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Voyage 2050 long-term planning of the esa science programme, updates on voyage 2050 can be found here ..

11 June 2021

Voyage 2050 sets sail: ESA chooses future science mission themes

​​​​​​ ESA’s large-class science missions for the timeframe 2035-2050 will focus on moons of the giant Solar System planets, temperate exoplanets or the galactic ecosystem, and new physical probes of the early Universe. [Read the press release here ]

The report of the Senior Committee to the Director of Science is available to download. 

26 May 2021

Message from the Senior Committee Chair and Co-Chair
 The Senior Committee recommendations have been submitted to the ESA Director of Science

We are delighted to announce that the Voyage 2050 Senior Committee has completed its work and a report has been submitted to the ESA Director of Science detailing the Committee’s final recommendations. This report will be the basis of a proposal for the long-term planning of ESA’s science programme that the Director will bring to the Science Programme Committee meeting in June. ESA will communicate the outcome of the SPC decision shortly after the meeting, and later this year will present the recommendations in a publication for a broad readership.

We recall that the Director of Science requested the Senior Committee make a three-tiered recommendation. The first was to provide a clear recommendation on science themes for the next three Large missions following JUICE, ATHENA, and LISA. The second was to provide a list of possible themes that could be addressed through Medium missions, and the third recommendation was to propose areas of long-term technology development that would lead to breakthrough science from ESA Space Science missions in the future, beyond Voyage 2050.

The starting point for the Senior Committee’s work was the almost 100 White Papers, outlining a wide range of diverse and ambitious ideas for science themes, submitted by the scientific community. This wealth of ideas had to be distilled to a much smaller number of themes for the recommendations. The Senior Committee was supported in this daunting task by the Topical Teams who ensured that the Committee had access to broad and diverse scientific views and opinions.

On behalf of the Senior Committee members we send our heartfelt thanks and gratitude to the authors of the White Papers, for providing us with a rich palette of exciting and ambitious science themes from which to choose, and to the members of the Topical Teams for their important and crucial contribution to the Voyage 2050 process.

The delivery of the Senior Committee report marks the point at which the Voyage 2050 'baton' is passed to ESA. We look forward to following the next steps of the Voyage 2050 journey.

Linda Tacconi and Chris Arridge Chair and Co-Chair of the Voyage 2050 Senior Committee

21 April 2021

Message from the Senior Committee Chair and Co-Chair
 Update on the Voyage 2050 process

We are happy to report that the Senior Committee is now preparing the report containing the Committee’s recommendation to the Director of Science. We have arrived at this point following numerous virtual meetings, which ran until early this year, and during which we carefully considered the reports of the individual Topical Teams and distilled the potential L- and M-class science themes, as well as areas that are ripe for technology development. After much focused, robust debate and deliberation the Senior Committee members have reached a consensus on the recommendations. Our report to the Director of Science will be delivered in mid-May and a public report will be issued later this year.

10 July 2020

It has been some time since the Voyage 2050 workshop in Madrid, and even longer since we received the White Papers for consideration for Voyage 2050, and we felt it was important to provide an update of the Voyage 2050 process.  This is especially relevant given the upheaval the world has seen in the first half of this year.  As you might imagine, COVID-19 has had a significant effect on our process.  

The Topical Teams met at ESTEC in January to discuss all the White Paper submissions and to begin to synthesise the contributions so that we could develop a recommendation for the ESA Science Programme Committee (SPC).  During this period the Topical Teams also met with technical experts to seek their views on what would be possible in the Voyage 2050 time frame.

Since the January meeting the process has been affected by COVID-19.  A planned face-to-face meeting of the Senior Committee in April was cancelled due to physical distancing and lockdown procedures effected across Europe.  Instead, the work of the Committee has progressed via regular virtual meetings, albeit slower than would have occurred without this pandemic.  The original timeline was for the Senior Committee’s recommendation to be delivered to the SPC in November, but this is now anticipated to be more a draft recommendation rather than a formal recommendation as originally planned.  Accordingly, the release of the Voyage 2050 public report will also be delayed into 2021.  

We take this opportunity to thank all the contributors to the Voyage 2050 process: the White Paper authors, whose works continue to be of use in the ongoing deliberations; the Topical Team members for their excellent work in robustly analysing the contributions, and the Senior Committee for their diligent work with these Topical Teams.  

4 March 2019

The Science Programme of the European Space Agency (ESA) relies on long-term planning of its scientific priorities. The first long-term plan, Horizon 2000, was the result of an exercise started in 1983, and it was followed by an extension, Horizon 2000 Plus, that resulted in the initiation of the Gaia and BepiColombo missions. The successive planning exercise, Cosmic Vision , was started in 2004 and is the current basis against which the content of the Science Programme is set.

Cosmic Vision is the result of a bottom-up process that began with a consultation of the broad scientific community. The plan, which comprises a variety of missions and extends up to 2035, defines the wide-ranging and ambitious scientific questions to be addressed by missions in the ESA Science Programme.

The next planning cycle of the ESA Science Programme, Voyage 2050, is now underway. In keeping with the bottom-up, peer-reviewed nature of the Science Programme, the definition of the next plan relies on open community input and on broad peer review. The community input will be gathered through the Call for White Papers, while the peer review of this input will take place through a two-tiered committee structure, with a Senior Committee of 13 European scientists supported by a number of Topical Teams. Scientists interested in participating in peer review process are invited to respond to the Call for Membership of the Topical Teams.

Membership of Topical Teams

Scientists working in ESA Member States and with an interest in any topic in space science and in the relevant technologies are welcome to apply for membership of the Topical Teams. Space science is defined here in a broad sense, including the observation of the Universe, planetary science, solar science, study of the space environment, and scientific experiments that can be carried out from a spacecraft.

The Topical Teams will be appointed by the Director of Science after the evaluation and recommendations of the Senior Committee. It is intended to have a mix of experience represented in each Topical Team and early career scientists are specifically encouraged to apply.

Full details, including information about Voyage 2050, the tasks of the Topical Team members, and information needed by applicants, can be found in the Call for Membership of Topical Teams document .

By means of the present Call for White Papers, the Agency is soliciting ideas from the scientific community for the science themes that should be covered during the Voyage 2050 planning cycle.

White Papers are not proposals for specific missions; they should rather argue why a specific scientific theme should have priority in the Voyage 2050 planning cycle. At the same time, and to ensure realism in the resulting Programme, applicants should briefly illustrate possible mission profiles.

Any scientist or science team can submit a White Paper, with no limitation in terms of residence or nationality. All White Papers must be submitted in English. White Paper lead scientists cannot be members of the Topical Teams.

Full details, including information about Voyage 2050, the requirements for White Papers, and the role these will play in formulating the future Science Programme, can be found in the Call for White Papers document .

An open workshop was held 29-31 October 2019 in Madrid, Spain, at which the White Papers were presented.

Submission forms

Schedule for this call and important dates.

Applicants who require further information while preparing their response to the Calls are invited to contact:

Last updated: 21 April 2021

To be informed about new Announcements or Calls from the ESA Science Directorate please subscribe to the dsciannounce mailing list .

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December 18, 2023

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Oceanography, sea floor mapping and satellite combine to map world's strongest current

From space to the sea floor, an Australian and international research voyage has mapped a highly energetic "hotspot" in the world's strongest current simultaneously by ship and satellite, and uncovered an underwater mountain range.

Halfway between Tasmania and Antarctica, the block of the Southern Ocean surveyed in high-resolution, three-dimensional detail stretches over an area of 20,000 square kilometers down through layers of swirling currents to the sea floor 4,000 meters below.

The FOCUS voyage on CSIRO research vessel (RV) Investigator has been working in the Antarctic Circumpolar Current for the last five weeks to understand how heat leaking across this natural barrier contributes to melting Antarctic ice shelves and the potential for sea-level rise .

The voyage was designed to work with the new Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite, jointly developed by NASA and the French space agency Centre National d'Études Spatiales (CNES)—enabling simultaneous mapping of fine-scale ocean features from the satellite and the ship.

Voyage chief scientist Dr. Benoit Legresy said CSIRO, Australia's national science agency, and the Australian Antarctic Program Partnership worked with collaborators and equipment from the US and France to tackle important climate questions.

"The ocean has absorbed more than 90 percent of heat due to global warming and around 25 percent of human CO 2 emissions, providing an enormous service as a 'climate shock absorber,'" Dr. Legresy said.

"Knowing how to deal with human-induced climate change brings an urgency to tracking down the heat and carbon pathways in the global climate system. We've been working in a gateway where heat is funneled towards Antarctica, contributing to ice melt and sea level rise. We need to understand how this gate works, how much heat gets through and how this may change in the future."

While mapping the ocean currents , the companion mapping of the sea floor bathymetry has revealed ancient dormant underwater volcanoes.

CSIRO geophysicist Dr. Chris Yule said the team conducted high resolution mapping with RV Investigator's world-class multibeam echosounder system. The survey spanned a sea floor area of 20,000 km 2 , most of which hasn't been mapped before.

"To our delight, we've discovered a spectacular chain of ancient seamounts, comprising eight long-dormant volcanoes with peaks up to 1500 meters high and one with a double vent," Dr. Yule said.

"Four of them are new discoveries, and we filled in details on two seamounts and a fault line ridge partially mapped on a previous voyage. We now know the ridge, just west of the survey area, drops into a valley over a 1600-meter-high cliff."

The survey area is 200 nautical miles (370 km) west of Macquarie Island and the tectonically active Macquarie Ridge. The seamounts were formed by volcanoes arising from hot-spot magmatism within the last 20 million years.

Voyage co-chief scientist Dr. Helen Phillips, from the Australian Antarctic Program Partnership at the University of Tasmania, said new discoveries about the shape of the sea floor are vitally important to understanding ocean dynamics.

"The Antarctic Circumpolar Current 'feels' the sea floor and the mountains in its path, and where it encounters barriers like ridges or seamounts, 'wiggles' are created in the water flow that form eddies. Valleys and cliffs can also accelerate deep currents at the bottom of the ocean," Dr. Phillips said.

"Eddies are like the weather systems of the ocean, playing a major role in transporting heat and carbon from the upper ocean to deeper layers—a critical buffer against global warming. Knowledge of the depth and shape of the sea floor is crucial for us to quantify the influence of undersea mountains, hills and valleys on the Antarctic Circumpolar Current and the leaking of heat toward Antarctica."

Dr. Phillips said that while integrating all the ship and satellite data will take some time, the successful voyage is fundamental to building knowledge of ocean circulation that informs climate policy.

"Ultimately, we want to turn daily maps of ocean sea surface height from satellites into daily maps of the movement of heat in the Southern Ocean toward Antarctica. This will help governments and communities plan how to adapt to rising sea levels and how fast they need to act," she said.

Provided by CSIRO

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After a 12.3 billion-mile 'shout,' NASA regains full contact with Voyager 2

Emily Olson

Ayana Archie

A NASA image of one of the twin Voyager space probes. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory lost contact with Voyager 2 on July 21 after mistakenly pointing its antenna 2 degrees away from Earth. On Friday, contact was fully restored. NASA/Getty Images hide caption

A NASA image of one of the twin Voyager space probes. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory lost contact with Voyager 2 on July 21 after mistakenly pointing its antenna 2 degrees away from Earth. On Friday, contact was fully restored.

Talk about a long-distance call.

NASA said it resumed full communications with the Voyager 2 on Friday after almost two weeks of silence from the interstellar spacecraft.

The agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said a series of ground antennas, part of the Deep Space Network, registered a carrier signal from Voyager 2 on Tuesday. However, the signal was too faint.

A Deep Space Network facility in Australia then sent "the equivalent of an interstellar 'shout' " to the Voyager 2 telling it to turn its antenna back toward Earth. The signal was sent more than 12.3 billion miles away and it took 37 hours to get a response from the spacecraft, NASA said.

Scientists received a response at about 12:30 a.m. ET Friday. Voyager 2 is now operating normally, returning science and telemetry data, and "remains on its expected trajectory," NASA said.

NASA said Friday that it lost contact with Voyager 2 on July 21 after "a series of planned commands" inadvertently caused the craft to turn its antenna 2 degrees away from the direction of its home planet.

NASA is keeping Voyager 2 going until at least 2026 by tapping into backup power

What might seem like a slight error had big consequences: NASA previously said it wouldn't be able to communicate with the craft until October, when the satellite would go through one of its routine repositioning steps.

"That is a long time to wait, so we'll try sending up commands several times" before October, program manager Suzanne Dodd told The Associated Press.

These are the 4 astronauts who'll take a trip around the moon next year

Even if Voyager 2 had failed to reestablish communications until fall, the engineers expected it to stay moving on its planned trajectory on the edge of the solar system.

Voyager 2 entered interstellar space in November 2018 — more than 40 years since it launched from Cape Canaveral, Fla. To this day, Voyager 2 remains one of only two human-made objects to ever operate outside the heliosphere, which NASA defines as "the protective bubble of particles and magnetic fields generated by the Sun."

Its primary mission was to study the outer solar system, and already, Voyager 2 has proved its status as a planetary pioneer . Equipped with several imaging instruments, the spacecraft is credited with documenting the discovery of 16 new moons, six new rings and Neptune's "Great Dark Spot."

Voyager 2 Bids Adieu To The Heliosphere, Entering Interstellar Space

Voyager 2 is also carrying some precious cargo, like a message in a bottle, should it find itself as the subject of another world's discovery: a golden record containing a variety of natural sounds, greetings in 55 languages and a 90-minute selection of music.

Last month's command mix-up foreshadows the craft's inevitable end an estimated three years from now.

"Eventually, there will not be enough electricity to power even one instrument," reads a NASA page documenting the spacecraft's travels . "Then, Voyager 2 will silently continue its eternal journey among the stars."

Meanwhile, Voyager 2's sister spacecraft, Voyager 1, is still broadcasting and transmitting data just fine from a slightly farther vantage point of 15 billion miles away.

Correction Aug. 3, 2023

A previous version of this article implied that Voyager 2 flew past Uranus in 2018 when, in fact, the spacecraft concluded its encounter with the planet and started heading toward Neptune in 1986. Voyager 2 entered interstellar space in November 2018.

• Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Voyager 1: Facts about Earth's farthest spacecraft

Voyager 1 continues to explore the cosmos along with its twin probe, Voyager 2.

The Grand Tour

Voyager 1 jupiter flyby, voyager 1 visits saturn and its moons, voyager 1 enters interstellar space, voyager 1's interstellar adventures, additional resources.

Voyager 1 is the first spacecraft to travel beyond the solar system and reach interstellar space . 

The probe launched on Sept. 5, 1977 — about two weeks after its twin Voyager 2 — and as of August 2022 is approximately 14.6 billion miles (23.5 billion kilometers) away from our planet, making it Earth 's farthest spacecraft. Voyager 1 is currently zipping through space at around 38,000 mph (17 kilometers per second), according to NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory .

When Voyager 1 launched a mission to explore the outer planets in our solar system nobody knew how important the probe would still be 45 years later The probe has remained operational long past expectations and continues to send information about its journeys back to Earth. 

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

Elizabeth Howell, Ph.D., is a staff writer in the spaceflight channel since 2022. She was contributing writer for  Space.com  for 10 years before that, since 2012. Elizabeth's on-site reporting includes two human spaceflight launches from Kazakhstan, three space shuttle missions in Florida, and embedded reporting from a simulated Mars mission in Utah. 

Size: Voyager 1's body is about the size of a subcompact car. The boom for its magnetometer instrument extends 42.7 feet (13 meters). Weight (at launch): 1,797 pounds (815 kilograms). Launch date: Sept. 5, 1977

Jupiter flyby date: March 5, 1979

Saturn flyby date: Nov. 12, 1980.

Entered interstellar space: Aug. 25, 2012. 

The spacecraft entered interstellar space in August 2012, almost 35 years after its voyage began. The discovery wasn't made official until 2013, however, when scientists had time to review the data sent back from Voyager 1.

Voyager 1 was the second of the twin spacecraft to launch, but it was the first to race by Jupiter and Saturn . The images Voyager 1 sent back have been used in schoolbooks and by many media outlets for a generation. The spacecraft also carries a special record — The Golden Record — that's designed to carry voices and music from Earth out into the cosmos. 

According to NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) , Voyager 1 has enough fuel to keep its instruments running until at least 2025. By then, the spacecraft will be approximately 13.8 billion miles (22.1 billion kilometers) away from the sun.  

The Voyager missions took advantage of a special alignment of the outer planets that happens just once every 176 years. This alignment allows spacecraft to gravitationally "slingshot" from one planet to the next, making the most efficient use of their limited fuel.

NASA originally planned to send two spacecraft past Jupiter, Saturn and Pluto and two other probes past Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune . Budgetary reasons forced the agency to scale back its plans, but NASA still got a lot out of the two Voyagers it launched.

Voyager 2 flew past Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune , while Voyager 1 focused on Jupiter and Saturn.

Recognizing that the Voyagers would eventually fly to interstellar space, NASA authorized the production of two Golden Records to be placed on board the spacecraft. Sounds ranging from whale calls to the music of Chuck Berry were placed on board, as well as spoken greetings in 55 languages. 

The 12-inch-wide (30 centimeters), gold-plated copper disks also included pictorials showing how to operate them and the position of the sun among nearby pulsars (a type of fast-spinning stellar corpse known as a neutron star ), in case extraterrestrials someday stumbled onto the spacecraft and wondered where they came from.

Both spacecraft are powered by three radioisotope thermoelectric generators , devices that convert the heat released by the radioactive decay of plutonium to electricity. Both probes were outfitted with 10 scientific instruments, including a two-camera imaging system, multiple spectrometers, a magnetometer and gear that detects low-energy charged particles and high-energy cosmic rays . Mission team members have also used the Voyagers' communications system to help them study planets and moons, bringing the total number of scientific investigations on each craft to 11.

Voyager 1 almost didn't get off the ground at its launch , as its rocket came within 3.5 seconds of running out of fuel on Sept. 5, 1977.

But the probe made it safely to space and raced past its twin after launch, getting beyond the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter before Voyager 2 did. Voyager 1's first pictures of Jupiter beamed back to Earth in April 1978, when the probe was 165 million miles (266 million kilometers) from home.

According to NASA , each voyager probe has about 3 million times less memory than a mobile phone and transmits data approximately 38,000 times slower than a 5g internet connection.  

To NASA's surprise, in March 1979 Voyager 1 spotted a thin ring circling the giant planet. It found two new moons as well — Thebe and Metis. Additionally, Voyager 1 sent back detailed pictures of Jupiter's big Galilean moons ( Io , Europa , Ganymede and Callisto ) as well as Amalthea .

Like the Pioneer spacecraft before it , Voyager's look at Jupiter's moons revealed them to be active worlds of their own. And Voyager 1 made some intriguing discoveries about these natural satellites. For example, Io's many volcanoes and mottled yellow-brown-orange surface showed that, like planets, moons can have active interiors.

Additionally, Voyager 1 sent back photos of Europa showing a relatively smooth surface broken up by lines, hinting at ice and maybe even an ocean underneath. (Subsequent observations and analyses have revealed that Europa likely harbors a huge subsurface ocean of liquid water, which may even be able to support Earth-like life .)

Voyager 1's closest approach to Jupiter was on March 5, 1979, when it came within 174,000 miles (280,000 km) of the turbulent cloud tops. Then it was time for the probe to aim for Saturn.

Scientists only had to wait about a year, until 1980, to get close-up pictures of Saturn. Like Jupiter, the ringed planet turned out to be full of surprises.

One of Voyager 1's targets was the F ring, a thin structure discovered only the year previously by NASA's Pioneer 11 probe. Voyager's higher-resolution camera spotted two new moons, Prometheus and Pandora, whose orbits keep the icy material in the F ring in a defined orbit. It also discovered Atlas and a new ring, the G ring, and took images of several other Saturn moons.

One puzzle for astronomers was Titan , the second-largest moon in the solar system (after Jupiter's Ganymede). Close-up pictures of Titan showed nothing but orange haze, leading to years of speculation about what it was like underneath. It wouldn't be until the mid-2000s that humanity would find out, thanks to photos snapped from beneath the haze by the European Space Agency's Huygens atmospheric probe .

The Saturn encounter marked the end of Voyager 1's primary mission. The focus then shifted to tracking the 1,590-pound (720 kg) craft as it sped toward interstellar space.

Two decades before it notched that milestone, however, Voyager 1 took one of the most iconic photos in spaceflight history. On Feb. 14, 1990, the probe turned back toward Earth and snapped an image of its home planet from 3.7 billion miles (6 billion km) away. The photo shows Earth as a tiny dot suspended in a ray of sunlight. 

Voyager 1 took dozens of other photos that day, capturing five other planets and the sun in a multi-image "solar system family portrait." But the Pale Blue Dot picture stands out, reminding us that Earth is a small outpost of life in an incomprehensibly vast universe.

Voyager 1 left the heliosphere — the giant bubble of charged particles that the sun blows around itself — in August 2012, popping free into interstellar space. The discovery was made public in a study published in the journal Science the following year.

The results came to light after a powerful solar eruption was recorded by Voyager 1's plasma wave instrument between April 9 and May 22, 2013. The eruption caused electrons near Voyager 1 to vibrate. From the oscillations, researchers discovered that Voyager 1's surroundings had a higher density than what is found just inside the heliosphere.

It seems contradictory that electron density is higher in interstellar space than it is in the sun's neighborhood. But researchers explained that, at the edge of the heliosphere, the electron density is dramatically low compared with locations near Earth. 

Researchers then backtracked through Voyager 1's data and nailed down the official departure date to Aug. 25, 2012. The date was fixed not only by the electron oscillations but also by the spacecraft's measurements of charged solar particles. 

On that fateful day — which was the same day that Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong died — the probe saw a 1,000-fold drop in these particles and a 9% increase in galactic cosmic rays that come from outside the solar system . At that point, Voyager 1 was 11.25 billion miles (18.11 billion km) from the sun, or about 121 astronomical units (AU).

One AU is the average Earth-sun distance — about 93 million miles (150 million km).

You can keep tabs on the Voyager 1's current distance and mission status on this NASA website .

Since flying into interstellar space, Voyager 1 has sent back a variety of valuable information about conditions in this zone of the universe . Its discoveries include showing that cosmic radiation out there is very intense, and demonstrating how charged particles from the sun interact with those emitted by other stars , mission project scientist Ed Stone, of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, told Space.com in September 2017 .

The spacecraft's capabilities continue to astound engineers. In December 2017, for example, NASA announced that Voyager 1 successfully used its backup thrusters to orient itself to "talk" with Earth . The trajectory correction maneuver (TCM) thrusters hadn't been used since November 1980, during Voyager 1's flyby of Saturn. Since then, the spacecraft had primarily used its standard attitude-control thrusters to swing the spacecraft in the right orientation to communicate with Earth. 

As the performance of the attitude-control thrusters began to deteriorate, however, NASA decided to test the TCM thrusters — an idea that could extend Voyager 1's operational life. That test ultimately succeeded. 

"With these thrusters that are still functional after 37 years without use, we will be able to extend the life of the Voyager 1 spacecraft by two to three years," Voyager project manager Suzanne Dodd, of NASA's Jet Propulsion, Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, said in a statement in December 2017 .

Mission team members have taken other measures to extend Voyager 1's life as well. For example, they turned off the spacecraft's cameras shortly after the Pale Blue Dot photo was taken to help conserve Voyager 1's limited power supply. (The cameras wouldn't pick up much in the darkness of deep space anyway.) Over the years, the mission team has turned off five other scientific instruments as well, leaving Voyager 1 with four that are still functioning — the Cosmic Ray Subsystem, the Low-Energy Charged Particles instrument, the Magnetometer and the Plasma Wave Subsystem. (Similar measures have been taken with Voyager 2, which currently has five operational instruments .)

The Voyager spacecraft each celebrated 45 years in space in 2022, a monumental milestone for the twin probes.

"Over the last 45 years, the Voyager missions have been integral in providing this knowledge and have helped change our understanding of the sun and its influence in ways no other spacecraft can," says Nicola Fox, director of the Heliophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington, in a NASA statement .

"Today, as both Voyagers explore interstellar space, they are providing humanity with observations of uncharted territory," said Linda Spilker, Voyager's deputy project scientist at JPL in the same NASA statement.

"This is the first time we've been able to directly study how a star, our Sun, interacts with the particles and magnetic fields outside our heliosphere, helping scientists understand the local neighborhood between the stars, upending some of the theories about this region, and providing key information for future missions." Spilker continues.

Voyager 1's next big encounter will take place in 40,000 years when the probe comes within 1.7 light-years of the star AC +79 3888. (The star is roughly 17.5 light-years from Earth.) However, Voyager 1's falling power supply means it will probably stop collecting scientific data around 2025.

You can learn much more about both Voyagers' design, scientific instruments and mission goals at JPL's Voyager site . NASA has lots of in-depth information about the Pale Blue Dot photo, including Carl Sagan's large role in making it happen, here . And if you're interested in the Golden Record, check out this detailed New Yorker piece by Timothy Ferris, who produced the historic artifact.  Explore the history of Voyager with this interactive timeline courtesy of NASA.  

Bibliography

• Bell, Jim. " The Interstellar Age: Inside the Forty-Year Voyager Mission ," Dutton, 2015.
• Landau, Elizabeth. "The Voyagers in popular culture," Dec. 1, 2017. https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/the-voyagers-in-popular-culture
• PBS, "Voyager: A history in photos." https://www.pbs.org/the-farthest/mission/voyager-history-photos/

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Elizabeth Howell (she/her), Ph.D., is a staff writer in the spaceflight channel since 2022 covering diversity, education and gaming as well. She was contributing writer for Space.com for 10 years before joining full-time. Elizabeth's reporting includes multiple exclusives with the White House and Office of the Vice-President of the United States, an exclusive conversation with aspiring space tourist (and NSYNC bassist) Lance Bass, speaking several times with the International Space Station, witnessing five human spaceflight launches on two continents, flying parabolic, working inside a spacesuit, and participating in a simulated Mars mission. Her latest book, " Why Am I Taller ?", is co-written with astronaut Dave Williams. Elizabeth holds a Ph.D. and M.Sc. in Space Studies from the University of North Dakota, a Bachelor of Journalism from Canada's Carleton University and a Bachelor of History from Canada's Athabasca University. Elizabeth is also a post-secondary instructor in communications and science at several institutions since 2015; her experience includes developing and teaching an astronomy course at Canada's Algonquin College (with Indigenous content as well) to more than 1,000 students since 2020. Elizabeth first got interested in space after watching the movie Apollo 13 in 1996, and still wants to be an astronaut someday. Mastodon: https://qoto.org/@howellspace

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Voyager 3D Model

A 3D model of NASA's twin Voyager spacecraft.

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Interstellar Mission

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

Mission Statistics

Launch Date

Sept. 5, 1977

About the mission

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

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

Instruments

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

Mission Highlights

Sept. 1, 2013

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

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How are the Voyager spacecraft able to transmit radio messages so far?

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The two Voyage spacecraft certainly have had an amazing track record. They were sent to photograph planets like Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune and have just kept on going past the outer edge of the solar system. Voyager 1 is currently over 7 billion miles (about 11 billion kilometers) away from Earth and is still transmitting -- it takes about 10 hours for the signal to travel from the spacecraft to Earth!

The Voyager spacecraft use 23-watt radios. This is higher than the 3 watts a typical cell phone uses, but in the grand scheme of things it is still a low-power transmitter. Big radio stations on Earth transmit at tens of thousands of watts and they still fade out fairly quickly.

The key to receiving the signals is therefore not the power of the radio, but a combination of three other things:

• Very large antennas
• Directional antennas that point right at each other
• Radio frequencies without a lot of man-made interference on them

The antennas that the Voyager spacecraft use are big. You may have seen people who have large satellite dish antennas in their yards. These are typically 2 or 3 meters (6 to 10 feet) in diameter. The Voyager spacecraft has an antenna that is 3.7 meters (14 feet) in diameter, and it transmits to a 34 meter (100 feet or so) antenna on Earth. The Voyager antenna and the Earth antenna are pointed right at each other. When you compare your phone's stubby, little omni-directional antenna to a 34 meter directional antenna, you can see the main thing that makes a difference!

The Voyager satellites are also transmitting in the 8 GHz range , and there is not a lot of interference at this frequency. Therefore the antenna on Earth can use an extremely sensitive amplifier and still make sense of the faint signals it receives. Then when the earth antenna transmits back to the spacecraft, it uses extremely high power (tens of thousands of watts) to make sure the spacecraft gets the message.

Frequently Asked Questions

What role do earth's ground stations play in receiving signals from distant spacecraft like voyager, how has technology advanced to maintain communication with voyager as it moves further away.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Korea's first ultra-small constellation satellite 'Mission BTS,' named after the global superstars set to launch in April 2024

K orea's first mass-produced ultra-small constellation satellite, No. 1, is reportedly named after K-pop sensation BTS; the mission is "Beginning Of The Swarm." On April 22, According to South Korean media agency KBS News, Rocket Lab USA, who is in charge of this mission, confirmed the launch of the satellite through their official Instagram page.

The mission's name has garnered attention on the internet, given the enormous popularity of the K-pop boy group. As per the satellite model's image shared by Rocket Lab, "Beginning Of The Swarm," inspired by BTS, is written at the bottom while South Korea's national flag is in the center.

The model carrying the first micro-swarm satellite has undergone the launch rehearsal and is all geared up for the reported space launch on April 24, 2024. The launch is scheduled from 10 am to 11 am (from 7 am to 8 am Korean Standard Time) at the Mahia Rocket Lab launch site in New Zealand.

More about Korea's first ultra-small constellation satellite "Beginning Of The Swarm" named after BTS

BTS is widely popular for releasing music based on the space and galaxy concept, including 134340, Mikrokosmos, My Universe with Coldplay, and the eldest member Jin 's' The Astronaut and Moon .

The name of the mission BTS, which is an abbreviation for the beginning of the swarm, has a special meaning as the Micro-Swarm Satellite No. 1 is a test, and 11 more satellites will reportedly be launched later. This launch hinted at the meaning of the beginning of the constellation.

According to KBS news, Rocket Lab reportedly said:

"It is an Earth observation satellite equipped with a high-resolution optical camera designed to monitor natural disasters on the Korean Peninsula by combining imaging and artificial intelligence (AI)."

As per Chosun Biz, KAIST also reportedly spoke about the features of the satellite.

"The Korean Peninsula area can be photographed at least three times a day, and the same spot will be photographed again within 24 hours. Because it is capable of filming, it can overcome the limitations of existing medium-to-large single Earth observation satellites," they said.

According to the Ministry of Science and ICT, they will confirm the final success of the launch through satellite communication at about 11:32 am KST, 4 hours and 24 minutes after launch.

The model featured the names of the institutions that developed the satellite, including the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). Satellite Research Institute and NeonSat, Satrec I (SI), Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI), and the Ministry of Science and ICT (MSIT) also joined other institutes.

Three songs by BTS on NASA's 2024 Voyage Moon Tunes playlist

Previously, in January 2024, BTS was all over social media as NASA picked three of its space-themed songs to be played in space. NASA picked three songs by the septet to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of Apollo 11. The 2024 Voyage Moon Tunes playlist included tracks like Mikrokosmos from Map of the Soul: Persona and 134340 from Love Yourself: Tear .

Furthermore, the leader, RM, added his track Moonchild and his songs with the group to the playlist for the three-day-long journey. RM created history with the moment as the first Korean solo artist to have a song added to NASA's Moon Tune playlist.

Currently, all seven members of BTS, including RM, Jin, Suga, J-Hope, Jimin, V, and Jungkook, are serving in the military. Meanwhile, Jin will be the first among the members to be discharged from his duties before the group's 11th debut anniversary in June 2024.