel time for a radio signal to reach Voyager 1 from Earth is about 22.5 hours, meaning it takes roughly 45 hours for engineers on the ground to learn how the spacecraft responded to their commands.

NASA also must use its largest communications antennas to contact Voyager 1. These 230-foot-diameter (70-meter) antennas are in high demand by many other NASA spacecraft , so the Voyager team has to compete with other missions to secure time for troubleshooting. This means it will take time to get Voyager 1 back to normal operations.

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

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September 12, 2013

Voyager 1 Finally Leaves Solar System—for Real This Time

After much debate over the murky boundary of interstellar space, a solar eruption gives scientists the evidence to say Voyager 1 has finally crossed it

By Clara Moskowitz

Voyager 1 was starting to get a reputation as the spacecraft that cried wolf, after scientists repeatedly claimed it was leaving the solar system, only to change their minds and say it wasn’t quite there yet . Now researchers say new evidence shows Voyager really has departed the sun’s sphere of influence and become the first man-made object to reach interstellar space.

Voyager 1, launched in 1977, is speeding away from us, traveling about 3.5 times the Earth–sun distance every year. The probe is now about 18.2 billion kilometers from Earth, farther away than anything human beings have sent into space. (Its sister spacecraft, Voyager 2, launched more than a month earlier, took a more circuitous path from Earth and is now about 14.8 billion kilometers away.)

Scientists have long been expecting Voyager 1 to exit the bubble of space containing particles from the sun, called the heliosphere, and enter a region where particles are much more plentiful and come from ancient explosions of other stars. But because Voyager 1 has lost its ability to measure this particle plasma, there was no easy way to tell when the transition had occurred .

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A boon came from an eruption on the sun in March 2012, which sent waves of solar material out into space. When this ejection reached Voyager 1 13 months later in April 2013, it set the local plasma vibrating. Voyager 1's plasma wave instrument (separate from the defunct plasma particle detector) was able to measure the pitch of these vibrations, which in turn reflected the density of plasma around the spacecraft. The results show that Voyager 1 is surrounded by plasma more than 40 times denser than it encountered earlier, when it was in the heliosphere. “Because there’s no other possible conclusion, I think we’re forced to and obliged to conclude that we’re truly in the interstellar medium,” physicist Gary Zank of the University of Alabama in Huntsville said during a press conference today.

Based on abrupt changes in the apparent plasma density around the spacecraft, the researchers were even able to pinpoint August 25, 2012 as the most likely date that Voyager 1 left the solar system , crossing the heliopause, the boundary between the heliosphere and the interstellar medium.

The “little spacecraft that could,” in the words of project manager Suzanne Dodd of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., is getting old in years and is technologically weak: the average smartphone has thousands of times more memory than the spacecraft. Yet most of Voyager 1’s instruments still work, and they continue to send signals back to Earth. The team estimates the probe still has enough power from its plutonium power plant to operate all its instruments through 2020, when it will begin shutting them off one by one, until it goes dark in 2025. That still gives Voyager 1 more than a decade to study the realm of the universe it has entered. “It marks the beginning of a new era of exploration for Voyager: the exploration of the space between the stars,” said Ed Stone, Voyager’s longtime project scientist.

The new findings represent a turnaround for the Voyager team, which as recently as June predicted the spacecraft may have years to go before it reached interstellar space. But the latest data remove most of the team members’ doubts, Stone said.

The new report, published online today in Science, also agrees with the conclusions of a separate paper claiming Voyager 1 had left the solar system, based on magnetic field data, which was published August 14 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The lead author of that paper, University of Maryland, College Park, physicist Marc Swisdak, says the two projects are complementary. “I thought the authors make an excellent case for their measurements and their interpretation,” Swisdak says.

Over the course of 36 years, between the two of them, the Voyager probes have visited all the outer planets of the solar system and discovered 23 moons around these worlds. They also each carry time capsules in the form of phonograph records loaded with recordings of music, natural sounds, voice greetings in 56 languages, and photographs and diagrams of life on Earth. Voyager 1 is on a course that should eventually take it within 1.6 light-years of a star called AC+79 3888, which lies in the constellation of Camelopardalis. It’s due to arrive in about 40,000 years, long after the spacecraft loses its ability to tell whomever is on Earth what comes of that encounter.

Interstellar Mission

Voyager 1 reached interstellar space in August 2012 and is the most distant human-made object in existence.

Mission Statistics

Launch Date

Sept. 5, 1977

About the mission

Voyager 1 reached interstellar space in August 2012 and is the most distant human-made object in existence. Launched just shortly after its twin spacecraft, Voyager 2, in 1977, Voyager 1 explored the Jovian and Saturnian systems discovering new moons, active volcanoes and a wealth of data about the outer solar system.

Voyagers 1 and 2 were designed to take advantage of a rare planetary alignment that occurs only once in 176 years and remain the most well traveled spacecraft in history. Both spacecraft carry a sort of time capsule called the Golden Record, a 12-inch gold-plated copper disk containing sounds and images selected to portray the story of our world to extraterrestrials.

Instruments

• Imaging system
• Infrared interferometer spectrometer
• Ultraviolet spectrometer
• Triaxial fluxgate magnetometer
• Plasma spectrometer
• Low-energy charged particles detectors
• Cosmic Ray System (CRS)
• Photopolarimeter System (PPS)
• Plasma Wave System (PWS)

Mission Highlights

Sept. 1, 2013

Interactive 3D model of Voyager 1. View the full interactive experience at Eyes on the Solar System .

NASA's interstellar Voyager 1 spacecraft isn't doing so well — here's what we know

Since late 2023, engineers have been trying to get the Voyager spacecraft back online.

On Dec. 12, 2023, NASA shared some worrisome news about Voyager 1, the first probe to walk away from our solar system 's gravitational party and enter the isolation of interstellar space . Surrounded by darkness, Voyager 1 seems to be glitching. 

It has been out there for more than 45 years, having supplied us with a bounty of treasure like the discovery of two new moons of Jupiter, another incredible ring of Saturn and the warm feeling that comes from knowing pieces of our lives will drift across the cosmos even after we're gone. (See: The Golden Record .) But now, Voyager 1 's fate seems to be uncertain.

As of Feb. 6, NASA said the team remains working on bringing the spacecraft back to proper health. "Engineers are still working to resolve a data issue on Voyager 1," NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said in a post on X (formerly Twitter). "We can talk to the spacecraft, and it can hear us, but it's a slow process given the spacecraft's incredible distance from Earth."

Related: NASA's interstellar Voyager probes get software updates beamed from 12 billion miles away

So, on the bright side, even though Voyager 1 sits so utterly far away from us, ground control can actually communicate with it. In fact, last year, scientists beamed some software updates to the spacecraft as well as its counterpart, Voyager 2 , from billions of miles away. Though on the dimmer side, due to that distance, a single back-and-forth communication between Voyager 1 and anyone on Earth takes a total of 45 hours. If NASA finds a solution, it won't be for some time .

The issue, engineers realized, has to do with one of Voyager 1's onboard computers known as the Flight Data System, or FDS. (The backup FDS stopped working in 1981.)

"The FDS is not communicating properly with one of the probe's subsystems, called the telemetry modulation unit (TMU)," NASA said in a blog post. "As a result, no science or engineering data is being sent back to Earth." This is of course despite the fact that ground control can indeed send information to Voyager 1, which, at the time of writing this article , sits about 162 AU's from our planet. One AU is equal to the distance between the Earth and the sun , or 149,597,870.7 kilometers (92,955,807.3 miles).

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From the beginning 

Voyager 1's FDS dilemma was first noticed last year , after the probe's TMU stopped sending back clear data and started procuring a bunch of rubbish. 

As NASA explains in the blog post, one of the FDS' core jobs is to collect information about the spacecraft itself, in terms of its health and general status. "It then combines that information into a single data 'package' to be sent back to Earth by the TMU," the post says. "The data is in the form of ones and zeros, or binary code." 

However, the TMU seemed to be shuffling back a non-intelligible version of binary code recently. Or, as the team puts it, it seems like the system is "stuck." Yes, the engineers tried turning it off and on again. 

That didn't work. 

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Then, in early February, Suzanne Dodd, Voyager project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told Ars Technica that the team might have pinpointed what's going on with the FDS at last. The theory is that the problem lies somewhere with the FDS' memory; there might be a computer bit that got corrupted. Unfortunately, though, because the FDS and TMU work together to relay information about the spacecraft's health, engineers are having a hard time figuring out where exactly the possible corruption may exist. The messenger is the one that needs a messenger.

They do know, however, that the spacecraft must be alive because they are receiving what's known as a "carrier tone." Carrier tone wavelengths don't carry information, but they are signals nonetheless, akin to a heartbeat. It's also worth considering that Voyager 1 has experienced problems before, such as in 2022 when the probe's "attitude articulation and control system" exhibited some blips that were ultimately patched up. Something similar happened to Voyager 2 during the summer of 2023, when Voyager 1's twin suffered some antenna complications before coming right back online again.

Still, Dodd says this situation has been the most serious since she began working on the historic Voyager mission.

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

Monisha Ravisetti is Space.com's Astronomy Editor. She covers black holes, star explosions, gravitational waves, exoplanet discoveries and other enigmas hidden across the fabric of space and time. Previously, she was a science writer at CNET, and before that, reported for The Academic Times. Prior to becoming a writer, she was an immunology researcher at Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York. She graduated from New York University in 2018 with a B.A. in philosophy, physics and chemistry. She spends too much time playing online chess. Her favorite planet is Earth.

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• Classical Motion There must be more to this story. Let me see if I have this right. They can receive a carrier. But the modulator gives them junk. Or possibly the processor's memory. And they can send new software. New instructions. So, why not simply use the packet data, to key the carrier on and off. OOK On and Off Keying. Telegraphy. Reply

Admin said: NASA's Voyager 1 deep space probe started glitching last year, and scientists aren't sure they can fix it. NASA's interstellar Voyager 1 spacecraft isn't doing so well — here's what we know : Read more

• Classical Motion I wish something would kick one of them back to us. I would love to see an analysis of every cubic cm of it. Reply
• billslugg Modulating the carrier wave would do no good unless the carrier knew what information to send us. The unit that failed takes the raw data and then tells the carrier what to say. Without the modulation unit there is no data to send. Reply

Classical Motion said: I wish something would kick one of them back to us. I would love to see an analysis of every cubic cm of it.

• Classical Motion I read that they were not sure if it was the modulator or the packet memory. The packet buffer. If they can send patch, it's easy to relocate that buffer into another section of memory. This can be done at several different memory locations to verify if it is a memory problem. If that works, then the modulator is ok. If the modulator fails with all those buffers, then it's the modulator. Turn off modulator. Just enable the carrier for a certain duration for a 1 bit. And turn it off for that certain duration for a 0 bit. One simply rotates that buffer string thru the accumulator at the duration rate, and use status flags to key the transmitter. Very simple and very short code. The packet is nothing more that a 128 BYTE or multiple size string of 1s and 0s. OOK is a very common wireless modulation. That's why I commented on more must be going on. And I would like to see what 30 years naked in space does to man molded matter. Reply

Classical Motion said: I read that they were not sure if it was the modulator or the packet memory. The packet buffer. If they can send patch, it's easy to relocate that buffer into another section of memory. This can be done at several different memory locations to verify if it is a memory problem. If that works, then the modulator is ok. If the modulator fails with all those buffers, then it's the modulator. Turn off modulator. Just enable the carrier for a certain duration for a 1 bit. And turn it off for that certain duration for a 0 bit. One simply rotates that buffer string thru the accumulator at the duration rate, and use status flags to key the transmitter. Very simple and very short code. The packet is nothing more that a 128 BYTE or multiple size string of 1s and 0s. OOK is a very common wireless modulation. That's why I commented on more must be going on. And I would like to see what 30 years naked in space does to man molded matter.

• damienassurre I think they should make another space craft and have it pick up voyager 1 and bring it back the info it went through would very valuable to stellar travel Reply

damienassurre said: I think they should make another space craft and have it pick up voyager 1 and bring it back the info it went through would very valuable to stellar travel

• billslugg The newer forms of memory can't be used easily in outer space as their feature size is too small and too easily corrupted by a cosmic ray. Very large, bulky features keep spacecraft memory far smaller than what earthbound computers can enjoy. As far as returning one of the Voyagers to Earth, it would take several thousand years using available technology. Better to wait for more advanced propulsion technologies. Reply
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45 years ago: voyager 1 begins its epic journey to the outer planets and beyond, johnson space center.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The voyage continues…

• 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

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Voyager 1 distance from earth, voyager 1 distance from sun, voyager 1 one-way light time, voyager 1 cosmic ray data, voyager 2 distance from the earth, voyager 2 distance from the sun, voyager 2 one-way light time, voyager 2 cosmic ray data, what's happening now.

Since November 2023, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft has been sending a steady radio signal to Earth, but the signal does not contain usable data.

Engineers are working to resolve an issue with one of Voyager 1’s three onboard computers, called the flight data system (FDS).

The efforts should help extend the lifetimes of the agency's interstellar explorers.

Download the Voyager 40th Anniversary posters.

Voyager 1 briefly came back to life after a 'poke' from NASA, giving scientists hope for the 46-year-old probe

• NASA engineers may have found a clever trick to get Voyager 1 talking in ways engineers understand.
• The probe, showing its age, has been sending back garbled data since November. 
• Engineers sent a "poke" to the aged probe and received a surprising response. 

Voyager 1 has taken to improvising in its old age, making it very difficult to understand what it has to say.

The probe has sent back a steady flow of gibberish since November, worrying scientists trying to capture the final slivers of information from the 46-year-old spacecraft.

Undeterred, NASA engineers have been working to rescue the data. A "poke" sent to Voyager 1's internal systems on March 3 may have brought it back from the brink, NASA announced on Wednesday.

NASA engineers spotted an unusual dataset in the response to their prompt. This may hold the key to deciphering the spacecraft's cryptic signal, the agency said.

The Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 probes have been feeding data about our universe since the late '70s when NASA first launched them.

They remain marvels of engineering — no one expected them to survive longer than five years. But they have continued to send back information about the cosmos, exceeding their lifespan more than nine times over.

Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 hold unique positions in space-exploration history as the only spacecraft to have ventured into interstellar space. Each spacecraft is more than 10 billion miles away from Earth and getting farther every day.

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While their instruments are feeling the weight of their age, NASA has managed to continue squeezing information out of the spacecraft with clever engineering tricks.

This approach has provided an unprecedented glimpse into what happens beyond the sun's reach.

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

The glitch in Voyager 1 data is hardly unexpected. It is only the latest in a series of issues in the probes' systems NASA has had to tackle. Experts have been concerned that repeat malfunctions are signs the probes are entering the last moments of their functional lives.

But NASA appears to have found a solution. Engineers knew Voyager 1's issue seemed to lie with one of the three on-board computers that package the probe's data before sending it to Earth — the flight-data subsystem, or FDS.

The ping to the FDS on March 1 returned a mostly muddled signal on March 3, but it contained some data that "differed from the rest of the computer's unreadable data stream."

One NASA engineer with its Deep Space Network decoded this precious signal, unlocking a "readout" of the FDS's memory that contains instructions and variables the engineers can use to understand what went wrong.

This doesn't mean all is saved.

"The team is analyzing the readout. Using that information to devise a potential solution and attempt to put it into action will take time," NASA said.

Regardless of what happens, the probes' final missions will continue.

Even when they can no longer communicate with Earth, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 will continue to drift through the galaxy, carrying golden records with information about humanity.

The hope is that these could act as interstellar messages for potential intelligent life that may intercept the iconic spacecraft.

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