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Nasa’s voyager team focuses on software patch, thrusters.

• Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Thruster Buildup

Patching things up, more about the mission, news media contact.

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

Engineers for NASA’s Voyager mission are taking steps to help make sure both spacecraft, launched in 1977, continue to explore interstellar space for years to come.

One effort addresses fuel residue that seems to be accumulating inside narrow tubes in some of the thrusters on the spacecraft. The thrusters are used to keep each spacecraft’s antenna pointed at Earth. This type of buildup has been observed in a handful of other spacecraft.

The team is also uploading a software patch to prevent the recurrence of a glitch that arose on Voyager 1 last year. Engineers resolved the glitch , and the patch is intended to prevent the issue from occurring again in Voyager 1 or arising in its twin, Voyager 2.

The thrusters on Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are primarily used to keep the spacecraft antennas pointed at Earth in order to communicate. Spacecraft can rotate in three directions – up and down, to the left and right, and around the central axis, like a wheel. As they do this, the thrusters automatically fire and reorient the spacecraft to keep their antennas pointed at Earth.

Propellant flows to the thrusters via fuel lines and then passes through smaller lines inside the thrusters called propellant inlet tubes that are 25 times narrower than the external fuel lines. Each thruster firing adds tiny amounts of propellant residue, leading to gradual buildup of material over decades. In some of the propellant inlet tubes, the buildup is becoming significant. To slow that buildup, the mission has begun letting the two spacecraft rotate slightly farther in each direction before firing the thrusters. This will reduce the frequency of thruster firings.

The adjustments to the thruster rotation range were made by commands sent in September and October, and they allow the spacecraft to move almost 1 degree farther in each direction than in the past. The mission is also performing fewer, longer firings, which will further reduce the total number of firings done on each spacecraft.

The adjustments have been carefully devised to ensure minimal impact on the mission. While more rotating by the spacecraft could mean bits of science data are occasionally lost – akin to being on a phone call where the person on the other end cuts out occasionally – the team concluded the plan will enable the Voyagers to return more data over time.

Engineers can’t know for sure when the thruster propellant inlet tubes will become completely clogged, but they expect that with these precautions, that won’t happen for at least five more years, possibly much longer. The team can take additional steps in the coming years to extend the lifetime of the thrusters even more.

“This far into the mission, the engineering team is being faced with a lot of challenges for which we just don’t have a playbook,” said Linda Spilker, project scientist for the mission as NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “But they continue to come up with creative solutions.”

In 2022, the onboard computer that orients the Voyager 1 spacecraft with Earth began to send back garbled status reports, despite otherwise continuing to operate normally. It took mission engineers months to pinpoint the issue . The attitude articulation and control system (AACS) was misdirecting commands, writing them into the computer memory instead of carrying them out. One of those missed commands wound up garbling the AACS status report before it could reach engineers on the ground.

The team determined the AACS had entered into an incorrect mode; however, they couldn’t determine the cause and thus aren’t sure if the issue could arise again. The software patch should prevent that.

“This patch is like an insurance policy that will protect us in the future and help us keep these probes going as long as possible,” said JPL’s Suzanne Dodd, Voyager project manager. “These are the only spacecraft to ever operate in interstellar space, so the data they’re sending back is uniquely valuable to our understanding of our local universe.”

Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 have traveled more than 15 billion and 12 billion miles from Earth, respectively. At those distances, the patch instructions will take over 18 hours to travel to the spacecraft. Because of the spacecraft’s age and the communication lag time, there’s some risk the patch could overwrite essential code or have other unintended effects on the spacecraft. To reduce those risks, the team has spent months writing, reviewing, and checking the code. As an added safety precaution, Voyager 2 will receive the patch first and serve as a testbed for its twin. Voyager 1 is farther from Earth than any other spacecraft, making its data more valuable.

The team will upload the patch and do a readout of the AACS memory to make sure it’s in the right place on Friday, Oct. 20. If no immediate issues arise, the team will issue a command on Saturday, Oct. 28, to see if the patch is operating as it should.

The Voyager mission was originally scheduled to last only four years, sending both probes past Saturn and Jupiter. NASA extended the mission so that Voyager 2 could visit Uranus and Neptune; it is still the only spacecraft ever to have encountered the ice giants. In 1990, NASA extended the mission again, this time with the goal of sending the probes outside the heliosphere, a protective bubble of particles and magnetic fields created by the Sun. Voyager 1 reached the boundary in 2012, while Voyager 2 (traveling slower and in a different direction than its twin) reached it in 2018.

A division of Caltech in Pasadena, JPL built and operates the Voyager spacecraft. 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

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

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Anti-aging —

Nasa wants the voyagers to age gracefully, so it’s time for a software patch, around a half-dozen full-timers and a few part-timers are keeping voyager alive..

Stephen Clark - Oct 24, 2023 12:15 am UTC

Forty-six years in deep space have taken their toll on NASA's twin Voyager spacecraft. Their antiquated computers sometimes do puzzling things, their thrusters are wearing out, and their fuel lines are becoming clogged. Around half of their science instruments no longer return data, and their power levels are declining.

Still, the lean team of engineers and scientists working on the Voyager program at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory are taking steps to eke out every bit of life from the only two spacecraft flying in interstellar space, the vast volume of dilute gas outside the influence of the Sun's solar wind.

"These are measures that we're trying to take to extend the life of the mission," said Suzanne Dodd, Voyager project manager at JPL, in an interview with Ars.

Voyager's instruments are studying cosmic rays, the magnetic field, and the plasma environment in interstellar space. They're not taking pictures anymore. Both probes have traveled beyond the heliopause, where the flow of particles emanating from the Sun runs into the interstellar medium.

"These two spacecraft are still operating, still returning uniquely valuable science data, and every extra day we get data back is a blessing," Dodd said.

While spacecraft engineers love redundancy, they no longer have the luxury of backups on the Voyagers. That means, in any particular section of the spacecraft, a failure of a single part could bring the mission to a halt.

"Everything on both spacecraft is single-string," Dodd said. "There are not any backup capabilities left. In some cases, we powered off stuff to save power, just to keep the instruments on."

Problem-solving from more than 12 billion miles away

Over the weekend, ground controllers at JPL planned to uplink a software patch to Voyager 2. It's a test before the ground team sends the same patch to Voyager 1 to resolve a problem with one of its onboard computers. This problem first cropped up in 2022, when engineers noticed the computer responsible for orienting the Voyager 1 spacecraft was sending down garbled status reports despite otherwise operating normally. It turns out the computer somehow entered an incorrect mode, according to NASA .

Managers wanted to try the patch on Voyager 2 before transmitting it to Voyager 1, which is flying farther from Earth, deeper into interstellar space. That makes observations of the environment around Voyager 1 more valuable to scientists.

At the same time, engineers have devised a new way to operate the thrusters on both Voyager spacecraft. These small rocket engines—fired autonomously—are necessary to keep the main antenna on each probe pointed at Earth. There's a buildup of propellant residue in the narrow lines that feed hydrazine fuel to the thrusters. NASA says the buildup is "becoming significant" in some of the lines, so engineers beamed up fresh commands to the spacecraft in the last few weeks to allow the probes to rotate slightly further in each direction before firing the thrusters.

This will result in the spacecraft performing fewer, longer firings, each of which adds to the residue in the fuel lines. The downside of this change is that science data transmitted back to Earth could occasionally be lost, but over time, the ground team concluded the plan would allow the Voyagers to return more data, NASA said.

With these steps, engineers expect the propellant inlet tubes won't become completely blocked for at least five more years, and "possibly much longer," NASA said. There are other things engineers could try to further extend the lifetime of the thrusters.

“This far into the mission, the engineering team is being faced with a lot of challenges for which we just don’t have a playbook,” said Linda Spilker, Voyager project scientist at JPL, in a statement. “But they continue to come up with creative solutions.”

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Channel ars technica.

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.

• svg]:stroke-accent-900">

Voyager probes get virtual tune-up to keep decades-long missions going and going

By Andrew Paul

Posted on Oct 23, 2023 2:00 PM EDT

3 minute read

Against all odds and expectations , both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are still going strong after nearly half a century of hurtling through—and far past—the solar system. To help boost the potential for the probes’ continued operations, engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory have beamed out two software updates across the billions of miles separating them from the historic spacecraft. If successful, the pair of interstellar travelers could gain at least another five years’ worth of life, if not more.

On October 20, NASA announced plans to transmit a software patch to protect Voyager 1 and 2 against a glitch that occurred within the former’s system last year. In May 2022, NASA started noticing inaccurate readings coming from Voyager 1’s attitude articulation and control system (AACS). A few months later, engineers determined the AACS was accidentally writing commands into memory instead of actually performing them.

Although engineers successfully resolved an original data issue within Voyager 1 in 2022, the new patch will hopefully ensure such a problem won’t arise again in either probe. Receiving the patch will take over 18 hours to reach transmitters; Voyager 2 will get the patch first to serve as a “testbed for its twin” in case of unintended consequences like accidentally overwriting essential code. Given Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are respectively 15 billion and 12 billion miles from Earth, engineers consider the farther craft’s data more valuable, as it still remains the farthest traveling human-made object. The NASA-JPL team will issue a command on October 28 to test the patch’s efficacy.

[Related: The secret to Voyagers’ spectacular space odyssey .]

The second planned tune-up for Voyager 1 and 2 involves the small thrusters responsible for controlling the probes’ communication antennas. According to NASA, spacecraft can generally rotate in three directions—left and right, up and down, as well as wheellike around a central axis. During these movements, propellant automatically flows through incredibly narrow “inlet tubes” to maintain the antennas’ contact with Earth.

But each time the propellant is used, miniscule residue can stick within the inlet tubings—while not much at first, that buildup is becoming problematic after the Voyager probes’ (many) decades’ of life. To slow the speed of buildup, engineers have edited the probes’ operational commands to allow both craft the ability to rotate nearly 1 degree farther in each available direction. This will reduce how often their thrusters need to fire. When engineers do need to enable thrusters, they now plan to fire them for longer periods of time, thus reducing the overall number of usages. 

[Related: How is Voyager’s vintage technology still flying? ]

“This far into the mission, the engineering team is being faced with a lot of challenges for which we just don’t have a playbook,” Linda Spilker, Voyager mission project scientist, said via NASA’s update . “But they continue to come up with creative solutions.”

Experts estimate both the fuel lines and software adjustments could extend the Voyager program’s lifespan by another five years. According to NASA, however, “additional steps in the coming years to extend the lifetime of the thrusters even more.”

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NASA’s Voyager Team Focuses on Software Patch, Thrusters

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. Traveling on a different trajectory, its twin, Voyager 2, entered interstellar space in 2018.

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

Engineers for NASA’s Voyager mission are taking steps to help make sure both spacecraft, launched in 1977, continue to explore interstellar space for years to come.

One effort addresses fuel residue that seems to be accumulating inside narrow tubes in some of the thrusters on the spacecraft. The thrusters are used to keep each spacecraft’s antenna pointed at Earth. This type of buildup has been observed in a handful of other spacecraft.

The team is also uploading a software patch to prevent the recurrence of a glitch that arose on Voyager 1 last year. Engineers resolved the glitch , and the patch is intended to prevent the issue from occurring again in Voyager 1 or arising in its twin, Voyager 2.

Thruster Buildup

The thrusters on Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are primarily used to keep the spacecraft antennas pointed at Earth in order to communicate. Spacecraft can rotate in three directions – up and down, to the left and right, and around the central axis, like a wheel. As they do this, the thrusters automatically fire and reorient the spacecraft to keep their antennas pointed at Earth.

Propellant flows to the thrusters via fuel lines and then passes through smaller lines inside the thrusters called propellant inlet tubes that are 25 times narrower than the external fuel lines. Each thruster firing adds tiny amounts of propellant residue, leading to gradual buildup of material over decades. In some of the propellant inlet tubes, the buildup is becoming significant. To slow that buildup, the mission has begun letting the two spacecraft rotate slightly farther in each direction before firing the thrusters. This will reduce the frequency of thruster firings.

The adjustments to the thruster rotation range were made by commands sent in September and October, and they allow the spacecraft to move almost 1 degree farther in each direction than in the past. The mission is also performing fewer, longer firings, which will further reduce the total number of firings done on each spacecraft.

The adjustments have been carefully devised to ensure minimal impact on the mission. While more rotating by the spacecraft could mean bits of science data are occasionally lost – akin to being on a phone call where the person on the other end cuts out occasionally – the team concluded the plan will enable the Voyagers to return more data over time.

Get the Latest JPL News

Engineers can’t know for sure when the thruster propellant inlet tubes will become completely clogged, but they expect that with these precautions, that won’t happen for at least five more years, possibly much longer. The team can take additional steps in the coming years to extend the lifetime of the thrusters even more.

“This far into the mission, the engineering team is being faced with a lot of challenges for which we just don’t have a playbook,” said Linda Spilker, project scientist for the mission as NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “But they continue to come up with creative solutions.”

Patching Things Up

In 2022, the onboard computer that orients the Voyager 1 spacecraft with Earth began to send back garbled status reports, despite otherwise continuing to operate normally. It took mission engineers months to pinpoint the issue . The attitude articulation and control system (AACS) was misdirecting commands, writing them into the computer memory instead of carrying them out. One of those missed commands wound up garbling the AACS status report before it could reach engineers on the ground.

The team determined the AACS had entered into an incorrect mode; however, they couldn’t determine the cause and thus aren’t sure if the issue could arise again. The software patch should prevent that.

“This patch is like an insurance policy that will protect us in the future and help us keep these probes going as long as possible,” said JPL’s Suzanne Dodd, Voyager project manager. “These are the only spacecraft to ever operate in interstellar space, so the data they’re sending back is uniquely valuable to our understanding of our local universe.”

Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 have traveled more than 15 billion and 12 billion miles from Earth, respectively. At those distances, the patch instructions will take over 18 hours to travel to the spacecraft. Because of the spacecraft’s age and the communication lag time, there’s some risk the patch could overwrite essential code or have other unintended effects on the spacecraft. To reduce those risks, the team has spent months writing, reviewing, and checking the code. As an added safety precaution, Voyager 2 will receive the patch first and serve as a testbed for its twin. Voyager 1 is farther from Earth than any other spacecraft, making its data more valuable.

The team will upload the patch and do a readout of the AACS memory to make sure it’s in the right place on Friday, Oct. 20. If no immediate issues arise, the team will issue a command on Saturday, Oct. 28, to see if the patch is operating as it should.

More About the Mission

The Voyager mission was originally scheduled to last only four years, sending both probes past Saturn and Jupiter. NASA extended the mission so that Voyager 2 could visit Uranus and Neptune; it is still the only spacecraft ever to have encountered the ice giants. In 1990, NASA extended the mission again, this time with the goal of sending the probes outside the heliosphere, a protective bubble of particles and magnetic fields created by the Sun. Voyager 1 reached the boundary in 2012, while Voyager 2 (traveling slower and in a different direction than its twin) reached it in 2018.

A division of Caltech in Pasadena, JPL built and operates the Voyager spacecraft. 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]

• Article Types

Nasa’s 46-year-old Voyager 1 receives cosmic software update

The software patch will be received from over 19 billion kilometres away in a bid to keep the spacecraft operational.

Voyager 1 was first launched in 1977 on a path that eventually led both it and its sister spacecraft, Voyager 2, outside the solar system altogether.

But in recent years, Nasa said that fuel residue has been accumulating inside narrow tubes in some of the thrusters on both spacecraft. Voyager 1 has also faced problems with sending junk data back home after it suddenly began routing its telemetry data through a derelict onboard computer for unknown reasons.

The thrusters on Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are primarily used to keep the spacecraft antennae pointed at Earth in order to communicate. As spacecraft can rotate in three directions, Voyager’s thrusters automatically fire to reorient itself.

Each time a thruster fires, it adds tiny amounts of propellant residue, leading to gradual build-up of material over decades. To slow that build-up, the mission has begun letting the two spacecraft rotate slightly farther in each direction before firing the thrusters.

The adjustments to the thruster rotation range were made by commands sent in September and October, and they allow the spacecraft to move almost one degree further in each direction than in the past.

While more rotating by the spacecraft could mean bits of science data are occasionally lost, the team believes the plan will enable the Voyagers to return more data in the long run.

“This far into the mission, the engineering team is being faced with a lot of challenges for which we just don’t have a playbook,” said Linda Spilker, project scientist for the mission. “But they continue to come up with creative solutions.”

In 2022, the onboard computer that orients Voyager 1 with Earth began to send back garbled status reports, despite otherwise operating normally. Mission engineers eventually realised that the attitude articulation and control system (AACS) was misdirecting commands, writing them into the computer memory instead of carrying them out. One of those missed commands wound up garbling the AACS status report before it could reach engineers on the ground.

“This patch is like an insurance policy that will protect us in the future and help us keep these probes going as long as possible,” said Suzanne Dodd, Voyager project manager. “These are the only spacecraft to ever operate in interstellar space, so the data they’re sending back is uniquely valuable to our understanding of our local universe.”

Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 have travelled more than 15 billion and 12 billion miles (24 billion and 19 billion kilometres) from Earth, respectively. At those distances, the patch instructions will take over 18 hours to travel to the spacecraft.

Because of their age and the communication lag time, there’s some risk the patch could overwrite essential code or have other unintended effects on the spacecraft. To reduce those risks, the team has spent months writing, reviewing and checking the code.

Image credit | iStock

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NASA’s Voyager Gets Software Tune-Up From Billions of Miles Away

To continue a 46-year-old mission, engineers on NASA’s Voyager team beamed up a software patch that would prevent the recurrence of a data glitch that arose last year, the space agency announced last week.

NASA launched the twin Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft months apart in the summer of 1977 from Cape Canaveral, Florida, as part of a mission to explore where nothing from Earth has flown before, interstellar space. In August 2012, Voyager 1 made its historic entry into interstellar space, and Voyager 2 entered interstellar space on November 5, 2018. To date, both spacecraft are sending scientific information about their surroundings through the Deep Space Network.

However, last year, engineers on NASA’s Voyager team discovered data glitches coming from the Voyager 1 spacecraft. The probe’s attitude articulation and control system (AACS), which keeps Voyager 1’s antenna pointed at Earth, began sending distorted information about its health and activities to mission controllers despite operating normally.

After months of investigation, the team was able to locate the source of the glitch: “The AACS had started sending the telemetry data through an onboard computer known to have stopped working years ago, and the computer corrupted the information,” the agency noted in a  statement  released last year.

However, while the team uncovered what caused the grabbled information, they couldn’t determine how it occurred or if the issue could arise again. The software patch should prevent that.

According to NASA, the software patch would prevent the recurrence of the glitch that arose on Voyager 1 and prevent the issue from occurring again in Voyager 1 or arising in its twin, Voyager 2.

“This patch is like an insurance policy that will protect us in the future and help us keep these probes going as long as possible,” Suzanne Dodd, Voyager project manager, said in an Oct. 20  statement . “These are the only spacecraft to ever operate in interstellar space, so the data they’re sending back is uniquely valuable to our understanding of our local universe.”

The team uploaded the software patch on Oct. 20. Voyager 2 received the patch first and served as a testbed for its twin, Voyager 1, which is farther from Earth than any other spacecraft, making its data more valuable.

The space agency does note that because of the spacecraft’s age and the communication lag time, there’s some risk the patch could overwrite essential code or have other unintended effects on the spacecraft. To reduce those risks, the team has spent months writing, reviewing, and checking the code.

If no immediate issues arise, the team will issue a command on Oct. 28 to see if the patch is operating as it should.

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Voyager’s New Horizon: NASA Engineers Tackle Thruster Buildup & Software Glitches

By Jet Propulsion Laboratory October 23, 2023

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. Traveling on a different trajectory, its twin, Voyager 2, entered interstellar space in 2018. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA ’s Voyager mission team is addressing challenges to ensure prolonged functionality of the two spacecraft. They’re mitigating thruster fuel residue issues and implementing a software patch to rectify a previous Voyager 1 glitch.

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

Engineers for NASA’s Voyager mission are taking steps to help make sure both spacecraft, launched in 1977, continue to explore interstellar space for years to come.

One effort addresses fuel residue that seems to be accumulating inside narrow tubes in some of the thrusters on the spacecraft. The thrusters are used to keep each spacecraft’s antenna pointed at Earth. This type of buildup has been observed in a handful of other spacecraft.

The team is also uploading a software patch to prevent the recurrence of a glitch that arose on Voyager 1 last year. Engineers resolved the glitch , and the patch is intended to prevent the issue from occurring again in Voyager 1 or arising in its twin, Voyager 2.

Thruster Buildup

The thrusters on Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are primarily used to keep the spacecraft antennas pointed at Earth in order to communicate. Spacecraft can rotate in three directions – up and down, to the left and right, and around the central axis, like a wheel. As they do this, the thrusters automatically fire and reorient the spacecraft to keep their antennas pointed at Earth.

Propellant flows to the thrusters via fuel lines and then passes through smaller lines inside the thrusters called propellant inlet tubes that are 25 times narrower than the external fuel lines. Each thruster firing adds tiny amounts of propellant residue, leading to gradual buildup of material over decades. In some of the propellant inlet tubes, the buildup is becoming significant. To slow that buildup, the mission has begun letting the two spacecraft rotate slightly farther in each direction before firing the thrusters. This will reduce the frequency of thruster firings.

The adjustments to the thruster rotation range were made by commands sent in September and October, and they allow the spacecraft to move almost 1 degree farther in each direction than in the past. The mission is also performing fewer, longer firings, which will further reduce the total number of firings done on each spacecraft.

The adjustments have been carefully devised to ensure minimal impact on the mission. While more rotating by the spacecraft could mean bits of science data are occasionally lost – akin to being on a phone call where the person on the other end cuts out occasionally – the team concluded the plan will enable the Voyagers to return more data over time.

Engineers can’t know for sure when the thruster propellant inlet tubes will become completely clogged, but they expect that with these precautions, that won’t happen for at least five more years, possibly much longer. The team can take additional steps in the coming years to extend the lifetime of the thrusters even more.

“This far into the mission, the engineering team is being faced with a lot of challenges for which we just don’t have a playbook,” said Linda Spilker, project scientist for the mission as NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “But they continue to come up with creative solutions.”

Patching Things Up

In 2022, the onboard computer that orients the Voyager 1 spacecraft with Earth began to send back garbled status reports, despite otherwise continuing to operate normally. It took mission engineers months to pinpoint the issue . The attitude articulation and control system (AACS) was misdirecting commands, writing them into the computer memory instead of carrying them out. One of those missed commands wound up garbling the AACS status report before it could reach engineers on the ground.

The team determined the AACS had entered into an incorrect mode; however, they couldn’t determine the cause and thus aren’t sure if the issue could arise again. The software patch should prevent that.

“This patch is like an insurance policy that will protect us in the future and help us keep these probes going as long as possible,” said JPL ’s Suzanne Dodd, Voyager project manager. “These are the only spacecraft to ever operate in interstellar space, so the data they’re sending back is uniquely valuable to our understanding of our local universe.”

Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 have traveled more than 15 billion and 12 billion miles from Earth, respectively. At those distances, the patch instructions will take over 18 hours to travel to the spacecraft. Because of the spacecraft’s age and the communication lag time, there’s some risk the patch could overwrite essential code or have other unintended effects on the spacecraft. To reduce those risks, the team has spent months writing, reviewing, and checking the code. As an added safety precaution, Voyager 2 will receive the patch first and serve as a testbed for its twin. Voyager 1 is farther from Earth than any other spacecraft, making its data more valuable.

The team will upload the patch and do a readout of the AACS memory to make sure it’s in the right place on Friday, October 20. If no immediate issues arise, the team will issue a command on Saturday, October 28, to see if the patch is operating as it should.

More About the Voyager Mission

Initially, the Voyager mission was planned for just four years, with both probes destined to pass Saturn and Jupiter . The mission was later extended for Voyager 2 to visit Uranus and Neptune , marking its unique journey to the ice giants. In 1990, another extension aimed to send the probes beyond the heliosphere, the sun’s protective bubble. Voyager 1 achieved this milestone in 2012, followed by Voyager 2 in 2018.

JPL, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, is responsible for the construction and operation of the Voyager spacecraft. The Voyager missions operate under the NASA Heliophysics System Observatory.

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WOW! I’ll bet these guys could fix an Olde Kapro 4, CP/M!

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JPL Software Update Rescues Failing Voyager 1 Spacecraft

NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft exited the Solar System’s heliosphere and entered interstellar space on August 25, 2012, after a multi-decade journey. Four of the spacecraft’s ten instruments are still reporting measurements back to Earth. The remaining instruments have been shut down to conserve energy as the power output of the spacecraft’s plutonium-powered radioisotope thermoelectric generation (RTG) continues to drop. On November 14, 2023, the Voyager team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena noticed that the spacecraft was sending garbled science and engineering data, although it still responded to commands. The spacecraft is currently 22.5 light-hours (15 billion miles) from Earth, so any troubleshooting involves a round-trip delay of nearly four days. Even with the obstacles of a 4-day latency and on-board computers that were designed and built half a century ago, JPL engineers were able to isolate the problem down to the chip level and effect a repair with a software patch. The first patch managed to restore the spacecraft’s engineering and status data. A subsequent patch or patches will restore the science instrument data.

The Voyager 1 spacecraft launched atop a Titan IIIE rocket on September 5, 1977. After more than four decades, the spacecraft is now in interstellar space. Image credit: NASA

The Voyager 1 spacecraft carries three dual-redundant computers: the Computer Command System (CCS), the Attitude Articulation Control System (AACS), and the Flight Data System (FDS). The FDS collects data from the spacecraft’s science instruments along with engineering data about the spacecraft’s health and status. It bundles this information, adds error-correcting codes so that the data can make it back to Earth, and then hands the coded information bundle to the telemetry modulation unit (TMU), which applies the modulation coding to the bundle and sends the modulated bundle to the spacecraft’s radio transmitter. For some reason, the TMU was sending a repeating pattern of ones and zeros instead of readable data. JPL’s Voyager team determined that the most likely problem was the FDS computer, not the TMU.

As a first troubleshooting step, the JPL team sent a “poke” command on March 1, 2024 that reset the program counter in the FDS computer. The command had an effect on the data stream but did not restart the flow of intelligible telemetry. On March 3, after the 2-day round trip latency, the Voyager mission team noticed that one section of the FDS bundle differed from the rest of the computer’s unreadable data stream. The new data was not properly formatted as normal telemetry. An engineer with NASA’s Deep Space Network managed to decode the new data. It was a memory dump from the FDS computer, including both executable code and data.

By analyzing the memory dump, JPL’s engineering team determined that about 3 percent of the FDS computer’s memory had been corrupted. The FDS memory stores 8K 16-bit words, or 16K bytes, and three percent of that capacity is approximately 4000 bits. Rounding up to the nearest power of two, the FDS memory had lost a 4-Kbit chunk. At this point, you might be thinking that the FDS is a dual-redundant computer, so JPL could just switch over to the backup. Unfortunately, the backup FDS computer’s memory failed more than forty years ago, on October 6, 1981.

There’s something quite special about the memory used by the FDS computers. While the CCS and AACS computers are based on older NASA computer designs that use plated-wire memory, the FDS computers needed much faster memory to achieve Voyager’s performance goals, so the FDS memory systems were built with CMOS SRAMs. I asked JPL for a description or part number of the failed SRAM and got a reply from Jeff Mellstrom, the Chief Engineer for JPL’s Astronomy and Physics Directorate. The failed device was one RCA 256×1-bit CD4061A CMOS SRAM. That one bad chip knocked out 256 words of FDS memory. It’s not possible to determine whether the SRAM simply wore out or was damaged by an energetic cosmic ray particle, and it doesn’t matter. No one would be sending out a repair mission. The fix, if one was possible, had to be sent by radio.

The JPL engineering team reworked the code in the FDS that formats the engineering data, breaking it into pieces that would fit into the unaffected memory addresses and adding jump instructions to skip over the affected memory. This work had to be done by hand. According to Mellstron, “…the assembly language is documented, but there no longer are development tools, hardware testbeds, or software emulators. To implement the code relocation as quickly as possible, we proceeded without developing a bit-level simulation of the processor. Because of these limitations, it was not possible to test the code modifications before uplinking to the spacecraft. Verification of the code was by inspection only.”

That’s some full-on, old-style, gutsy engineering. We’re not talking about a WiFi firmware update here. We’re talking about beaming a software patch 22.5 light-hours into the ether, beyond the edge of the Solar System, using NASA’s Deep Space Network. Incredibly, it worked. On April 22, Voyager 1 started sending intelligible engineering telemetry back to Earth. The team plans to restore the science data stream in the same way.

However, that’s not the end of this story. The RCA CD4061A 256×1-bit CMOS SRAM has an interesting place in semiconductor history. It’s part of RCA’s venerable CD4000 family of CMOS logic ICs. RCA was the leading early advocate for CMOS. (See “ A Brief History of the MOS transistor, Part 5: RCA – The Persistent CMOS Contrarian .”) After years of work on CMOS ICs starting in 1963, RCA finally announced the first 15 members of the CD4000A IC family in 1968. By 1969, there were fifteen CD4000A family members. RCA was the sole source for CD4000A chips that year. By the end of 1972, when RCA devoted the entire December 1972/January 1973 issue of “RCA Engineer” to CMOS technology, there were more than 60 devices in the CD4000A family with multiple alternate sources.

In that same issue of “RCA Engineer,” an article titled “COS/MOS Standard-parts Line Comes of Age” listed all the members of the CD4000A family. (“COS/MOS” was the trademarked name RCA used for CMOS.) This article did not list the CD4061A SRAM, but it did list a 256×1-bit SRAM with a “developmental” part number: the TA6335. During that period, RCA was designing custom CMOS parts under contract for the U.S. Air Force and for NASA, so the TA6335 might have been one of these contracted devices, or it may have been developed by RCA for its own purposes. Whatever the reason, the device was introduced as the CD4061A SRAM in 1974 and appeared in the 1975 COS/MOS IC catalog.

Die shot of the RCA CD4061A 256×1-bit CMOS SRAM, still bearing the development number “6335” along the right-hand side. Image credit: Steve Emery, ChipScapes.com

RCA’s CD4061A SRAM was pin-compatible with Intel’s 1101 SRAM, which had been introduced in 1969. However, the CMOS CD4061A drew far less power than the Intel 1101. Although nowhere near as famous or as successful as Intel’s 1103 DRAM, the 1101 was Intel’s first successful MOS IC, so making the CD4061A pin compatible with the 1101 was a pretty good idea.

A report appearing in RCA’s “High Reliability Integrated Circuits” data book in 1982 stated that Voyagers 1 and 2 contained 10,346 RCA CMOS ICs between the two spacecraft. That works out to 5173 CMOS chips per spacecraft. Each of the dual-redundant FDS computers in each spacecraft needed 512 CD4016A SRAMs to create the 8Kword memory, which is 1024 CMOS SRAM chips per spacecraft. According to the reliability report, just two of the RCA CMOS ICs out of the 10,346 total number in both Voyager spacecraft had failed after the first 52 months in space. We know from JPL that one of the Voyager 1 spacecraft’s FDS memories failed in 1981, so at least one of the two reported CMOS chip failures was associated with that memory loss. Possibly both. The fact that these very early RCA CMOS SRAMs managed to get Voyager 1 out past the edge of the Solar System in working condition is a real testament to the design and manufacture of the chips and the design and fabrication of the Voyager FDS computer systems. The fact that the JPL engineering team could troubleshoot and diagnose a problem and effect a repair after nearly 50 years and from 15 billion miles away is a testament to the dedication of that team. Sort of makes you proud to be an engineer, doesn’t it?

The 10,346 CMOS ICs in these two spacecraft are part of the dwindling number of artifacts that represent the innovation factory that was once RCA’s Solid State Division. During the 1960s, after David Sarnoff’s son Robert Sarnoff took over as RCA’s president, the company veered away from its role as a technology leader and became a conglomerate by making a diverse set of corporate acquisitions, including Hertz rental cars, Banquet frozen foods, Coronet carpets, Random House book publishing, and Gibson greeting cards. Radio Corporation of America (RCA) abandoned its original name and simply became “RCA,” while investors nicknamed the new conglomerate “Rugs, Chickens, and Automobiles” to better reflect the company’s new posture.

RCA did not survive the Robert Sarnoff era for long. GE announced its intent to reacquire RCA in late 1985. It had created RCA as an electronic technology spinout at the request of the U.S. government back in 1919. After the acquisition was completed in 1986, GE Solid State absorbed RCA’s Solid State Division along with old-time semiconductor maker Intersil, Inc. However, GE’s chair Jack Welch (“Neutron Jack”) had little appreciation for the semiconductor business with its wildly fluctuating financials and sold GE Solid State to Harris Corp in 1988. Harris sold GE Solid State’s logic business, including RCA’s CD4000 CMOS logic family, to Texas Instruments (TI) in 1998, although Harris continued to make radiation-hardened versions of RCA’s CD4000B logic family. (The “B” is for “buffered.”) Harris spun out the rest of its semiconductor business as a newly reconstituted Intersil Corp in 1999, which was subsequently absorbed by Renesas in 2017.

You can still get CD4000B devices from TI. STMicroelectronics lists radiation hardened CD4000B devices as current products. Rochester Electronics – a company that specializes in keeping certain obsolete semiconductors available through authorized old stock, die banks, and licensed reverse or re-engineering – seems to have a few CD4000A devices originally made by RCA and Harris in stock, available through DigiKey. However, you’ll be hard pressed to find any CD4061A SRAMs still on the shelf. I didn’t find any, although I did locate a cache of bare CD4061A die, in possession of a friend.

Meanwhile, Voyagers 1 and 2 continue their mission to sail beyond the Solar System and beyond. If you want to check the Voyagers’ status, NASA maintains a real-time update page here .

H. Weisberg, “MOS – an RCA pioneered technology; COS/MOS – RCA’s thrust in digital logic,” RCA Engineer, Dec/Jan 1972/1973, pp 5-7

R. Heuner, “COS/MOS standard-parts line comes of age,” RCA Engineer, Dec/Jan 1972/1973, pp 14-19

T. G. Athanas, “Development of COS/MOS technology,” RCA Engineer, Dec/Jan 1972/1973, pp 26-30

James E. Tomayko, Computers in Spaceflight: The NASA Experience , NASA History Office, July 2005

“ High Reliability Integrated Circuits ,” RCA, 1982

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The Voyager Project was conceived in the early '60s as an unmanned mission to the outer planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto). Launch was accomplished in the late summer of 1977. The two craft completed their fly-bys of Jupiter and Saturn in mid-1981. Voyager 2 encountered Uranas in January of 1986, and Nepture in August of 1989. Voyager discovered seven new moons orbiting Uranus as it "flew by." Congressman Bill Nelson suggested they be named for the seven lost crew members of STS 51L. 4 inches wide.

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May 30, 2024

Voyager 1’s Revival Offers Inspiration for Everyone on Earth

Instruments may fail, but humanity’s most distant sentinel will keep exploring, and inspiring us all

By Saswato R. Das

Artist's rendering of a Voyager spacecraft in deep space.

Dotted Zebra/Alamy Stock Photo

Amid April’s litany of bad news—war in Gaza, protests on American campuses, an impasse in Ukraine—a little uplift came for science buffs.

NASA has reestablished touch with Voyager 1 , the most distant thing built by our species, now hurtling through interstellar space far beyond the orbit of Pluto. The extraordinarily durable spacecraft had stopped transmitting data in November, but NASA engineers managed a very clever work-around, and it is sending data again. Now more than 15 billion miles away, Voyager 1 is the farthest human object, and continues to speed away from us at approximately 38,000 miles per hour.

Like an old car that continues to run, or an uncle blessed with an uncommonly long life, the robotic spacecraft is a super ager that goes on and on—and, in doing so, has captivated space buffs everywhere.

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Launched on September 5, 1977, the one-ton Voyager 1 was meant to chart the outer solar system, in particular the gas giant planets Jupiter and Saturn, and Saturn’s moon, Titan. Its twin, Voyager 2 , launched the same year, followed a different trajectory with a slightly different mission to explore the outer planets before heading to the solar system’s edge.

Those were NASA’s glory days. A few years earlier, NASA had successfully landed men on the moon—and won the space race for the U.S. NASA’s engineers were the envy of the world.

To get to Jupiter and Saturn, both Voyagers had to traverse the asteroid belt, which is full of rocks and debris orbiting the sun. They had to survive cosmic rays, intense radiation from Jupiter and other perils of space. But the two spacecraft made it without a hitch.

President Jimmy Carter held office when Voyager 1 was launched from Cape Canaveral; Elvis Presley had died just three weeks before; gas was about 60 cents a gallon; and, like now, the Middle East was in crisis, with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat trying to find peace.

Voyager 1 sent back spectacular photos of Jupiter and its giant red spot. It showed how dynamic the Jovian atmosphere was, with clouds and storms. It also took pictures of Jupiter’s moon Io, with its volcanoes, and Saturn’s moon Titan , which astronomers think has an atmosphere similar to the primordial Earth’s. The spacecraft discovered a thin ring around Jupiter and two new Jovian moons, which were named Thebe and Metis. On reaching Saturn, it discovered five new moons as well as a new ring.

And then Voyager 1 continued on its journey and sent images back from the edge of the solar system. Many of us remember the Pale Blue Dot , a haunting picture of the Earth it took on Feb 14, 1990, when it was a distance of 3.7 billion miles from the sun. The astronomer Carl Sagan wrote:

“There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.”

By then Voyager 1 had long outlived its planetary mission but kept faithfully calling home as it traveled beyond the solar system into the realm of the stars. By 2012 Voyager 1 had reached the heliosphere , the farthest edge of the solar system. There, it penetrated the heliopause, where the solar wind ends, stopped by particles coming from the interstellar medium, the vast space between the stars. (Astronomers know that the space between the stars is not totally empty but permeated by a rarefied gas .)

From Voyager 1, scientists learned that the heliopause is quite dynamic and first measured the magnetic field of the Milky Way beyond the solar system. And its instruments kept sending data as it traveled through the interstellar medium.

On hearing that Voyager 1 had gone dark, I had checked in with Louis Lanzerotti , a former Bell Labs planetary scientist who did the calibrations for the Voyager 1 spacecraft and was a principal investigator on many experiments. He told me that a NASA manager in the 1970s had doubted that the spacecraft’s mechanical scan platform, which pointed instruments at targets, and very thin solid state detectors, which took those edge of the solar system readings, on the spacecraft would survive. They not only survived but worked flawlessly for all this time, Lanzerotti said, providing excellent data for decades. He was overjoyed on hearing the news that Voyager 1 was still alive.

Voyager 1 instruments have power until 2025 . After that, they will shut off, one by one. But there is nothing to stop the spacecraft as it speeds away from us in the vast emptiness of space.

Thousands of years from now, maybe when the human race has left this planet, Voyager 1, the tiny little spacecraft that could, will still continue its inexorable journey to the stars.

This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

Things are finally looking up for the Voyager 1 interstellar spacecraft

Two of the four science instruments aboard the Voyager 1 spacecraft are now returning usable data after months of transmitting only gibberish, NASA scientists have announced.

I was once sitting with my father while Googling how far away various things in the solar system are from Earth. He was looking for exact numbers, and very obviously grew more invested with each new figure I shouted out. I was thrilled. The moon? On average, 238,855 miles (384,400 kilometers) away. The James Webb Space Telescope ? Bump that up to about a million miles (1,609,344 km) away. The sun? 93 million miles (149,668,992 km) away.  Neptune ? 2.8  billion  miles (4.5 billion km) away. "Well, wait until you hear about Voyager 1," I eventually said, assuming he was aware of what was coming. He was not.

"NASA's  Voyager 1  interstellar spacecraft actually isn't even in the solar system anymore," I announced. "Nope, it's more than 15 billion miles (24 billion km)  away from us  — and it's getting even farther as we speak." I can't quite remember his response, but I do indeed recall an expression of sheer disbelief. There were immediate inquiries about how that's even physically possible. There were bewildered laughs, different ways of saying "wow," and mostly, there was a contagious sense of awe. And just like that, a new Voyager 1 fan was born.

It is easy to see why Voyager 1 is among the most beloved robotic space explorers we have — and it is thus easy to understand why so many people felt a pang to their hearts several months ago, when Voyager 1 stopped talking to us.

Related:  After months of sending gibberish to NASA, Voyager 1 is finally making sense again

For reasons unknown at the time, this spacecraft began sending back gibberish in place of the neatly organized and data-rich 0's and 1's it had been providing since its  launch in 1977 . It was this classic computer language which allowed Voyager 1 to converse with its creators while earning the title of "farthest human made object." It's how the spacecraft relayed vital insight that led to the discovery of new Jovian moons and, thanks to this sort of binary podcast, scientists incredibly identified a new ring of Saturn and created the solar system's first and only "family portrait." This code, in essence, is crucial to Voyager 1's very being.

Plus, to make matters worse, the issue behind the glitch turned out to be associated with the craft's Flight Data System, which is literally the system that transmits information about Voyager 1's health so scientists can correct any issues that arise. Issues like this one. Furthermore, because of the spacecraft's immense distance from its operators on Earth, it takes about 22.5 hours for a transmission to reach the spacecraft, and then 22.5 hours to receive a transmission back. Alas, things weren't looking good for a while — for about five months, to be precise.

But then, on April 20, Voyager 1  finally phoned home  with legible 0's and legible 1's.

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"The team had gathered early on a weekend morning to see whether telemetry would return," Bob Rasmussen, a member of the Voyager flight team, told Space.com. "It was nice to have everyone assembled in one place like this to share in the moment of learning that our efforts had been successful. Our cheer was both for the intrepid spacecraft and for the comradery that enabled its recovery."

And  then,  on May 22 , Voyager scientists released the welcome announcement that the spacecraft has successfully resumed returning science data from two of its four instruments, the plasma wave subsystem and magnetometer instrument. They're now working on getting the other two, the cosmic ray subsystem and low energy charged particle instrument, back online as well. Though there technically are six other instruments onboard Voyager, those had been out of commission for some time.

The comeback

Rasmussen was actually a member of the Voyager team in the 1970s, having worked on the project as a computer engineer before leaving for other missions including  Cassini , which launched the spacecraft that taught us almost everything we currently know about Saturn. In 2022, however, he returned to Voyager because of a separate dilemma with the mission — and has remained on the team ever since.

"There are many of the original people who were there when Voyager launched, or even before, who were part of both the flight team and the science team," Linda Spilker, a planetary scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory , who also worked on the Voyager mission, told Space.com in the This Week from Space podcast on the TWiT network. "It's a real tribute to Voyager — the longevity not only of the spacecraft, but of the people on the team."

To get Voyager 1 back online, in rather cinematic fashion, the team devised a complex workaround that prompted the FDS to send a copy of its memory back to Earth. Within that memory readout, operators managed to discover the crux of the problem — a corrupted code spanning a single chip — which was then remedied through another (honestly,  super interesting ) process to modify the code. On the day Voyager 1 finally spoke again, "you could have heard a pin drop in the room," Spilker said. "It was very silent. Everybody's looking at the screen, waiting and watching." 

Of course, Spilker also brought in some peanuts for the team to munch on — but not just any peanuts. Lucky peanuts. 

It's a longstanding tradition at JPL to have a peanut feast before major mission events like launches, milestones and, well, the possible resurrection of Voyager 1. It  began  in the 1960s, when the agency was trying to launch the Ranger 7 mission that was meant to take pictures of and collect data about the moon's surface. Rangers 1 through 6 had all failed, so Ranger 7 was a big deal. As such, the mission's trajectory engineer, Dick Wallace, brought lots of peanuts for the team to nibble on and relax. Sure enough, Ranger 7 was a success and, as Wallace once said, "the rest is history." 

Voyager 1 needed some of those positive snacky vibes. 

"It'd been five months since we'd had any information," Spilker explained. So, in this room of silence besides peanut-eating-noises, Voyager 1 operators sat at their respective system screens, waiting. 

"All of a sudden it started to populate — the data," Spilker said. That's when the programmers who had been staring at those screens in anticipation leapt out of their seats and began to cheer: "They were the happiest people in the room, I think, and there was just a sense of joy that we had Voyager 1 back."

Eventually, Rasmussen says the team was able to conclude that the failure probably occurred due to a combination of aging and radiation damage by which energetic particles in space bombarded the craft. This is also why he believes it wouldn't be terribly surprising to see a similar failure occur in the future, seeing as Voyager 1 is still roaming beyond the distant boundaries of our stellar neighborhood just like its spacecraft twin,  Voyager 2 .

To be sure, the spacecraft isn't fully fixed yet — but it's lovely to know things are finally looking up, especially with the recent news that some of its science instruments are back on track. And, at the very least, Rasmussen assures that nothing the team has learned so far has been alarming. "We're confident that we understand the problem well," he said, "and we remain optimistic about getting everything back to normal — but we also expect this won't be the last."

In fact, as Rasmussen explains, Voyager 1 operators first became optimistic about the situation just after the root cause of the glitch had been determined with certainty. He also emphasizes that the team's spirits were never down. "We knew from indirect evidence that we had a spacecraft that was mostly healthy," he said. "Saying goodbye was not on our minds."

"Rather," he continued, "we wanted to push toward a solution as quickly as possible so other matters on board that had been neglected for months could be addressed. We're now calmly moving toward that goal."

The future of Voyager's voyage

It can't be ignored that, over the last few months, there has been an air of anxiety and fear across the public sphere that Voyager 1 was slowly moving toward sending us its final 0 and final 1. Headlines all over the internet, one written by  myself included , have carried clear, negative weight. I think it's because even if Voyager 2 could technically carry the interstellar torch post-Voyager 1, the prospect of losing Voyager 1 felt like the prospect of losing a piece of history. 

"We've crossed this boundary called the heliopause," Spilker explained of the Voyagers. "Voyager 1 crossed this boundary in 2012; Voyager 2 crossed it in 2018 — and, since that time, were the first spacecraft ever to make direct measurements of the interstellar medium." That medium basically refers to material that fills the space between stars. In this case, that's the space between other stars and our sun, which, though we don't always think of it as one, is simply another star in the universe. A drop in the cosmic ocean.

"JPL started building the two Voyager spacecraft in 1972," Spilker explained. "For context, that was only three years after we had the first human walk on the moon — and the reason we started that early is that we had this rare alignment of the planets that happens once every  176 years ." It was this alignment that could promise the spacecraft checkpoints across the solar system, including at Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Those checkpoints were important for the Voyagers in particular. Alongside planetary visits come gravity assists, and gravity assists can help fling stuff within the solar system — and, now we know, beyond.

As the first humanmade object to leave the solar system, as a relic of America's early space program, and as a testament to how robust even decades-old technology can be, Voyager 1 has carved out the kind of legacy usually reserved for remarkable things lost to time.

"Our scientists are eager to see what they’ve been missing," Rasmussen remarked. "Everyone on the team is self-motivated by their commitment to this unique and important project. That's where the real pressure comes from." 

Still, in terms of energy, the team's approach has been clinical and determined. 

— NASA's Voyager 1 sends readable message to Earth after 4 nail-biting months of gibberish

— NASA engineers discover why Voyager 1 is sending a stream of gibberish from outside our solar system

— NASA's Voyager 1 probe hasn't 'spoken' in 3 months and needs a 'miracle' to save it

"No one was ever especially excited or depressed," he said. "We're confident that we can get back to business as usual soon, but we also know that we're dealing with an aging spacecraft that is bound to have trouble again in the future. That's just a fact of life on this mission, so not worth getting worked up about."

Nonetheless, I imagine it's always a delight for Voyager 1's engineers to remember this robotic explorer occupies curious minds around the globe. (Including my dad's mind now, thanks to me and Google.)

As Rasmussen puts it: "It's wonderful to know how much the world appreciates this mission."

Originally posted on Space.com .

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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Behind the Scenes of NASA's Mind-Boggling Voyager Missions

Two years ago, Voyager 1 became the first man-made object to enter interstellar space, a mind-boggling 18 billion kilometers from the sun. Its sister, Voyager 2 , is not far behind, exploring the edge of our solar system in a mission that began 36 years ago.

The extraordinary probes, which have performed far beyond our best expectations, continue sending invaluable information to the most ordinary of places: An office between a dog training school and a McDonald's on a nondescript street in LA. It looks more like something out of Office Space than mission control for a milestone in our space program.

“The mission control room is really just some screens, a couple rolling chairs and a fax machine,” says photographer Noah Rabinowitz , who was allowed to photograph there as well as the mission control replica at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.

NASA launched Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in 1977. They were designed to study Jupiter and Saturn, and each carries a Golden Record that contains images, sounds and greetings to any extraterrestrial civilizations. Voyager 1 's primary mission ended in 1980 and its sister's in 1989, but the little probes kept going. And going. And going. Voyager 1 passed Pluto in 1990, and NASA announced on September 12, 2012 that it had entered interstellar space. Despite the vast distance, the two probes continue transmitting information. That means there must be someone at home to receive it.

Many photographers might avoid such an assignment, thinking there would be little of interest to see or shoot for a mission all but forgotten by the public. But Rabinowitz found it engrossing, and strove to capture a part of NASA few ever see. The resulting images are both nostalgic, transporting us to a bygone era, and inspiring.

As fascinating as the probes, and the far corners of the solar system, may be, Rabinowitz's most revealing photos capture the quiet quiet moments and wonderful personalities within mission control. Take, for example, Tom Weeks, a position controller who looks like he could be playing in a Guns N’ Roses cover band. He was part of the original launch, left NASA to attend film school, played in a few bands, had kids and came back.

“I tended to focus on the people because they are the kind of untold story of these space missions,” Rabinowitz says. “And in this case, everyone I met was pretty extraordinary.”

Programmer Larry Zottarelli is in his late 70s. He's been with NASA for 55 years, and is so crucial---and dedicated---to the Voyager program that he hasn't allowed himself to retire. He says he'd be happy to “simply fall over dead, right here."

That may yet happen. According to NASA, the two probes have sufficient electricity and fuel to operate for another decade or so. Beyond that, NASA starts taking a much longer view, noting that in 40,000 years or so Voyager 1 will drift within 1.6 light-years or 9.3 trillion miles of AC+79 3888, a star in the constellation of Camelopardalis. And even that will not be the end. NASA says both probes “are destined---perhaps eternally---to wander the Milky Way.”

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Golden Record Sounds and Music

Sounds of earth.

The following is a listing of sounds electronically placed onboard the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft.

Music from Earth

The following music was included on the Voyager record.

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golden record

Where are they now.

• frequently asked questions
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golden record  /  whats on the record

Music from earth.

The following music was included on the Voyager record.

• Bach, Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 in F. First Movement, Munich Bach Orchestra, Karl Richter, conductor. 4:40
• Java, court gamelan, "Kinds of Flowers," recorded by Robert Brown. 4:43
• Senegal, percussion, recorded by Charles Duvelle. 2:08
• Zaire, Pygmy girls' initiation song, recorded by Colin Turnbull. 0:56
• Australia, Aborigine songs, "Morning Star" and "Devil Bird," recorded by Sandra LeBrun Holmes. 1:26
• Mexico, "El Cascabel," performed by Lorenzo Barcelata and the Mariachi México. 3:14
• "Johnny B. Goode," written and performed by Chuck Berry. 2:38
• New Guinea, men's house song, recorded by Robert MacLennan. 1:20
• Japan, shakuhachi, "Tsuru No Sugomori" ("Crane's Nest,") performed by Goro Yamaguchi. 4:51
• Bach, "Gavotte en rondeaux" from the Partita No. 3 in E major for Violin, performed by Arthur Grumiaux. 2:55
• Mozart, The Magic Flute, Queen of the Night aria, no. 14. Edda Moser, soprano. Bavarian State Opera, Munich, Wolfgang Sawallisch, conductor. 2:55
• Georgian S.S.R., chorus, "Tchakrulo," collected by Radio Moscow. 2:18
• Peru, panpipes and drum, collected by Casa de la Cultura, Lima. 0:52
• "Melancholy Blues," performed by Louis Armstrong and his Hot Seven. 3:05
• Azerbaijan S.S.R., bagpipes, recorded by Radio Moscow. 2:30
• Stravinsky, Rite of Spring, Sacrificial Dance, Columbia Symphony Orchestra, Igor Stravinsky, conductor. 4:35
• Bach, The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 2, Prelude and Fugue in C, No.1. Glenn Gould, piano. 4:48
• Beethoven, Fifth Symphony, First Movement, the Philharmonia Orchestra, Otto Klemperer, conductor. 7:20
• Bulgaria, "Izlel je Delyo Hagdutin," sung by Valya Balkanska. 4:59
• Navajo Indians, Night Chant, recorded by Willard Rhodes. 0:57
• Holborne, Paueans, Galliards, Almains and Other Short Aeirs, "The Fairie Round," performed by David Munrow and the Early Music Consort of London. 1:17
• Solomon Islands, panpipes, collected by the Solomon Islands Broadcasting Service. 1:12
• Peru, wedding song, recorded by John Cohen. 0:38
• China, ch'in, "Flowing Streams," performed by Kuan P'ing-hu. 7:37
• India, raga, "Jaat Kahan Ho," sung by Surshri Kesar Bai Kerkar. 3:30
• "Dark Was the Night," written and performed by Blind Willie Johnson. 3:15
• Beethoven, String Quartet No. 13 in B flat, Opus 130, Cavatina, performed by Budapest String Quartet. 6:37