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Voyager 1 image of jupiter.

First close-up view of Jupiter from Voyager 1.

Voyager 1’s closest approach to Jupiter occurred March 5, 1979.

Image Credit: NASA

Voyager 1 Trajectory through the Solar System

• Released Thursday, August 31, 2017
• Visualizations by:
• Tom Bridgman

This visualization tracks the trajectory of the Voyager 1 spacecraft through the solar system. Launched on September 5, 1977, it was one of two spacecraft sent to visit the giant planets of the outer solar system. Voyager 1 flew by Jupiter and Saturn before being directed out of the solar system. To fit the 40 year history of the mission into a short visualization, the pacing of time accelerates through most of the movie, starting at about 5 days per second at the beginning and speeding up to about 11 months per second after the planet flybys are past. The termination shock and heliopause are the 'boundaries' created when the plasma between the stars interacts with the plasma flowing outward from the Sun. They are represented with simple grid models and oriented so their 'nose' is pointed in the direction (Right Ascension = 17h 24m, declination = 17 degrees south) represented by more recent measurements from other missions.

Visualization centered on the Voyager 1 trajectory through the solar system.

• Voyager.ChaseV1.HD1080i_p30.mp4 (1920x1080) [120.3 MB]
• Voyager.ChaseV1.HD1080i_p30.webm (1920x1080) [15.4 MB]
• Voyager.ChaseV1.clockSlate_2160p30.mp4 (3840x2160) [210.8 MB]
• Voyager.ChaseV1.clockSlate (1920x1080) [256.0 KB]
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• Voyager.ChaseV1.clockSlate_Track.HD1080i.03905_print.jpg (1024x576) [96.8 KB]
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• Voyager.ChaseV1.clockSlate_Track.HD1080i.03905_thm.png (80x40) [4.4 KB]

Voyager 1's 'Family Portrait' On Valentine's Day 1990, Voyager 1's camera were pointed back at the solar system to image the planets. Check out Voyager at NASA/JPL for more information.

• Voyager.ChaseV1.clockSlate_Track.UHD3840.00000_print.jpg (1024x576) [104.9 KB]

Opening view of Earth orbit looking outward to the rest of the solar system.

• Voyager.ChaseV1.clockSlate_Track.UHD3840.00550_print.jpg (1024x576) [117.4 KB]

Voyager 1 (and 2) cross the orbit of Mars, slightly above the ecliptic plane to avoid the asteroid belt between Mars & Jupiter.

• Voyager.ChaseV1.clockSlate_Track.UHD3840.01490_print.jpg (1024x576) [113.3 KB]

The camera moves out ahead of the Voyagers for a view back at the inner solar system.

• Voyager.ChaseV1.clockSlate_Track.UHD3840.01990_print.jpg (1024x576) [102.3 KB]

Voyager 1 just after the Jupiter flyby on March 5, 1979.

• Voyager.ChaseV1.clockSlate_Track.UHD3840.02420_print.jpg (1024x576) [101.8 KB]

Voyager 1 just before the Saturn flyby on November 12, 1980.

• Voyager.ChaseV1.clockSlate_Track.UHD3840.02990_print.jpg (1024x576) [123.1 KB]

With a gravity-assist from the Saturn flyby, Voyager 1 is directed above the plane of the solar system and continues outward. This is near the time of the Voyager 1 'Family Portrait'. The orbit of Pluto is the grey orbit visible above the orbits of the other planets.

• Voyager.ChaseV1.clockSlate_Track.UHD3840.03350_print.jpg (1024x576) [97.5 KB]

Voyager 1 crosses the termination shock of the solar wind. For simplified and symmetric termination shock model, the timing is not accurate. In reality, this crossing occurred around December of 2004.

• Voyager.ChaseV1.clockSlate_Track.UHD3840.03900_print.jpg (1024x576) [99.4 KB]

Voyager 1 (and 2) beyond the heliopause near the end of 2017.

A slightly sped-up version of the Voyager 1 visualization above, reducing the time for the Voyagers to cross the asteroid belt.

• Voyager1SpedUp.m4v (1920x1080) [123.0 MB]
• Voyager1SpedUp.webm (1920x1080) [12.2 MB]
• Voyager1_Sped_Up-HD1080p.mov (1920x1080) [185.8 MB]
• Voyager1_Sped_Up.mov (1920x1080) [1.7 GB]
• Voyager_1_Sped_Up_4k-H264.mov (3840x2160) [639.6 MB]
• Voyager_1_Sped_Up_4k_ProRes.mov (3840x2160) [7.2 GB]
• Voyager1SpedUp.00500_print.jpg (1024x576) [122.6 KB]
• Solar System

Please give credit for this item to: NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio

• Tom Bridgman  (Global Science and Technology, Inc.)
• Kathalina Tran  (KBR Wyle Services, LLC)
• Genna Duberstein  (USRA)
• Scott Wiessinger  (USRA)

Project support

• Laurence Schuler  (ADNET Systems, Inc.)
• Ian Jones  (ADNET Systems, Inc.)

Release date

This page was originally published on Thursday, August 31, 2017. This page was last updated on Wednesday, November 15, 2023 at 12:05 AM EST.

• Voyager @ 40
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Hubble’s Brand New Image of Jupiter

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Voyager 1's approach to Jupiter over a period of 60 days

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Voyager 2 trajectory (GIF format)

Voyager 2 trajectory movie (mpg format), interactive 3-dimensional wire-frame model of voyager 1 and 2 trajectories (java applet), voyager 1 and 2 trajectory data files, for more information contact john richardson at mit (e-mail: [email protected])..

Category : Photos of Jupiter by Voyager 1

Media in category "photos of jupiter by voyager 1".

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Instrument status.

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To learn more about Voyager, zoom in and give the spacecraft a spin. View the full interactive experience at Eyes on the Solar System . Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

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Well, hello, Voyager 1! The venerable spacecraft is once again making sense

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Members of the Voyager team celebrate at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory after receiving data about the health and status of Voyager 1 for the first time in months. NASA/JPL-Caltech hide caption

Members of the Voyager team celebrate at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory after receiving data about the health and status of Voyager 1 for the first time in months.

NASA says it is once again able to get meaningful information back from the Voyager 1 probe, after months of troubleshooting a glitch that had this venerable spacecraft sending home messages that made no sense.

The Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 probes launched in 1977 on a mission to study Jupiter and Saturn but continued onward through the outer reaches of the solar system. In 2012, Voyager 1 became the first spacecraft to enter interstellar space, the previously unexplored region between the stars. (Its twin, traveling in a different direction, followed suit six years later.)

Voyager 1 had been faithfully sending back readings about this mysterious new environment for years — until November, when its messages suddenly became incoherent .

NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft is talking nonsense. Its friends on Earth are worried

It was a serious problem that had longtime Voyager scientists worried that this historic space mission wouldn't be able to recover. They'd hoped to be able to get precious readings from the spacecraft for at least a few more years, until its power ran out and its very last science instrument quit working.

For the last five months, a small team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California has been working to fix it. The team finally pinpointed the problem to a memory chip and figured out how to restore some essential software code.

"When the mission flight team heard back from the spacecraft on April 20, they saw that the modification worked: For the first time in five months, they have been able to check the health and status of the spacecraft," NASA stated in an update.

The usable data being returned so far concerns the workings of the spacecraft's engineering systems. In the coming weeks, the team will do more of this software repair work so that Voyager 1 will also be able to send science data, letting researchers once again see what the probe encounters as it journeys through interstellar space.

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

• interstellar mission

Greetings, Earth! NASA can understand Voyager 1 again

The 46-year-old space probe is making sense for the first time in five months after remote repairs.

By Laura Baisas | Published Apr 23, 2024 10:08 AM EDT

For the first time since November 2023 , NASA is receiving meaningful communication from its Voyager 1 probe . The agency has spent months troubleshooting a glitch in why the famed probe was sending home messages that looked like garbled up gibberish and not scientific data. The probe is now coherent, but according to NASA , the next step is to enable Voyager 1 to begin to return usable science information again. 

[Related: Voyager 1 is sending back bad data, but NASA is on it .]

Alongside its twin Voyager 2 , these probes are the only spacecraft to ever fly in interstellar space –or the region between stars beyond the influence of the sun. Both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 probes launched in 1977 . Their mission initially included detailed observations of Jupiter and Saturn, but it continued on exploring the outer reaches of the solar system. Voyager 1 became the first spacecraft to enter interstellar space in 2012. Voyager 2 followed Voyager 1 into interstellar space in 2018 . 

On November 14, 2023, Voyager 1 stopped sending readable science and engineering data back to Earth for the first time. Mission controllers could tell that the spacecraft was still receiving their commands and otherwise operating normally, so they were not sure why it was sending back such incoherent information. In March, the Voyager engineering team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) confirmed that the issue was related to one of the spacecraft’s three onboard computers, called the flight data subsystem (FDS). The FDS packages science and engineering data before it’s sent to Earth so that NASA can use it.

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

The team pinpointed the code responsible for packaging the spacecraft’s engineering data. The glitch was only on one single chip representing around 3 percent of the FDS memory, according to Space . They were unable to repair the chip. On April 18 , JPL engineers migrated the code to other portions of the FDS memory. This required splitting the code up into several sections to store them at multiple locations in the FDS. The code was adjusted to work from multiple locations as one cohesive process and references to its new directories were updated. 

“When the mission flight team heard back from the spacecraft on April 20, they saw that the modification worked: For the first time in five months, they have been able to check the health and status of the spacecraft,” NASA wrote in an update on April 22 .

[Related: When Voyager 1 goes dark, what comes next? ]

As of now, the usable data returned so far relates to how the spacecraft’s engineering systems are working. The team plans more software repair work in the next several weeks so that Voyager 1 can send valuable science data about the outer reaches of the solar system that is readable once again. As of now, Voyager 2 is still operating normally.

Laura is a science news writer, covering a wide variety of subjects, but she is particularly fascinated by all things aquatic, paleontology, nanotechnology, and exploring how science influences daily life. Laura is a proud former resident of the New Jersey shore, a competitive swimmer, and a fierce defender of the Oxford comma.

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Voyager 1 Just Sent Its First Coherent Message Back to NASA In Months

A clever programming fix has cured the spacecraft's electronic aphasia.

After 5 months of electronic aphasia, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft can communicate intelligibly again, thanks to a clever programming fix from its engineers.

The Voyager 1 team received a clear message about the spacecraft’s status on April 20, and they expect to have science data flowing again in the next few weeks. This comes a few months after Voyager program manager Suzanne Dodd said restoring the spacecraft’s ability to talk to its operators on Earth would take a miracle.

“In the last decade, I have learned from Voyager that there is (almost) always a way around a problem, no matter how dire it is,” Voyager mission assurance manager Bruce Waggoner told Inverse in March . “You just have to think ‘outside the box’ when people tell you not to do so.”

Voyager 1 entered interstellar space in 2012, and this illustration shows what it might look like out there (although it’s probably a lot darker in reality).

Flipped Bits and Electronic Gibberish

Back in November, a passing cosmic ray hit one of Voyager 1’s three onboard computers, and it “flipped a bit” (or altered a tiny unit of data) in the spacecraft’s Flight Data Subsystem. This unit of data happened to be a key piece of the code that tells Voyager 1 how to package up science and engineering data, including information about its own condition, before sending the message to Earth.

Like the robot version of a person recovering from a stroke, Voyager 1 could receive and understand messages from home, and it could gather data to send back. But when it tried to “speak,” its data came out as a gibberish of random 0s and 1s.

Engineers at NASA realized that to fix the problem, they needed to reprogram Voyager 1 with the correct code. However, there wasn’t enough data storage space on the Flight Data Subsystem computer to hold it all. The programmers had to split the code into sections, which could be tucked into Voyager 1’s computer wherever there was room. Then include instructions about where to find each one.

On April 18, Voyager 1’s team transmitted the new code to the distant spacecraft. Then they waited. It took 22.5 hours for the data, moving at the speed of light, to cross more than 15 billion miles of space to reach Voyager 1, and then it took another 22.5 hours for Voyager 1’s response to cross the vastness of space and reach NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. But after a tense 45 hours, on April 20, the team downloaded Voyager 1’s message: a clear, understandable status update declaring that all was well with the intrepid space robot.

The Voyager 1 team will spend the next few weeks reworking the code that packages science data, and they expect Voyager 1 to return to sending back reports from the edge of the Solar System — ones its human operators can actually read.

Meanwhile, Voyager 2, a well-behaved space robot that hasn’t been in the news lately, is still cruising out of the Solar System on its own trajectory. NASA says it hopes to keep both missions gathering data and calling home until around 2035 .

• Space Science

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

NASA's Voyager 1 probe has resumed sending usable data back to Earth after engineers fixed a computer error that caused the interstellar spacecraft to only transmit gibberish for five months.

NASA's Voyager 1 probe is once again sending readable radio signals back to Earth after engineers fixed a computer glitch that caused the spacecraft to malfunction in November .

For the first time in five months, Voyager 1 is now transmitting usable data about the health and status of its onboard engineering systems back to our planet, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced Monday (April 22). However, engineers have yet to fix the software that enables the spacecraft to return science data.

Voyager 1 is cruising through interstellar space roughly 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) away from Earth, which means mission control teams have to wait 22.5 hours for their commands to reach the spacecraft and another 22.5 hours for a response. Voyager 1 and its twin probe — Voyager 2, which continues to operate normally after a 2-week blackout last year — were launched almost 47 years ago and are the most distant human-made objects in existence. 

Engineers first noticed something wrong with Voyager 1 on Nov. 14, 2023, when the probe suddenly began transmitting a nonsensical stream of ones and zeros instead of its usual neatly packaged science and engineering datasets. 

Mission controllers could tell the spacecraft was still receiving their commands, however, indicating that its vital systems were operating normally.

Related: A mysterious 'hum' vibrates interstellar space. Voyager 1 has a recording of it.

In early March, after three months of unsuccessful tinkering , NASA engineering teams determined the issue was tied to one of Voyager 1's three onboard computer systems known as the "flight data subsystem" (FDS). The FDS is essential for packaging data harvested by the probe before they are sent to Earth, according to NASA's announcement.

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Engineers located the glitch by sending a command — or "poke" — that prompted the FDS to try new sequences of code in its software in case the issue could be resolved by skirting a corrupted section. The command triggered a signal that differed from the stream of gibberish the spacecraft had been sending back, and that engineers were able to decode . 

It turned out a single chip responsible for storing a portion of the FDS memory, including some of its computer software code, had stopped working. The loss of that code meant the probe's science and engineering data were unusable, according to NASA. To get around the issue, engineers broke up the code once stored in the chip and squeezed sections of it into functioning portions of the FDS memory. 

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The team then rewrote some of the reshuffled code so it could work as a whole again.

Engineers saved these modifications to the FDS memory on April 18. Two days later, they received a response from Voyager 1 showing that the reshuffle worked. For the first time in five months, the probe's message contained readable data, prompting celebrations at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.

However, solving the spacecraft's science data transmission will take further mending of the corrupted portions of the FDS software, NASA said in its announcement.

Sascha is a U.K.-based trainee staff writer at Live Science. She holds a bachelor’s degree in biology from the University of Southampton in England and a master’s degree in science communication from Imperial College London. Her work has appeared in The Guardian and the health website Zoe. Besides writing, she enjoys playing tennis, bread-making and browsing second-hand shops for hidden gems.

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admin said: NASA engineers have fixed a computer error that caused the interstellar Voyager 1 probe to glitch and stop transmitting data back to Earth for five months. After months of sending gibberish to NASA, Voyager 1 is finally making sense again : Read more

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Posted Apr 22, 2024

At 9:36 PM UTC

NASA has finally found a fix after the 46-year-old space probe stopped sending readable data to Earth in November. Voyager 1 can only send information about its health and status for now, but NASA says it’s working to get it back to transmitting scientific data, too.

[ blogs.nasa.gov ]

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April 22, 2024

After Months of Gibberish, Voyager 1 Is Communicating Well Again

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

By Meghan Bartels

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

NASA/JPL-Caltech

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NASA hears from Voyager 1, the most distant spacecraft from Earth, after months of quiet

NASA has finally heard back from Voyager 1 in a way that makes sense

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- NASA has finally heard back from Voyager 1 again in a way that makes sense.

The most distant spacecraft from Earth stopped sending back understandable data last November. Flight controllers traced the blank communication to a bad computer chip and rearranged the spacecraft’s coding to work around the trouble.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California declared success after receiving good engineering updates late last week. The team is still working to restore transmission of the science data.

It takes 22 1/2 hours to send a signal to Voyager 1, more than 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) away in interstellar space. The signal travel time is double that for a round trip.

Contact was never lost, rather it was like making a phone call where you can’t hear the person on the other end, a JPL spokeswoman said Tuesday.

Launched in 1977 to study Jupiter and Saturn, Voyager 1 has been exploring interstellar space — the space between star systems — since 2012. Its twin, Voyager 2, is 12.6 billion miles (20 billion kilometers) away and still working fine.

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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• Apr 27, 6:54 PM

Ex-official told investigators Trump had 'no standing declassification order'

• Apr 25, 6:55 PM

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