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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

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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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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45 years ago: voyager 1 begins its epic journey to the outer planets and beyond, johnson space center.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The voyage continues…

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 .

Voyager 1, Now Most Distant Human-made Object in Space

In a dark, cold, vacant neighborhood near the very edge of our solar system, the Voyager 1 spacecraft is set to break another record and become the explorer that has traveled farthest from home.

At approximately 2:10 p.m. Pacific time on February 17, 1998, Voyager 1, launched more than two decades ago, will cruise beyond the Pioneer 10 spacecraft and become the most distant human-created object in space at 10.4 billion kilometers (6.5 billion miles.) The two are headed in almost opposite directions away from the Sun. As with other spacecraft traveling past the orbit of Mars, both Voyager and Pioneer derive their electrical power from onboard nuclear batteries.

"For 25 years, the Pioneer 10 spacecraft led the way, pressing the frontiers of exploration, and now the baton is being passed from Pioneer 10 to Voyager 1 to continue exploring where no one has gone before," said Dr. Edward C. Stone, Voyager project scientist and director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

For 25 years, the Pioneer 10 spacecraft led the way, pressing the frontiers of exploration, and now the baton is being passed from Pioneer 10 to Voyager 1 to continue exploring where no one has gone before.

Dr. Edward Stone

Voyager Project Scientist

"At almost 70 times farther from the Sun than the Earth, Voyager 1 is at the very edge of the Solar System. The Sun there is only 1/5,000th as bright as here on Earth -- so it is extremely cold and there is very little solar energy to keep the spacecraft warm or to provide electrical power. The reason we can continue to operate at such great distances from the Sun is because we have radioisotope thermal electric generators (RTGs) on the spacecraft that create electricity and keep the spacecraft operating," Stone said. "The fact that the spacecraft is still returning data is a remarkable technical achievement."

Voyager 1 was launched from Cape Canaveral on September 5, 1977. The spacecraft encountered Jupiter on March 5, 1979, and Saturn on November 12, 1980.

Then, because its trajectory was designed to fly close to Saturn's large moon Titan, Voyager 1's path was bent northward by Saturn's gravity, sending the spacecraft out of the ecliptic plane - the plane in which all the planets except Pluto orbit the Sun.

Launched on March 2, 1972, the Pioneer 10 mission officially ended on March 31, 1997. However NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffet Field, CA, intermittently receives science data from Pioneer as part of a training program for flight controllers of the Lunar Prospector spacecraft now orbiting the Moon.

"The Voyager mission today presents an unequaled technical challenge. The spacecraft are now so far from home that it takes nine hours and 36 minutes for a radio signal traveling at the speed of light to reach Earth,"said Ed B. Massey, project manager for the Voyager Interstellar Mission. "That signal, produced by a 20 watt radio transmitter, is so faint that the amount of power reaching our antennas is 20 billion times smaller than the power of a digital watch battery."

Having completed their planetary explorations, Voyager 1 and its twin, Voyager 2, are studying the environment of space in the outer solar system. Although beyond the orbits of all the planets, the spacecraft still are well within the boundary of the Sun's magnetic field, called the heliosphere. Science instruments on both spacecraft sense signals that scientists believe are coming from the outermost edge of the heliosphere, known as the heliopause.

The heliosphere results from the Sun emitting a steady flow of electrically charged particles called the solar wind. As the solar wind expands supersonically into space in all directions, it creates a magnetized bubble -- the heliosphere -- around the Sun. Eventually, the solar wind encounters the electrically charged particles and magnetic field in the interstellar gas. In this zone the solar wind abruptly slows down from supersonic to subsonic speed, creating a termination shock. Before the spacecraft travel beyond the heliopause into interstellar space, they will pass through this termination shock.

"The data coming back from Voyager now suggest that we may pass through the termination shock in the next three to five years," Stone said. "If that's the case, then one would expect that within 10 years or so we would actually be very close to penetrating the heliopause itself and entering into interstellar space for the first time."

Reaching the termination shock and heliopause will be major milestones for the mission because no spacecraft have been there before and the Voyagers will gather the first direct evidence of their structure. Encountering the termination shock and heliopause has been a long-sought goal for many space physicists, and exactly where these two boundaries are located and what they are like still remains a mystery.

Science data are returned to Earth in real-time to the 34- meter Deep Space Network (DSN) antennas located in California, Australia and Spain. Both spacecraft have enough electricity and attitude control propellant to continue operating until about 2020, when electrical power produced by the RTGs will no longer support science instrument operation. At that time, Voyager 1 will be almost 150 times farther from the Sun than the Earth -- more than 20 billion kilometers (almost 14 billion miles) away.

On Feb. 17, Voyager 1 will be 10.4 billion kilometers (6.5 billion miles) from Earth and is departing the Solar System at a speed of 17.4 kilometers per second (39,000 miles per hour). At the same time, Voyager 2 will be 8.1 billion kilometers (5.1 billion miles) from Earth and is departing the solar system at a speed of 15.9 kilometers per second (35,000 miles per hour).

JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology, manages the Voyager Interstellar Mission for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, D. C.

Written by Mary A. Hardin (Jet Propulsion Laboratory)

NASA re-establishes communication with Voyager 1 interstellar spacecraft that went silent for months

NASA and Voyager 1 are communicating back and forth again, after the most distant human-made object in space stopped sending usable data back to the space agency nearly five months ago.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory said Voyager 1, which is more than 15 billion miles away from Earth, stopped sending readable data back to scientists on Nov. 14, 2023, though mission controllers could still see the spacecraft was receiving commands and operating as intended.

The Southern California-based engineering team responsible for Voyager 1 investigated the problem and learned the issue was connected to one of the spacecraft’s three onboard computers, which is called the Flight Data Subsystem (FDS).

The FDS packages the data collected by the spacecraft before sending it back to earth.

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Engineers discovered the chip responsible for storing a portion of the FDS memory was faulty, making the code unusable.

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Had the spacecraft been located on Earth, engineers would be able to go in and replace a chip, but because it is in interstellar space, engineers needed to figure out a way to move the affected code somewhere else in the FDS memory.

The code is so large that there is not a single location to store the entire section of the code. So, engineers divided the affected code into sections and planned to move them to various locations in the FDS.

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Engineers also had to make sure the code worked together as a whole after being moved.

Once the code was reconfigured, engineers transmitted the changes to the FDS memory on April 18.

The signal takes about 22.5 hours to travel through space until it reaches Voyager 1, and then another 22.5 hours for a signal to come back to earth.

VOYAGER 1 DETECTS ‘HUM’ WHILE IN INTERSTELLAR SPACE: REPORT

On April 20, the mission team received a response from Voyager 1 and confirmed the modification worked. As a result, engineers now have the ability to check the health and status of the spacecraft.

In the coming months, the team plans to move and adjust additional portions of the FDS software that was affected, including portions that send scientific data back to mission control.

Voyager 1′s odyssey began in 1977 when the spacecraft and its twin, Voyager 2, were launched on a tour of the gas giant planets of the solar system.

After beaming back dazzling postcard views of Jupiter’s giant red spot and Saturn’s shimmering rings, Voyager 2 hopscotched to Uranus and Neptune . Meanwhile, Voyager 1 used Saturn as a gravitational slingshot to power itself past Pluto. 

Original article source: NASA re-establishes communication with Voyager 1 interstellar spacecraft that went silent for months

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April 22, 2024

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NASA's Voyager 1 resumes sending engineering updates to Earth

For the first time since November, NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft is returning usable data about the health and status of its onboard engineering systems. The next step is to enable the spacecraft to begin returning science data again. The probe and its twin, Voyager 2, are the only spacecraft to ever fly in interstellar space (the space between stars).

Voyager 1 stopped sending readable science and engineering data back to Earth on Nov. 14, 2023, even though mission controllers could tell the spacecraft was still receiving their commands and otherwise operating normally. In March, the Voyager engineering team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California confirmed that the issue was tied to one of the spacecraft's three onboard computers, called the flight data subsystem (FDS). The FDS is responsible for packaging the science and engineering data before it's sent to Earth.

The team discovered that a single chip responsible for storing a portion of the FDS memory—including some of the FDS computer's software code—isn't working. The loss of that code rendered the science and engineering data unusable. Unable to repair the chip, the team decided to place the affected code elsewhere in the FDS memory. But no single location is large enough to hold the section of code in its entirety.

So they devised a plan to divide the affected code into sections and store those sections in different places in the FDS. To make this plan work, they also needed to adjust those code sections to ensure, for example, that they all still function as a whole. Any references to the location of that code in other parts of the FDS memory needed to be updated as well.

The team started by singling out the code responsible for packaging the spacecraft's engineering data. They sent it to its new location in the FDS memory on April 18. A radio signal takes about 22.5 hours to reach Voyager 1, which is over 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, and another 22.5 hours for a signal to come back to Earth. When the mission flight team heard back from the spacecraft on April 20, they saw that the modification had worked: For the first time in five months, they were able to check the health and status of the spacecraft.

During the coming weeks, the team will relocate and adjust the other affected portions of the FDS software. These include the portions that will start returning science data.

Voyager 2 continues to operate normally. Launched over 46 years ago, the twin Voyager spacecraft are the longest-running and most distant spacecraft in history. Before the start of their interstellar exploration, both probes flew by Saturn and Jupiter, and Voyager 2 flew by Uranus and Neptune.

Provided by NASA

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Voyager 1 & 2

• Launched on September 5, 1977
• Surveyed the Jupiter and Saturn systems
• First spacecraft to reach interstellar space
• RTGs still operating
• Currently exploring beyond our solar system
• Launched on August 20, 1977
• Only spacecraft to visit Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune
• Currently exploring the edge of the solar system

Each powered by:

• 3 Multi-Hundred Watt (MHW) RTGs stacked in a series on a boom, producing about 158 W e each, at launch.

As the electrical power decreases, power loads on the spacecraft must be turned off in order to avoid having demand exceed supply. As loads are turned off, some spacecraft capabilities are eliminated.

Voyager Goals & Accomplishments

Voyager 1 and 2 were designed to take advantage of a rare planetary alignment to explore the outer solar system. Voyager 1 targeted Jupiter and Saturn before continuing on to chart the far edges of our solar system. Voyager 2 targeted Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune before joining its sister probe on their interstellar mission.

Voyager proved to be one of the greatest missions of discovery in history. Among their many revelations about the solar system are:

• Rings around Jupiter
• Volcanoes on Jupiter's moon Io
• Moons of Saturn that shepherd its rings
• New moons around Uranus and Neptune
• Geysers of liquid nitrogen on Neptune's moon Triton
• Revealed and crossed the farthest boundary of our solar system

Voyager 2 is the only spacecraft to study all four of the solar system's giant planets at close range. The Voyagers are now exploring the outermost reaches of our sun's influence, where the solar wind mixes with the interstellar wind of our galaxy. Their long-lived power source has enabled these explorers to continue teaching us about our solar system for more than years after they left earth.

• Go to Voyager Homepage
• Go to Voyager Image Gallery
• Status: Where are the Voyagers?

Mission Elapsed Time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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From the beginning 

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

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

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

That didn't work. 

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— Scientists' predictions for the long-term future of the Voyager Golden Records will blow your mind

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• billslugg The newer forms of memory can't be used easily in outer space as their feature size is too small and too easily corrupted by a cosmic ray. Very large, bulky features keep spacecraft memory far smaller than what earthbound computers can enjoy. As far as returning one of the Voyagers to Earth, it would take several thousand years using available technology. Better to wait for more advanced propulsion technologies. Reply
• View All 20 Comments

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• The Contents
• The Making of
• Where Are They Now
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Q & A with Ed Stone

golden record

Where are they now.

• frequently asked questions
• Q&A with Ed Stone

Galleries of Images Voyager Took

The Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft explored Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune before starting their journey toward interstellar space. Here you'll find some of those iconic images, including "The Pale Blue Dot" - famously described by Carl Sagan - and what are still the only up-close images of Uranus and Neptune.

Photography of Jupiter began in January 1979, when images of the brightly banded planet already exceeded the best taken from Earth. Voyager 1 completed its Jupiter encounter in early April, after taking almost 19,000 pictures and many other scientific measurements. Voyager 2 picked up the baton in late April and its encounter continued into August. They took more than 33,000 pictures of Jupiter and its five major satellites.

The Voyager 1 and 2 Saturn encounters occurred nine months apart, in November 1980 and August 1981. Voyager 1 is leaving the solar system. Voyager 2 completed its encounter with Uranus in January 1986 and with Neptune in August 1989, and is now also en route out of the solar system.

NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft flew closely past distant Uranus, the seventh planet from the Sun, in January. At its closet, the spacecraft came within 81,800 kilometers (50,600 miles) of Uranus's cloudtops on Jan. 24, 1986. Voyager 2 radioed thousands of images and voluminous amounts of other scientific data on the planet, its moons, rings, atmosphere, interior and the magnetic environment surrounding Uranus.

In the summer of 1989, NASA's Voyager 2 became the first spacecraft to observe the planet Neptune, its final planetary target. Passing about 4,950 kilometers (3,000 miles) above Neptune's north pole, Voyager 2 made its closest approach to any planet since leaving Earth 12 years ago. Five hours later, Voyager 2 passed about 40,000 kilometers (25,000 miles) from Neptune's largest moon, Triton, the last solid body the spacecraft will have an opportunity to study.

This narrow-angle color image of the Earth, dubbed 'Pale Blue Dot', is a part of the first ever 'portrait' of the solar system taken by Voyager 1. The spacecraft acquired a total of 60 frames for a mosaic of the solar system from a distance of more than 4 billion miles from Earth and about 32 degrees above the ecliptic. From Voyager's great distance Earth is a mere point of light, less than the size of a picture element even in the narrow-angle camera. Earth was a crescent only 0.12 pixel in size. Coincidentally, Earth lies right in the center of one of the scattered light rays resulting from taking the image so close to the sun. This blown-up image of the Earth was taken through three color filters -- violet, blue and green -- and recombined to produce the color image. The background features in the image are artifacts resulting from the magnification.