nasa voyager 2 probe

• 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

Mission Overview

The twin Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft are exploring where nothing from Earth has flown before. Continuing on their more-than-40-year journey since their 1977 launches, they each are much farther away from Earth and the sun than Pluto. In August 2012, Voyager 1 made the historic entry into interstellar space, the region between stars, filled with material ejected by the death of nearby stars millions of years ago. Voyager 2 entered interstellar space on November 5, 2018 and scientists hope to learn more about this region. Both spacecraft are still sending scientific information about their surroundings through the Deep Space Network, or DSN.

The primary mission was the exploration of Jupiter and Saturn. After making a string of discoveries there — such as active volcanoes on Jupiter's moon Io and intricacies of Saturn's rings — the mission was extended. Voyager 2 went on to explore Uranus and Neptune, and is still the only spacecraft to have visited those outer planets. The adventurers' current mission, the Voyager Interstellar Mission (VIM), will explore the outermost edge of the Sun's domain. And beyond.

Interstellar Mission

The mission objective of the Voyager Interstellar Mission (VIM) is to extend the NASA 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.

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Planetary Voyage

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.

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Launch: Voyager 2 launched on August 20, 1977, from Cape Canaveral, Florida aboard a Titan-Centaur rocket. On September 5, Voyager 1 launched, also from Cape Canaveral aboard a Titan-Centaur rocket.

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What Voyager 1's near-death experience says about the future of space exploration

Scientists recently had to repair the voyager probe from afar. how much longer can they keep it alive, by matthew rozsa.

From more than 15 billion miles away, NASA engineers last April  began repairing a space probe that is headed to the constellation of Ophiucus, though it won't arrive for some 38,000 years. NASA launched Voyager 1 in 1977 and it has already outlived expectations, but the space agency hopes to continue receiving data from the probe until at least 2030. Yet after Voyager 1 experienced a computer glitch in November, it began transmitting incomprehensible data (which isn't entirely unusual for it), prompting NASA to initiate those long-distance fixes.

After some uncertainty if any of it would work, the repairs succeeded . Even better, when Salon spoke with NASA about the problem of fixing distance spacecraft, the experts were optimistic about its future and what it says about space exploration in general.

To understand why, it is first necessary to break down what happened to Voyager 1 in the first place. In November, the space probe sent a signal that did not include any data. Engineers figured out that the issue was either with the flight data subsystem (FDS) or the telemetry modulation unit (TMU). By the last week of February, NASA sent a "poke" to Voyager 1 to prompt the FDS to send a memory readout with data; not only did this succeed, but NASA soon uploaded a separate command that caused Voyager 1 to reply with a full memory readout that helped them identify the specific issue with the FDS.

"The team confirmed that the issue is with the FDS," NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory media relations specialist Calla Cofield told Salon. "A chip responsible for storing 256 words of the FDS memory has a stuck bit (the code is stuck at a 0 or a 1), indicating the part failed, either due to age or due to external particle damage. This section represents about 3% of the FDS memory. The team would need to relocate the portion of the software code stored on the damaged chip."

During the April mission, NASA transmitted a command to the Voyager 1 to both relocate the portion of the impacted FDS software code and redirect references to that code to other places in the spacecraft software. 

"On April 20, the team received engineering data from the spacecraft, indicating that the command was a success," Cofield said. "All indications suggest the spacecraft is fine after five months of no contact." 

The team began once again receiving scientific data from Voyager 1 on May 19, and by June all of the science instruments on Voyager 1 had resumed sending usable data. Even so, Cofield added that "housekeeping [is] still ongoing with the spacecraft."

Of course, this is not the end of the issue; Voyager 1 is not the only space probe out there that may some day require repairs. Currently there are two other space probes that have left the Solar System and remain operational, Voyager 2 and New Horizons. Additionally NASA has sent out two other probes that are now defunct, Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11. Can the lessons which allowed NASA to repair Voyager 1 be applied to these and other distant space craft?

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"All indications suggest the spacecraft is fine after five months of no contact."

"The future is less about repairs than about finding ways to work around problems," Bob Rasmussen, a member of the Voyager flight team, said. "We know several life-limiting factors and have strategies for preserving capability as long as possible. We can’t predict outright failures though, so we need to deal with them as they arise."

This is not to say that Rasmussen is entirely hopeful about NASA's ability to salvage malfunctioning probes. In 2019, the agency had to turn off a heater for the cosmic ray subsystem instrument in Voyager 2 to conserve the probe's power. In April NASA further kept Voyager 2 chugging along by tapping into a small reservoir of backup power that is used to fuel the onboard safety mechanism. By doing this, NASA believes it can keep the craft powered with enough juice that they will not need to shut down a scientific instrument until 2026.

Voyager 1 and 2, meanwhile, are always on the verge of a more lasting breakdown . Even if all of their systems perform optimally going forward, the spacecrafts are still not expected to survive past the 2030s. If anything, the fact that they lasted this long is a testament to the skill and dedication of the 1970s engineers who built them. Unfortunately, there could be a day when more than one of their vital systems simply ceases to properly function.

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  "Worst case is that both can fail at any time," Rasmussen said. "Not all failures are recoverable. For many, we would never be able to tell what happened, because contact would simply cease."

Rasmussen added that the best case scenario is that Voyager 1 continues to function for another five to 10 years. "We have a long-term strategy for gradually reducing activities as power wanes and for using degraded modes of operation," Rasmussen said. "But we also know what happens to best laid plans."

On a tragic note , June was also the month in which Ed Stone, the man who pioneered the Voyager missions and led their missions for half a century, died. In their obituary for former Jet Propulsion Laboratory director, NASA wrote that Stone was "a trailblazer who dared mighty things in space" and "took humanity on a planetary tour of our  solar system  and beyond, sending NASA where no spacecraft had gone before."

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Matthew Rozsa is a staff writer at Salon. He received a Master's Degree in History from Rutgers-Newark in 2012 and was awarded a science journalism fellowship from the Metcalf Institute in 2022.

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Voyager 2 Illuminates Boundary of Interstellar Space

Five new research papers detail Voyager 2's observations since it exited the heliosphere, or the protective bubble of particles and magnetic fields created by our Sun.

One year ago, on Nov. 5, 2018, NASA's Voyager 2 became only the second spacecraft in history to leave the heliosphere - the protective bubble of particles and magnetic fields created by our Sun. At a distance of about 11 billion miles (18 billion kilometers) from Earth - well beyond the orbit of Pluto - Voyager 2 had entered interstellar space, or the region between stars. Today, five new research papers in the journal Nature Astronomy describe what scientists observed during and since Voyager 2's historic crossing.

Each paper details the findings from one of Voyager 2's five operating science instruments: a magnetic field sensor, two instruments to detect energetic particles in different energy ranges and two instruments for studying plasma (a gas composed of charged particles). Taken together, the findings help paint a picture of this cosmic shoreline, where the environment created by our Sun ends and the vast ocean of interstellar space begins.

The Sun's heliosphere is like a ship sailing through interstellar space. Both the heliosphere and interstellar space are filled with plasma, a gas that has had some of its atoms stripped of their electrons. The plasma inside the heliosphere is hot and sparse, while the plasma in interstellar space is colder and denser. The space between stars also contains cosmic rays, or particles accelerated by exploding stars. Voyager 1 discovered that the heliosphere protects Earth and the other planets from more than 70% of that radiation.

When Voyager 2 exited the heliosphere last year , scientists announced that its two energetic particle detectors noticed dramatic changes: The rate of heliospheric particles detected by the instruments plummeted, while the rate of cosmic rays (which typically have higher energies than the heliospheric particles) increased dramatically and remained high. The changes confirmed that the probe had entered a new region of space.

Before Voyager 1 reached the edge of the heliosphere in 2012, scientists didn't know exactly how far this boundary was from the Sun. The two probes exited the heliosphere at different locations and also at different times in the constantly repeating, approximately 11-year solar cycle, over the course of which the Sun goes through a period of high and low activity. Scientists expected that the edge of the heliosphere, called the heliopause, can move as the Sun's activity changes, sort of like a lung expanding and contracting with breath. This was consistent with the fact that the two probes encountered the heliopause at different distances from the Sun.

The new papers now confirm that Voyager 2 is not yet in undisturbed interstellar space: Like its twin, Voyager 1, Voyager 2 appears to be in a perturbed transitional region just beyond the heliosphere.

"The Voyager probes are showing us how our Sun interacts with the stuff that fills most of the space between stars in the Milky Way galaxy," said Ed Stone, project scientist for Voyager and a professor of physics at Caltech. "Without this new data from Voyager 2, we wouldn't know if what we were seeing with Voyager 1 was characteristic of the entire heliosphere or specific just to the location and time when it crossed."

Pushing Through Plasma

The two Voyager spacecraft have now confirmed that the plasma in local interstellar space is significantly denser than the plasma inside the heliosphere, as scientists expected. Voyager 2 has now also measured the temperature of the plasma in nearby interstellar space and confirmed it is colder than the plasma inside the heliosphere.

In 2012, Voyager 1 observed a slightly higher-than-expected plasma density just outside the heliosphere, indicating that the plasma is being somewhat compressed. Voyager 2 observed that the plasma outside the heliosphere is slightly warmer than expected, which could also indicate it is being compressed. (The plasma outside is still colder than the plasma inside.) Voyager 2 also observed a slight increase in plasma density just before it exited the heliosphere, indicating that the plasma is compressed around the inside edge of the bubble. But scientists don't yet fully understand what is causing the compression on either side.

Leaking Particles

If the heliosphere is like a ship sailing through interstellar space, it appears the hull is somewhat leaky. One of Voyager's particle instruments showed that a trickle of particles from inside the heliosphere is slipping through the boundary and into interstellar space. Voyager 1 exited close to the very "front" of the heliosphere, relative to the bubble's movement through space. Voyager 2, on the other hand, is located closer to the flank, and this region appears to be more porous than the region where Voyager 1 is located.

Magnetic Field Mystery

An observation by Voyager 2's magnetic field instrument confirms a surprising result from Voyager 1: The magnetic field in the region just beyond the heliopause is parallel to the magnetic field inside the heliosphere. With Voyager 1, scientists had only one sample of these magnetic fields and couldn't say for sure whether the apparent alignment was characteristic of the entire exterior region or just a coincidence. Voyager 2's magnetometer observations confirm the Voyager 1 finding and indicate that the two fields align, according to Stone.

The Voyager probes launched in 1977, and both flew by Jupiter and Saturn. Voyager 2 changed course at Saturn in order to fly by Uranus and Neptune, performing the only close flybys of those planets in history. The Voyager probes completed their Grand Tour of the planets and began their Interstellar Mission to reach the heliopause in 1989. Voyager 1, the faster of the two probes, is currently over 13.6 billion miles (22 billion kilometers) from the Sun, while Voyager 2 is 11.3 billion miles (18.2 billion kilometers) from the Sun. It takes light about 16.5 hours to travel from Voyager 2 to Earth. By comparison, light traveling from the Sun takes about eight minutes to reach Earth.

More information about Voyager is available at the following site:

https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/

News Media Contact

Calla Cofield

Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

626-808-2469

[email protected]

How NASA Fixed Voyager 1 From 15 Billion Miles Away

N ASA engineers say they've fixed a problem that had temporarily halted all but basic communications with Voyager 1, the longest-operating spacecraft in history. As a result of their efforts and ingenuity, the probe has returned to transmitting science and engineering data back to Earth.

The successful fix caps a half-year effort that began in November 2023, when the probe stopped returning readable data. The NASA engineering team responsible for the fix ultimately focused their efforts on one of three computers aboard the unmanned spacecraft.  That problem computer, known as the flight data system (FDS), wasn't correctly communicating with another part of the probe responsible for sending data through the spacecraft's radio transmitter. 

Fixing the issue wasn't as simple as uploading a software update for a smartphone app. The Voyager 1 was launched in 1977, and now the engineers had to work with its half-century old technology.

The team's success extended humanity's furthest mission into space. The Voyager 1 was designed to study magnetic fields and weather as it conducted flybys of Jupiter and Saturn before exiting the heliosphere -- a pocket of space created by the Sun containing its magnetic fields and solar winds -- in 2012. Voyager 1 is currently over 15 billion miles away from home, with a transmission delay of 22.5 hours each way.

NASA teams had to comb through the Voyager 1 systems documentation to develop a patch, while ensuring they didn't cause any further issues. Here's how they did it.

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Identifying The Problem

The journey from identification of the problem to a complete fix took nearly eight months, as per NASA press releases. The Voyager probes send data to Earth via a radio signal containing a single data package that has both the information gathered by the onboard science instruments and the engineering information about the status of the spacecraft. On November 14, 2023, NASA realized that the data sent from Voyager 1 was unreadable. In December 2023, the team tried restarting some of the probe's systems, but that did not solve the problem.

After months of working on a fix, NASA in March 2024 announced its team had made progress with understanding the issue with Voyager 1. On March 1, the team sent a "poke" command to the probe, making its software attempt a variety of sequences that could work around problems they'd identified with its computer. NASA received a response from Voyager on March 3, and after some difficulty decoding it, the teams realized it was a readout of the system's memory. The team was able to devise a solution by analyzing the differences between earlier and current readouts.

In April 2024, NASA said it had found the cause – 3% of the flight data system's memory had been corrupted, causing the abnormal behavior. NASA engineers suspected a single chip holding a part of the computer code had stopped working. Fortunately, they figured out a solution.

Devising And Implementing A Solution

The NASA team was able to move various pieces of code to another location in the memory of the probe's computers. On April 18, the NASA team tested the solution by sending only a part of the fix -- the corrected code responsible for packaging the engineering data -- to its new location in probe computer's memory. When NASA received the probe's response on April 20, engineers learned the fix had worked as intended. Now, the Voyager 1 was correctly transmitting its health and status data. The team then began working on fixes to enable the probe to send back data collected from the science instruments too.

On May 17, a fix for sending science data from two of the four instruments (plasma wave subsystem and magnetometer) was transmitted to the probe, and it was a success. In June, NASA announced that the team had managed to fix the issue with the other two instruments (cosmic ray subsystem and low energy charged particle instrument) in the interim. Additional fixes for problems with the timekeeping software and digital tape recorder were being planned, NASA said. 

Brief History Of The Voyager Spacecraft

This isn't the first issue onboard the Voyager that NASA's team has faced during the probe's  over 40 years in space . For example, last year,  NASA briefly lost contact with Voyager 2  -- Voyager 1's sister probe launched on a different trajectory. NASA's even faced other  data issues with Voyager 1 . Still, both of their missions continue.

The Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are identical spacecraft, with 10 science instruments onboard, six of which on Voyager 1 either stopped working or were deactivated after it flew past Saturn. The two Voyager probes are both now beyond the heliosphere, and are the first spacecraft to get a taste of interstellar space. Voyager 1 left the heliosphere in 2012, while Voyager 2 left in 2018.

Both probes have seen some awesome sights. Both Voyager spacecraft flew past Jupiter and Saturn, showcasing the Great Red Spot on the former and the hexagonal polar vortices of the latter. The two probes also captured data of some of the gas giants' moons (including Ganymede, Io, Europa, Enceladus, Titan, Iapetus, and Tethys), while Voyager 2 flew past Uranus and Neptune. Apart from discoveries about the planets and moons we already knew about, the two probes were also responsible for discovering new moons on each of the planets.

Read the original article on SlashGear .

NASA’s Voyager 2 Probe Enters Interstellar Space

For the second time in history, a human-made object has reached the space between the stars. NASA’s Voyager 2 probe now has exited the heliosphere – the protective bubble of particles and magnetic fields created by the Sun.

Members of NASA’s Voyager team will discuss the findings at a news conference at 11 a.m. EST (8 a.m. PST) today at the meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in Washington. The news conference will stream live on the agency’s website .

Comparing data from different instruments aboard the trailblazing spacecraft, mission scientists determined the probe crossed the outer edge of the heliosphere on Nov. 5. This boundary, called the heliopause, is where the tenuous, hot solar wind meets the cold, dense interstellar medium. Its twin, Voyager 1 , crossed this boundary in 2012, but Voyager 2 carries a working instrument that will provide first-of-its-kind observations of the nature of this gateway into interstellar space.

Voyager 2 now is slightly more than 11 billion miles (18 billion kilometers) from Earth. Mission operators still can communicate with Voyager 2 as it enters this new phase of its journey, but information – moving at the speed of light – takes about 16.5 hours to travel from the spacecraft to Earth. By comparison, light traveling from the Sun takes about eight minutes to reach Earth.

The most compelling evidence of Voyager 2’s exit from the heliosphere came from its onboard Plasma Science Experiment ( PLS ), an instrument that stopped working on Voyager 1 in 1980, long before that probe crossed the heliopause. Until recently, the space surrounding Voyager 2 was filled predominantly with plasma flowing out from our Sun. This outflow, called the solar wind, creates a bubble – the heliosphere – that envelopes the planets in our solar system. The PLS uses the electrical current of the plasma to detect the speed, density, temperature, pressure and flux of the solar wind. The PLS aboard Voyager 2 observed a steep decline in the speed of the solar wind particles on Nov. 5. Since that date, the plasma instrument has observed no solar wind flow in the environment around Voyager 2, which makes mission scientists confident the probe has left the heliosphere.

“Working on Voyager makes me feel like an explorer, because everything we’re seeing is new,” said John Richardson, principal investigator for the PLS instrument and a principal research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. “Even though Voyager 1 crossed the heliopause in 2012, it did so at a different place and a different time, and without the PLS data. So we’re still seeing things that no one has seen before.”

In addition to the plasma data, Voyager’s science team members have seen evidence from three other onboard instruments – the cosmic ray subsystem, the low energy charged particle instrument and the magnetometer – that is consistent with the conclusion that Voyager 2 has crossed the heliopause. Voyager’s team members are eager to continue to study the data from these other onboard instruments to get a clearer picture of the environment through which Voyager 2 is traveling.

“There is still a lot to learn about the region of interstellar space immediately beyond the heliopause,” said Ed Stone, Voyager project scientist based at Caltech in Pasadena, California.

Together, the two Voyagers provide a detailed glimpse of how our heliosphere interacts with the constant interstellar wind flowing from beyond. Their observations complement data from NASA’s Interstellar Boundary Explorer ( IBEX ), a mission that is remotely sensing that boundary. NASA also is preparing an additional mission – the upcoming Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe ( IMAP ), due to launch in 2024 – to capitalize on the Voyagers’ observations.

“Voyager has a very special place for us in our heliophysics fleet,” said Nicola Fox, director of the Heliophysics Division at NASA Headquarters. “Our studies start at the Sun and extend out to everything the solar wind touches. To have the Voyagers sending back information about the edge of the Sun’s influence gives us an unprecedented glimpse of truly uncharted territory.”

While the probes have left the heliosphere, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 have not yet left the solar system, and won’t be leaving anytime soon. The boundary of the solar system is considered to be beyond the outer edge of the Oort Cloud , a collection of small objects that are still under the influence of the Sun’s gravity. The width of the Oort Cloud is not known precisely, but it is estimated to begin at about 1,000 astronomical units (AU) from the Sun and to extend to about 100,000 AU. One AU is the distance from the Sun to Earth. It will take about 300 years for Voyager 2 to reach the inner edge of the Oort Cloud and possibly 30,000 years to fly beyond it.

The Voyager probes are powered using heat from the decay of radioactive material, contained in a device called a radioisotope thermal generator ( RTG ). The power output of the RTGs diminishes by about four watts per year, which means that various parts of the Voyagers, including the cameras on both spacecraft, have been turned off over time to manage power.

“I think we’re all happy and relieved that the Voyager probes have both operated long enough to make it past this milestone,” said Suzanne Dodd, Voyager project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. “This is what we've all been waiting for. Now we’re looking forward to what we’ll be able to learn from having both probes outside the heliopause.”

Voyager 2 launched in 1977, 16 days before Voyager 1, and both have traveled well beyond their original destinations. The spacecraft were built to last five years and conduct close-up studies of Jupiter and Saturn. However, as the mission continued, additional flybys of the two outermost giant planets, Uranus and Neptune, proved possible. 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 Earth. Their two-planet mission became a four-planet mission. Their five-year lifespans have stretched to 41 years, making Voyager 2 NASA’s longest running mission.

The Voyager story has impacted not only generations of current and future scientists and engineers, but also Earth's culture, including film, art and music. Each spacecraft carries a Golden Record of Earth sounds, pictures and messages. Since the spacecraft could last billions of years, these circular time capsules could one day be the only traces of human civilization.

Voyager’s mission controllers communicate with the probes using NASA’s Deep Space Network ( DSN ), a global system for communicating with interplanetary spacecraft. The DSN consists of three clusters of antennas in Goldstone, California; Madrid, Spain; and Canberra, Australia.

The Voyager Interstellar Mission is a part of NASA’s Heliophysics System Observatory, sponsored by the Heliophysics Division of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. JPL built and operates the twin Voyager spacecraft. NASA’s DSN, managed by JPL, is an international network of antennas that supports interplanetary spacecraft missions and radio and radar astronomy observations for the exploration of the solar system and the universe. The network also supports selected Earth-orbiting missions. The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, Australia’s national science agency, operates both the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex, part of the DSN, and the Parkes Observatory, which NASA has been using to downlink data from Voyager 2 since Nov. 8.

For more information about the Voyager mission, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov/voyager

More information about NASA’s Heliophysics missions is available online at:

https://www.nasa.gov/sunearth

News Media Contact

Calla Cofield Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. 626-808-2469 [email protected]

Dwayne Brown / Karen Fox NASA Headquarters, Washington 202-358-1726 / 301-286-6284 [email protected] / [email protected]

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NASA astronauts send Fourth of July message to Earth from ISS (video)

"The Fourth of July always reminds me of the freedoms that we continue to fight for every day, all over the world."

The six NASA astronauts who are living off planet at the moment just beamed a special birthday message down to their home country.

Mike Barratt, Matt Dominick, Tracy Caldwell Dyson, Jeanette Epps, Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore each took a turn at the mic, saying a few words about the Fourth of July from their perch aboard the International Space Station (ISS), about 250 miles (400 kilometers) above Earth.

"The Fourth of July always reminds me of the freedoms that we continue to fight for every day, all over the world," Epps said in the new video , which NASA released on Wednesday (July 3). 

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"For me, the Fourth of July is just a reminder of the fortitude that it took for our forefathers and their families to not only have the will to fight for our freedom, but also the courage to do so," Dyson said.

Barratt came prepared, holding copies of the Declaration of Independence, the first draft of the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

"These are sacred words that every American should be familiar with," Barratt said. 

"They're sacred because they provided a framework for this idea of an independent, multicultural democracy to form and actually function," he added. "And we're still building our more perfect union; everybody knows that. But let's recommit, and, as we do that, let's celebrate the Fourth of July and celebrate the great nation that we live in."

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Barratt, Dominick and Epps came to the ISS in early March on SpaceX's Crew-8 mission . Dyson arrived a few weeks later aboard a Russian Soyuz vehicle. All four are spending about six months aboard the orbiting lab.

Williams and Wilmore are shorter-term residents; they arrived on June 6 on the first-ever crewed flight of Boeing's Starliner capsule. That mission, known as Crew Flight Test (CFT), was expected to last just 10 days or so, but it has been extended multiple times as NASA and Boeing investigate helium leaks and thruster issues that have cropped up on Starliner. There is currently no target departure date for CFT.

The six NASA astronauts aren't the ISS's only current residents. Cosmonauts Nikolai Chub, Alexander Grebenkin and Oleg Kononenko are also living on the ISS, but they did not participate in the July 4 video message.

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].

Michael Wall is a Senior Space Writer with  Space.com  and joined the team in 2010. He primarily covers exoplanets, spaceflight and military space, but has been known to dabble in the space art beat. His book about the search for alien life, "Out There," was published on Nov. 13, 2018. Before becoming a science writer, Michael worked as a herpetologist and wildlife biologist. He has a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology from the University of Sydney, Australia, a bachelor's degree from the University of Arizona, and a graduate certificate in science writing from the University of California, Santa Cruz. To find out what his latest project is, you can follow Michael on Twitter.

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Nasa’s juno gets a close-up look at lava lakes on jupiter’s moon io.

• Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Fire-Breathing Lakes

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Infrared imagery from the solar-powered spacecraft heats up the discussion on the inner workings of Jupiter’s hottest moon.

New findings from NASA’s Juno probe provide a fuller picture of how widespread the lava lakes are on Jupiter’s moon Io and include first-time insights into the volcanic processes at work there. These results come courtesy of Juno’s Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper (JIRAM) instrument, contributed by the Italian Space Agency, which “sees” in infrared light. Researchers published a paper on Juno’s most recent volcanic discoveries on June 20 in the journal Nature Communications Earth and Environment.

Io has intrigued the astronomers since 1610, when Galileo Galilei first discovered the Jovian moon, which is slightly larger than Earth’s Moon. Some 369 years later, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft captured a volcanic eruption on the moon. Subsequent missions to Jupiter , with more Io flybys, discovered additional plumes — along with lava lakes . Scientists now believe Io, which is stretched and squeezed like an accordion by neighboring moons and massive Jupiter itself, is the most volcanically active world in the solar system. But while there are many theories on the types of volcanic eruptions across the surface of the moon, little supporting data exists.

In both May and October 2023, Juno flew by Io, coming within about 21,700 miles (35,000 kilometers) and 8,100 miles (13,000 kilometers), respectively. Among Juno’s instruments getting a good look at the beguiling moon was JIRAM.

Designed to capture the infrared light (which is not visible to the human eye) emerging from deep inside Jupiter, JIRAM probes the weather layer down to 30 to 45 miles (50 to 70 kilometers) below the gas giant’s cloud tops. But during Juno’s extended mission, the mission team has also used the instrument to study the moons Io , Europa , Ganymede , and Callisto. The JIRAM Io imagery showed the presence of bright rings surrounding the floors of numerous hot spots.

“The high spatial resolution of JIRAM’s infrared images, combined with the favorable position of Juno during the flybys, revealed that the whole surface of Io is covered by lava lakes contained in caldera-like features,” said Alessandro Mura, a Juno co-investigator from the National Institute for Astrophysics in Rome. “In the region of Io’s surface in which we have the most complete data, we estimate about 3% of it is covered by one of these molten lava lakes.” (A caldera is a large depression formed when a volcano erupts and collapses.)

JIRAM’s Io flyby data not only highlights the moon’s abundant lava reserves, but also provides a glimpse of what may be going on below the surface. Infrared images of several Io lava lakes show a thin circle of lava at the border, between the central crust that covers most of the lava lake and the lake’s walls. Recycling of melt is implied by the lack of lava flows on and beyond the rim of the lake, indicating that there is a balance between melt that has erupted into the lava lakes and melt that is circulated back into the subsurface system.

“We now have an idea of what is the most frequent type of volcanism on Io: enormous lakes of lava where magma goes up and down,” said Mura. “The lava crust is forced to break against the walls of the lake, forming the typical lava ring seen in Hawaiian lava lakes. The walls are likely hundreds of meters high, which explains why magma is generally not observed spilling out of the paterae” — bowl-shaped features created by volcanism — “and moving across the moon’s surface.”

JIRAM data suggests that most of the surface of these Io hot spots is composed of a rocky crust that moves up and down cyclically as one contiguous surface due to the central upwelling of magma. In this hypothesis, because the crust touches the lake’s walls, friction keeps it from sliding, causing it to deform and eventually break, exposing lava just below the surface.

An alternative hypothesis remains in play: Magma is welling up in the middle of the lake, spreading out and forming a crust that sinks along the rim of the lake, exposing lava.

“We are just starting to wade into the JIRAM results from the close flybys of Io in December 2023 and February 2024,” said Scott Bolton, principal investigator for Juno at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. “The observations show fascinating new information on Io’s volcanic processes. Combining these new results with Juno’s longer-term campaign to monitor and map the volcanoes on Io’s never-before-seen north and south poles, JIRAM is turning out to be one of the most valuable tools to learn how this tortured world works.”

Juno executed its 62nd flyby of Jupiter — which included an Io flyby at an altitude of about 18,175 miles (29,250 kilometers) — on June 13. The 63rd flyby of the gas giant is scheduled for July 16.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages the Juno mission for the principal investigator, Scott Bolton, of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. Juno is part of NASA’s New Frontiers Program, which is managed at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Italian Space Agency (ASI) funded the Jovian InfraRed Auroral Mapper. Lockheed Martin Space in Denver built and operates the spacecraft.

More information about Juno is available at:

https://science.nasa.gov/mission/juno

DC Agle Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. 818-393-9011 [email protected]

Karen Fox / Charles Blue NASA Headquarters 202-385-1287 / 202-802-5345 [email protected]  /  [email protected]

Deb Schmid Southwest Research Institute, San Antonio 210-522-2254 [email protected]

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