1977 voyager 2

• Tuesday, 30 April 2024

NSSDCA/COSPAR ID:  1977-076A

Description

Voyager 2 was one of a pair of spacecraft launched to explore the planets of the outer solar system and the interplanetary environment. Each Voyager had as its major objectives at each planet to: (1) investigate the circulation, dynamics, structure, and composition of the planet's atmosphere; (2) characterize the morphology, geology, and physical state of the satellites of the planet; (3) provide improved values for the mass, size, and shape of the planet, its satellites, and any rings; and, (4) determine the magnetic field structure and characterize the composition and distribution of energetic trapped particles and plasma therein.

Spacecraft and Subsystems

Each Voyager consisted of a decahedral bus, 47 cm in height and 1.78 m across from flat to flat. A 3.66 m diameter parabolic high-gain antenna was mounted on top of the bus. The major portion of the science instruments were mounted on a science boom extending out some 2.5 m from the spacecraft. At the end of the science boom was a steerable scan platform on which were mounted the imaging and spectroscopic remote sensing instruments. Also mounted at various distances along the science boom were the plasma and charged particle detectors. The magnetometers were located along a separate boom extending 13 m on the side opposite the science boom. A third boom, extending down and away from the science instruments, held the spacecraft's radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs). Two 10 m whip antennas (used for the plasma wave and planetary radio astronomy investigations) also extended from the spacecraft, each perpendicular to the other. The spacecraft was three-axis spin stabilized to enable long integration times and selective viewing for the instruments mounted on the scan platform.

Power was provided to the spacecraft systems and instruments through the use of three radioisotope thermoelectric generators. The RTGs were assembled in tandem on a deployable boom hinged on an outrigger arrangement of struts attached to the basic structure. Each RTG unit, contained in a beryllium outer case, was 40.6 cm in diameter, 50.8 cm in length, and weighed 39 kg. The RTGs used a radioactive source (Plutonium-238 in the form of plutonium oxide, or PuO2, in this case) which, as it decayed, gave off heat. A bi-metallic thermoelectric device was used to convert the heat to electric power for the spacecraft. The total output of RTGs slowly decreases with time as the radioactive material is expended. Therefore, although the initial output of the RTGs on Voyager was approximately 470 W of 30 V DC power at launch, it had fallen off to approximately 335 W by the beginning of 1997 (about 19.5 years post-launch). As power continues to decrease, power loads on the spacecraft must also decrease. Current estimates (1998) are that increasingly limited instrument operations can be carried out at least until 2020.

Communications were provided through the high-gain antenna with a low-gain antenna for backup. The high-gain antenna supported both X-band and S-band downlink telemetry. Voyager was the first spacecraft to utilize X-band as the primary telemetry link frequency. Data could be stored for later transmission to Earth through the use of an on-board digital tape recorder.

Voyager, because of its distance from Earth and the resulting time-lag for commanding, was designed to operate in a highly-autonomous manner. In order to do this and carry out the complex sequences of spacecraft motions and instrument operations, three interconnected on-board computers were utilized. The Computer Command Subsystem (CCS) was responsible for storing commanding for the other two computers and issuing the commands at set times. The Attitude and Articulation Control Subsystem (AACS) was responsible for controlling spacecraft attitude and motions of the scan platform. The Flight Data Subsystem (FDS) controlled the instruments, including changes in configuration (state) or telemetry rates. All three computers had redundant components to ensure continued operations. The AACS included redundant star trackers and Sun sensors as well.

Message in a Bottle

Each Voyager has mounted to one of the sides of the bus a 12-inch gold-plated copper disk. The disk has recorded on it sounds and images of Earth designed to portray the diversity of life and culture on the planet. Each disk is encased in a protective aluminum jacket along with a cartridge and a needle. Instructions explaining from where the spacecraft originated and how to play the disk are engraved onto the jacket. Electroplated onto a 2 cm area on the cover is also an ultra-pure source of uranium-238 (with a radioactivity of about 0.26 nanocuries and a half-life of 4.51 billion years), allowing the determination of the elapsed time since launch by measuring the amount of daughter elements to remaining U238. The 115 images on the disk were encoded in analog form. The sound selections (including greetings in 55 languages, 35 sounds, natural and man-made, and portions of 27 musical pieces) are designed for playback at 1000 rpm. The Voyagers were not the first spacecraft designed with such messages to the future. Pioneers 10 and 11, LAGEOS, and the Apollo landers also included plaques with a similar intent, though not quite so ambitious.

Mission Profile

Originally planned as a Grand Tour of the outer planets, including dual launches to Jupiter, Saturn, and Pluto in 1976-77 and dual launches to Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune in 1979, budgetary constraints caused a dramatic rescoping of the project to two spacecraft, each of which would go to only Jupiter and Saturn. The new mission was called Mariner Jupiter/Saturn, or MJS. It was subsequently renamed Voyager about six months prior to launch. The rescoped mission was estimated to cost $250 million (through the end of Saturn operations), only a third of what the Grand Tour design would have cost.

Voyager 2 was the first of the two spacecraft to be launched, with liftoff occurring 20 Aug. 1977. What was at first an auspicious launch, however, proved to be the beginning of a number of problems. The primary cause of the initial problems were attributed to commanding by the AACS, including difficulty in determining the full deployment of the science boom. These problems resulted in a delay of four days in the launch of Voyager 1 to ensure they wouldn't occur for it.

Although launched sixteen days after Voyager 2, Voyager 1's trajectory was the quicker one to Jupiter. On 15 Dec. 1977, while both spacecraft were in the asteroid belt, Voyager 1 surpassed Voyager 2's distance from the Sun.

Several months after launch, in April 1978, Voyager 2's primary radio receiver failed, automatically kicking in the backup receiver which proved to be faulty. Attempts to recover the use of the primary receiver failed and the backup receiver was used for the remainder of the mission. Although use of the backup receiver made communication with the spacecraft more difficult, engineers were able to find workarounds.

Voyager 2 proceeded with its primary mission and flew by Jupiter (closest approach on 09 July 1979) and Saturn (26 August 1981). During these flybys, Voyager 2 obtained images roughly equal in number to Voyager 1 (18,000 at Jupiter, 16,000 at Saturn).

Voyager 2's launch date had preserved one part of the original Grand Tour design, i.e. the possibility of an extended mission to Uranus and Neptune. Despite the difficulties encountered, scientists and engineers had been able to make Voyager enormously successful. As a result, approval was granted to extend the mission, first to Uranus, then to Neptune and later to continue observations well past Neptune. Voyager 2 made successful flybys of Uranus (24 January 1986) and Neptune (25 August 1989). Because of the additional distance of these two planets, adaptations had to made to accomodate the lower light levels and decreased communications. Voyager 2 was successfully able to obtain about 8,000 images of Uranus and its satellites. Additional improvements in the on-board software and use of image compression techniques allowed about 10,000 images of Neptune and its satellites to be taken.

All of the experiments on Voyager 2 have produced useful data.

Onward and Outward

Rechristened the Voyager Interstellar Mission (VIM) by NASA in 1989 after its encounter with Neptune, Voyager 2 continues operations, taking measurements of the interplanetary magnetic field, plasma, and charged particle environment while searching for the heliopause (the distance at which the solar wind becomes subsumed by the more general interstellar wind). Through the end of the Neptune phase of the Voyager project, a total of $875 million had been expended for the construction, launch, and operations of both Voyager spacecraft. An additional $30 million was allocated for the first two years of VIM.

Voyager 2 is speeding away from the Sun at a velocity of about 3.13 AU/year toward a point in the sky of RA=338 degrees, Dec=-62 degrees (-47.46 degrees ecliptic latitude, 310.89 degrees ecliptic longitude).

Alternate Names

• Mariner 77B
• Mariner Jupiter/Saturn B
• Outer Planets B
• urn:nasa:pds:context:instrument_host:spacecraft.vg2

Facts in Brief

Launch Date:  1977-08-20 Launch Vehicle:  Titan IIIE-Centaur Launch Site:  Cape Canaveral, United States Mass:  721.9 kg Nominal Power:  420 W

Funding Agency

• NASA-Office of Space Science Applications (United States)

Disciplines

• Planetary Science
• Space Physics

Additional Information

• Launch/Orbital information for Voyager 2
• Telecommunications information for Voyager 2
• Experiments on Voyager 2
• Data collections from Voyager 2

Questions and comments about this spacecraft can be directed to: Dr. Edwin V. Bell, II   Personnel

Selected references.

• Stone, E. C., How Voyager 2 has been reprogrammed, Nature , 292, No. 5825, 675-676, Aug. 1981.
• Stone, E. C., Voyager mission: Encounters with Saturn, J. Geophys. Res. , 88, No. A11, 8639-8642, doi:10.1029/JA088iA11p08639, Nov. 1983.
• Stone, E. C., and E. D. Miner, The Voyager encounter with Neptune, J. Geophys. Res. , 96, Suppl., 18903-18906, doi:10.1029/91JA02174, Oct. 1991.
• Stone, E. C., The Voyager 2 encounter with Uranus, J. Geophys. Res. , 92, No. A13, 14873-14876, doi:10.1029/JA092iA13p14873, Dec. 1987.
• Stone, E. C., The Voyager mission through the Jupiter encounters, J. Geophys. Res. , 86, No. A10, 8123-8124, doi:10.1029/JA086iA10p08123, Sept. 1981.
• Kohlhase, C. E., and P. A. Penzo, Voyager mission description, Space Sci. Rev. , 21, No. 2, 77-101, doi:10.1007/BF00200846, Nov. 1977.

Other Voyager Information/Data at NSSDCA

NSSDCA Voyager page

Data available on-line

• Voyager cruise magnetic field and plasma data from COHOWeb
• Voyager 1/2 position data in heliographic coordinates.

View selected images from the NSSDCA Photo Gallery taken by Voyager 1/2 of:

• the Solar System family

Data coverage charts for on-line, interplanetary datasets at NSSDCA, PDS, and experiment team sites for Voyager 1 and Voyager 2

Related Information/Data at NSSDCA

Other sources of voyager information/data.

Voyager project page (NASA JPL)

Cosmic Ray Subsystem (CRS) (NASA GSFC) Low-Energy Charged Particle (LECP) (JHU/APL) Magnetometer (MAG) (NASA GSFC) Plasma Science (PLS) (MIT) Plasma Wave System (PWS) (U. of Iowa)

NSSDCA Master Catalog Search

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• NASA Official: Dr. David R. Williams
• Curator: E. Bell, II
• Version 5.1.15, 28 October 2022

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40 years and counting: the team behind Voyager’s space odyssey

In 1977, Voyager 1 and 2 started their one-way journey across our galaxy, travelling a million miles a day. Jonathan Margolis meets the dedicated team keeping the craft moving

O n a chilly March morning, Steve Howard, aged 65, is at work in his office on the northern edge of Pasadena, California. Two computer screens are squeezed on to his corner desk along with family photos, a tissue box and tins of Altoids Curiously Strong Peppermints. The office is in a quiet business park by a workaday main road. Next to it is a McDonald’s, where people linger for hours over a $1 coffee, seemingly to keep warm. Over the road there’s a scruffier burger joint, Jim’s, with an M missing from its sign – and, visible from Howard’s window, a landscaping supplies yard.

If the few people walking by on West Woodbury Road, Altadena, or popping into the landscaping place for some patio paving slabs were to peer into Howard’s office, they might guess, seeing the graph-covered twin screens and a third PC at the other end of the desk, that he was, perhaps, a financial adviser or a day trader. But what Steve Howard is actually doing makes this very ordinary all-American scene quite extraordinary.

Howard is a Nasa mission controller. He is sending instructions to a probe in interstellar space, 12 billion miles from Earth, beyond Pluto and escaping our Solar System at 1 million miles a day. The 815kg craft, Voyager 1 , is one of two identical machines that for many years now have been the furthest human-made objects from Earth. Howard’s computer code takes 17 hours at the speed of light to reach Voyager 1, the furthest travelled. Voyager 2, which is leaving the solar system in a different direction, is 3bn miles closer. The responses, from transmitters on the twin probes running 23 watts of power – have the power of a billionth of a billionth of a watt by the time they reach Earth.

“So here, see, I have Voyager 1’s status and information up, at least as it was 17 hours ago,” Howard explains. “Right now I’m connected to our Canberra station, and these are seven commands, set to radiate one every five minutes starting 30 minutes from now. They’re to verify that the spacecraft can receive and reset its timer. Such is the speed of light, I will not get confirmation that all is OK until late tomorrow night, but it will have entailed a 25bn-mile round trip, so that’s not too bad.”

It is no hyperbole to say, then, that the man tapping away at his keyboard on the office park next to McDonald’s is a key figure in the greatest-ever feat of human exploration. There was nothing like the Voyager 1 and 2 missions to the outer planets before they launched in 1977, and although three outer planet probes launched last decade are still on mission, no new ventures into deep space are planned.

Space exploration tends to be more inward looking today than in the so-called Space Age. The famous Curiosity rover is of course still working wonders on Mars, but almost all the US’s coming spacecraft will be restricted to studying our own planet, with special attention to environmental issues. The Voyagers and the people like Howard who still work on them full-time – having, in many cases, done so their entire adult life – are from a different era, when budgets were unrestrained, audaciousness (and showing off to the Soviets) was in vogue and the environment was a concern only for hippies.

Voyager’s spindly limbed, Transit-van-sized machines have been travelling at around 37,000mph for almost 38 years. When they were launched, wooden-framed Morris 1000 Traveller cars had only recently stopped being produced by British Leyland in Oxford. The Voyagers’ on-board computers are early 1970s models that were advanced then but are puny now – an iPhone’s computer is some 200,000 times faster and has about 250,000 times more memory than Voyager’s hardware.

The Voyager mission’s early 70s-inspired and -equipped trip, originally meant to last four years, took the craft initially to Jupiter, then Saturn, then, as a bonus since everything was working well, to Uranus and finally Neptune, after which they spun off into their journey around the Milky Way. Against all expectations their vintage electronics and thrusters are still, mostly, working in the intense -253C cold of outer space. What’s more, their sensors are sending data all day every day, as some will continue to do until 2036. That said, by 2025 almost all the instruments sending worthwhile scientific information will be turned off as the ships’ tiny plutonium-238 power sources dwindle.

The on-board camera on each Voyager, for instance, was deactivated to save power 25 years ago last Valentine’s Day. This was after Voyager 1 took a now-iconic “family portrait” of the solar system from almost 4bn miles out. It captured Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter, Venus, Earth (seen, in the late astrophysicist Carl Sagan ’s phrase, as a “pale blue dot”) and the Sun, by then just a tiny point of light. By 2036 the craft will be nearly out of the solar system altogether and will remain dead, although in perfect condition, probably for eternity.

It is the Voyager spacecrafts’ longevity, despite their becoming a bit arthritic in later years, that has led to their Mission Control being moved out to an office park. The problem for Nasa – more correctly for the California Institute of Technology’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory , which runs most robotic missions for Nasa – is that high-profile later expeditions, most notably Curiosity, have used the available space on CalTech’s campus. Proud as JPL is of the amazing Voyager story, the craft are not taking photos or doing a lot of sexy science any more and may not encounter anything of much interest for another 40,000 years, by which time they will be deaf and mute. So, like a great grandfather who stubbornly refuses to do the decent thing, the Earth end of the Voyager programme and the spacecraft’s devoted carers have been put in a somewhat off-piste rest home.

Engineers are not given to emotion, but the romance of this incredible voyage of discovery has, by their own account, kept the ageing mission team together. Even latecomers, who were at school when Voyager was launched, have been working on the same mission for 30 years and more. “I’m in my mid-50s and treat the craft like my ageing parents,” says Suzy Dodd , who was 16 at launch, joined as a graduate student and whose card now proclaims surely one of the cooler job titles in science: Project manager, Voyager Interstellar Mission.

“You treat them with a certain amount of reverence; you know they’re stately spacecraft, venerable senior citizens, and you want to do everything possible for them to have a healthy lifetime,” she says. “You need to help them a bit because things have failed and you want to be careful other things don’t. Most of the engineers here have dedicated their career to this project. They have turned down opportunities for promotions and other things because they like Voyager so much they want to stay with it.”

It is clear talking to Voyager staff that they genuinely love their spacecraft, even though most were too young to see them before they flew, and it is more than possible that the older ones will have died before the Voyagers bleep their last. But as engineers, they have mixed feelings about the most famous aspect of that romance, the “golden record” that each craft carries. This is a gold-covered copper LP, packed with a needle and cartridge (plus instructions), and containing, in groove form, 115 photos from Earth, a selection of natural sounds from surf to whales, music from a variety of cultures and eras (the modern west is represented by Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B Goode”) and spoken greetings in 55 languages, from Akkadian, spoken in Sumer about 6,000 years ago, to Welsh.

Carl Sagan, who had the initial idea for the record, wrote in the 1970s: “The spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced spacefaring civilisations in interstellar space. But the launching of this bottle into the cosmic ocean says something very hopeful about life on this planet.” Sagan’s son Nick, then an infant, now a science-fiction novelist and screenwriter (his credits include Star Trek episodes), recorded the English message: “Hello from the children of planet Earth.” But one sure to make many tear up is the Mandarin: “Hope everyone’s well. We are thinking about you all. Please come here to visit when you have time.” (The messages are on the Voyager website, voyager.jpl.nasa.gov ).

Voyager’s mission controllers are less starry-eyed than Sagan about the golden records. You sense some feel that it was too much of a bow to religious sentiment. Steve Howard is one of the more positive on the record question. “Even though Earth may not be here, some intelligent being could pick it up and detect it. I would say that many of the civilisations are much more advanced and would detect something like that and simply go in and decipher it,” he says.

Suzy Dodd’s view is more typical of the team’s. “I think it’s a great idea to get humans and mankind thinking what-ifs. Let’s send a picture of ourselves vintage 1977 and put it on a spacecraft and send it out there forever. I think it’s done to connect us to the spacecraft more than for an alien running into it. I’m of the opinion that space is very empty and the chances of something finding it are remote. But that doesn’t diminish the fact that we’ve got a little time capsule out there travelling through space and now orbiting around in our galaxy. And that’s us.”

For the mission’s much-honoured chief scientist and spokesman since 1972, CalTech professor Ed Stone, aged 79, the romance of Voyager lies more in what it has discovered since he joined the project aged 36. “Yes, the Space Age was a young man’s game back then,” he says, not a little ruefully, sitting on a park bench on the green university campus. “We all knew we were on a mission of discovery. We just had no idea how much discovery there would be. We just kept finding things we didn’t know were there to be found.

“For example, before Voyager, the only known volcanoes in the solar system were here on Earth. Then we flew by Jupiter’s moon, Io, which had 10 times the volcanic activity of Earth. Ten times! We detected hot lakes of lava on the surface. That was the first major discovery and it set the tone for the rest of the mission. And there are five instruments still working. But by 2025 the last will go off.”

He doesn’t quite add that by then he will be nearly 90, but does say, smiling: “Thing is, if you want to do space experiments, you have to be optimistic that it’s all going to work and that you’re going to find something worth the work. And you have to be patient, because nothing happens fast in space.”

Stone explains how, although it’s widely considered freakish that the Voyager crafts are still working so well – a TV left permanently on since Jim Callaghan’s day would be hardly working today – it’s less surprising to people like him who built them. To anyone familiar with the inside of a vintage radio or TV, the hand-soldered circuit boards, capacitors, transistors, resistors and so on that run a Voyager would look reassuringly familiar, which isn’t the case with a modern computer or phone, whose microchip-studded innards look more like something out of a UFO.

But the parts in Voyager weren’t as ordinary as they looked. Suzy Dodd, a “newcomer” to the project with just over 30 years’ service, has also been intrigued by the spacecraft’s durability. “The robustness is unique,” she says. “If you talk to the older engineers, they’ll say: ‘Well, we were told to make a four-year mission, but we realised if you just used this higher-rated component, it would last twice as long.’ So they did that. They just didn’t tell anybody. The early engineers were very conscious of trying to make this last as long as possible and, quite frankly, being not as forthcoming with information about the types of parts they were using.”

Even so, Ed Stone says, there have been problems. A ground controller’s error in April 1978 meant that Voyager 2 switched itself irretrievably to its back-up receiver – meaning that the craft has been receiving transmissions from Earth on a dodgy back-up radio for almost the entire mission. One of the original thrusters also failed.

For spacecraft 12bn miles from home and in their dotage, the Voyagers are quite tranquil machines today, but they do need watching. As Steve Howard is in his office inputting code in primordial programming language, on the floor of what passes for the main mission control Enrique Medina, 65, is watching streams of engineering data from the craft. A computer engineer, Medina is another of the eight full- and part-time controllers.

“One of us is always on call,” he says. “We’re all connected all the time by our smartphones. We will hear, that way, which engineering channel is out of tolerance and then we will connect from home with secure IDs and special codes, troubleshoot, determine and sometimes fix it from home. Or in some cases, one of us will drive in. That usually happens four to five times a month.

“Sometimes people are away, but we love Voyager so much that though it’s not part of our employment we’ll come in and do it anyway. Attitude control is my sub-system, but if the propulsion or the power needs attention, we all do multiple jobs,” he adds. “I’ve been working on Voyager since the Uranus encounter in 1986, and I will retire when Voyager retires in 2025. My wife doesn’t like that idea at all, as we already have a retirement place by the beach back in Mexico.”

Medina’s devotion to the Voyager is clear to see. “This has been part of my life for so long, and they pay us to do it, so how can you stop doing something you love? I even talk about the spacecraft like it’s a person, especially if it’s my sub-system.”

Steve Howard feels the same. “I just love to think of everything, all those 65,000 parts on each craft, working up there,” he says. “Oh man, it really is something. Every time we come in here, it’s just a gift. And you know that one day it could stop.”

Do these engineers ever think it might be more fun to be at the controls of Curiosity on the CalTech campus a couple of miles away?

“Yes, maybe,” says Medina, “but after so many years, you’re invested. It’s like being married to someone. It would be interesting to go out with Angelina Jolie, but do I want to give up my wife of 44 years, and my grandkids? I don’t think so. I would not give this up for something more interesting or newer.”

For the most part, Voyager is the reality of space – slow, patient science, humdrum perhaps, but real. It’s only a 20-minute drive from Altadena to Hollywood, where brilliant fake versions of space exploration like Christopher Nolan’s recent Interstellar are confected.

But Voyager, starring real people who keep tissues and tins of Altoids on their desks and real buildings rather than set designers’ glamorous fantasies, just happens to be the only real interstellar mission there will probably be in the lifetime of anyone alive today. It is surely one of the most amazing things in human history.

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JPL manages and controls the Voyager project for NASA's Office of Space Science.

Keep Exploring

• VG Imaging Science Subsystem

NASA Voyager 2 Could Be Nearing Interstellar Space

NASA's Voyager 2 probe, currently on a journey toward interstellar space, has detected an increase in cosmic rays that originate outside our solar system. Launched in 1977, Voyager 2 is a little less than 11 billion miles (about 17.7 billion kilometers) from Earth, or more than 118 times the distance from Earth to the Sun.

Since 2007 the probe has been traveling through the outermost layer of the heliosphere -- the vast bubble around the Sun and the planets dominated by solar material and magnetic fields. Voyager scientists have been watching for the spacecraft to reach the outer boundary of the heliosphere, known as the heliopause. Once Voyager 2 exits the heliosphere, it will become the second human-made object, after Voyager 1, to enter interstellar space.

Since late August, the Cosmic Ray Subsystem instrument on Voyager 2 has measured about a 5 percent increase in the rate of cosmic rays hitting the spacecraft compared to early August. The probe's Low-Energy Charged Particle instrument has detected a similar increase in higher-energy cosmic rays.

Cosmic rays are fast-moving particles that originate outside the solar system. Some of these cosmic rays are blocked by the heliosphere, so mission planners expect that Voyager 2 will measure an increase in the rate of cosmic rays as it approaches and crosses the boundary of the heliosphere.

In May 2012, Voyager 1 experienced an increase in the rate of cosmic rays similar to what Voyager 2 is now detecting. That was about three months before Voyager 1 crossed the heliopause and entered interstellar space.

However, Voyager team members note that the increase in cosmic rays is not a definitive sign that the probe is about to cross the heliopause. Voyager 2 is in a different location in the heliosheath -- the outer region of the heliosphere -- than Voyager 1 had been, and possible differences in these locations means Voyager 2 may experience a different exit timeline than Voyager 1.

The fact that Voyager 2 may be approaching the heliopause six years after Voyager 1 is also relevant, because the heliopause moves inward and outward during the Sun's 11-year activity cycle. Solar activity refers to emissions from the Sun, including solar flares and eruptions of material called coronal mass ejections. During the 11-year solar cycle, the Sun reaches both a maximum and a minimum level of activity.

"We're seeing a change in the environment around Voyager 2, there's no doubt about that," said Voyager Project Scientist Ed Stone, based at Caltech in Pasadena. "We're going to learn a lot in the coming months, but we still don't know when we'll reach the heliopause. We're not there yet -- that's one thing I can say with confidence."

The Voyager spacecraft were built by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, which continues to operate both. JPL is a division of Caltech. The Voyager missions are a part of the NASA Heliophysics System Observatory, managed by the Heliophysics Division of the Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

For more information about the Voyager spacecraft, visit:

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

News Media Contacts Calla Cofield Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. 626-808-2469 [email protected] Jia-Rui Cook Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. 818-354-0724 [email protected] Karen Fox NASA Headquarters, Washington 301-286-6284 [email protected]

News Release: 2018-232

What Is on Voyager’s Golden Record?

From a whale song to a kiss, the time capsule sent into space in 1977 had some interesting contents

Megan Gambino

Senior Editor

“I thought it was a brilliant idea from the beginning,” says Timothy Ferris. Produce a phonograph record containing the sounds and images of humankind and fling it out into the solar system.

By the 1970s, astronomers Carl Sagan and Frank Drake already had some experience with sending messages out into space. They had created two gold-anodized aluminum plaques that were affixed to the Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 spacecraft. Linda Salzman Sagan, an artist and Carl’s wife, etched an illustration onto them of a nude man and woman with an indication of the time and location of our civilization.

The “Golden Record” would be an upgrade to Pioneer’s plaques. Mounted on Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, twin probes launched in 1977, the two copies of the record would serve as time capsules and transmit much more information about life on Earth should extraterrestrials find it.

NASA approved the idea. So then it became a question of what should be on the record. What are humanity’s greatest hits? Curating the record’s contents was a gargantuan task, and one that fell to a team including the Sagans, Drake, author Ann Druyan, artist Jon Lomberg and Ferris, an esteemed science writer who was a friend of Sagan’s and a contributing editor to Rolling Stone .

The exercise, says Ferris, involved a considerable number of presuppositions about what aliens want to know about us and how they might interpret our selections. “I found myself increasingly playing the role of extraterrestrial,” recounts Lomberg in Murmurs of Earth , a 1978 book on the making of the record. When considering photographs to include, the panel was careful to try to eliminate those that could be misconstrued. Though war is a reality of human existence, images of it might send an aggressive message when the record was intended as a friendly gesture. The team veered from politics and religion in its efforts to be as inclusive as possible given a limited amount of space.

Over the course of ten months, a solid outline emerged. The Golden Record consists of 115 analog-encoded photographs, greetings in 55 languages, a 12-minute montage of sounds on Earth and 90 minutes of music. As producer of the record, Ferris was involved in each of its sections in some way. But his largest role was in selecting the musical tracks. “There are a thousand worthy pieces of music in the world for every one that is on the record,” says Ferris. I imagine the same could be said for the photographs and snippets of sounds.

The following is a selection of items on the record:

Silhouette of a Male and a Pregnant Female

The team felt it was important to convey information about human anatomy and culled diagrams from the 1978 edition of The World Book Encyclopedia. To explain reproduction, NASA approved a drawing of the human sex organs and images chronicling conception to birth. Photographer Wayne F. Miller’s famous photograph of his son’s birth, featured in Edward Steichen’s 1955 “Family of Man” exhibition, was used to depict childbirth. But as Lomberg notes in Murmurs of Earth , NASA vetoed a nude photograph of “a man and a pregnant woman quite unerotically holding hands.” The Golden Record experts and NASA struck a compromise that was less compromising— silhouettes of the two figures and the fetus positioned within the woman’s womb.

DNA Structure

At the risk of providing extraterrestrials, whose genetic material might well also be stored in DNA, with information they already knew, the experts mapped out DNA’s complex structure in a series of illustrations.

Demonstration of Eating, Licking and Drinking

When producers had trouble locating a specific image in picture libraries maintained by the National Geographic Society, the United Nations, NASA and Sports Illustrated , they composed their own. To show a mouth’s functions, for instance, they staged an odd but informative photograph of a woman licking an ice-cream cone, a man taking a bite out of a sandwich and a man drinking water cascading from a jug.

Olympic Sprinters

Images were selected for the record based not on aesthetics but on the amount of information they conveyed and the clarity with which they did so. It might seem strange, given the constraints on space, that a photograph of Olympic sprinters racing on a track made the cut. But the photograph shows various races of humans, the musculature of the human leg and a form of both competition and entertainment.

Photographs of huts, houses and cityscapes give an overview of the types of buildings seen on Earth. The Taj Mahal was chosen as an example of the more impressive architecture. The majestic mausoleum prevailed over cathedrals, Mayan pyramids and other structures in part because Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan built it in honor of his late wife, Mumtaz Mahal, and not a god.

Golden Gate Bridge

Three-quarters of the record was devoted to music, so visual art was less of a priority. A couple of photographs by the legendary landscape photographer Ansel Adams were selected, however, for the details captured within their frames. One, of the Golden Gate Bridge from nearby Baker Beach, was thought to clearly show how a suspension bridge connected two pieces of land separated by water. The hum of an automobile was included in the record’s sound montage, but the producers were not able to overlay the sounds and images.

A Page from a Book

An excerpt from a book would give extraterrestrials a glimpse of our written language, but deciding on a book and then a single page within that book was a massive task. For inspiration, Lomberg perused rare books, including a first-folio Shakespeare, an elaborate edition of Chaucer from the Renaissance and a centuries-old copy of Euclid’s  Elements  (on geometry), at the Cornell University Library. Ultimately, he took MIT astrophysicist Philip Morrison’s suggestion: a  page  from Sir Isaac Newton’s  System of the World , where the means of launching an object into orbit is described for the very first time.

Greeting from Nick Sagan

To keep with the spirit of the project, says Ferris, the wordings of the 55 greetings were left up to the speakers of the languages. In  Burmese , the message was a simple, “Are you well?” In  Indonesian , it was, “Good night ladies and gentlemen. Goodbye and see you next time.” A woman speaking the Chinese dialect of  Amoy  uttered a welcoming, “Friends of space, how are you all? Have you eaten yet? Come visit us if you have time.” It is interesting to note that the final greeting, in  English , came from then-6-year-old Nick Sagan, son of Carl and Linda Salzman Sagan. He said, “Hello from the children of planet Earth.”

Whale Greeting

Biologist Roger Payne provided a whale song (“the most beautiful whale greeting,” he said, and “the one that should last forever”) captured with hydrophones off the coast of Bermuda in 1970. Thinking that perhaps the whale song might make more sense to aliens than to humans, Ferris wanted to include more than a slice and so mixed some of the song behind the greetings in different languages. “That strikes some people as hilarious, but from a bandwidth standpoint, it worked quite well,” says Ferris. “It doesn’t interfere with the greetings, and if you are interested in the whale song, you can extract it.”

Reportedly, the trickiest sound to record was a  kiss . Some were too quiet, others too loud, and at least one was too disingenuous for the team’s liking. Music producer Jimmy Iovine kissed his arm. In the end, the kiss that landed on the record was actually one that Ferris planted on Ann Druyan’s cheek.

Druyan had the idea to record a person’s brain waves, so that should extraterrestrials millions of years into the future have the technology, they could decode the individual’s thoughts. She was the guinea pig. In an hour-long session hooked to an EEG at New York University Medical Center, Druyan meditated on a series of prepared thoughts. In  Murmurs of Earth , she admits that “a couple of irrepressible facts of my own life” slipped in. She and Carl Sagan had gotten engaged just days before, so a love story may very well be documented in her neurological signs. Compressed into a minute-long segment, the  brain waves  sound, writes Druyan, like a “string of exploding firecrackers.”

Georgian Chorus—“Tchakrulo”

The team discovered a beautiful recording of “Tchakrulo” by Radio Moscow and wanted to include it, particularly since Georgians are often credited with introducing polyphony, or music with two or more independent melodies, to the Western world. But before the team members signed off on the tune, they had the lyrics translated. “It was an old song, and for all we knew could have celebrated bear-baiting,” wrote Ferris in  Murmurs of Earth . Sandro Baratheli, a Georgian speaker from Queens, came to the rescue. The word “tchakrulo” can mean either “bound up” or “hard” and “tough,” and the song’s narrative is about a peasant protest against a landowner.

Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode”

According to Ferris, Carl Sagan had to warm up to the idea of including Chuck Berry’s 1958 hit “Johnny B. Goode” on the record, but once he did, he defended it against others’ objections. Folklorist Alan Lomax was against it, arguing that rock music was adolescent. “And Carl’s brilliant response was, ‘There are a lot of adolescents on the planet,’” recalls Ferris.

On April 22, 1978,  Saturday Night Live  spoofed the Golden Record in a  skit  called “Next Week in Review.” Host Steve Martin played a psychic named Cocuwa, who predicted that  Time  magazine would reveal, on the following week’s cover, a four-word message from aliens. He held up a mock cover, which read, “Send More Chuck Berry.”

More than four decades later, Ferris has no regrets about what the team did or did not include on the record. “It means a lot to have had your hand in something that is going to last a billion years,” he says. “I recommend it to everybody. It is a healthy way of looking at the world.”

According to the writer, NASA approached him about producing another record but he declined. “I think we did a good job once, and it is better to let someone else take a shot,” he says.

So, what would you put on a record if one were being sent into space today?

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Megan Gambino | | READ MORE

Megan Gambino is a senior web editor for Smithsonian magazine.

pale blue dot

Voyager 2 was launched on August 20, 1977

On August 20, 1977, Voyager 2 was launched from Cape Canaveral on top of a Titan IIIE-Centaur rocket. It launched before Voyager 1 , which was sent into space on September 5, 1977 .

Today’s (August 20) story of what happened this day in Science, Technology, Astronomy, and Space Exploration history.

Voyager 2 – Timeline of Travel and Important Events

August 20, 1977: voyager 2 launched into space.

Voyager 2 was launched on August 20, 1977, 16 days before the September 5 launch of its twin, Voyager 1 . Why the reversal of order? The two were sent on different trajectories, and Voyager 1 was put on a path to reach its planetary targets, Jupiter and Saturn, ahead of Voyager 2.

Like its twin, the Voyager 2 was launched to study the outer planets of the Solar System and interstellar space beyond the Sun’s heliosphere (the magnetosphere and the outermost atmospheric layer of the Sun, the heliosphere is regarded as the border of the Solar System).

December 10, 1977: Entered Asteroid Belt

The asteroid belt is a torus-shaped region located roughly between the orbits of the planets Jupiter and Mars. It contains a great many solid, irregularly shaped bodies, of many sizes. They are much smaller than planets, though, so they are called asteroids or minor planets.

December 19, 1977: Voyager 1 overtakes Voyager 2

Although Pioneer probes (10, 11) and Voyager 2 were launched first, Voyager 1 has achieved a higher speed and overtaken all others. Voyager 1 overtook Voyager 2 just a few months after launch, on December 19, 1977.

Then it overtook Pioneer 11 (launched on April 6, 1973) in 1983, and then Pioneer 10 (launched on March 3, 1972) on February 17, 1998, becoming the farthest spacecraft from Earth.

October 21, 1978: Exited Asteroid Belt

The width of the asteroid belt is roughly 1 AU (the distance between Earth and the Sun ), or 92 million miles (150 million km). It took more than 10 months for Voyager 2 to travel through it.

July 9, 1979: Jupiter flyby

The space probe performed the Jupiter flyby with the closest approach at 721,670 km (448,425 miles) from the center of mass of the gas giant.

During its inbound journey toward the planet, Voyager 2 made flybys of several of Jupiter’s moons – 133,600 miles of Callisto, 38,600 miles of Ganymede ( the largest moon of Jupiter and in the Solar System ), 127,900 miles of Europa , and 347,000 miles of Amalthea.

On July 9, 1979, Voyager 2 made its closest approach to Jupiter, flying within 350,000 miles (563, 270 km) of the planet’s cloud tops.

On the outbound leg of its Jupiter encounter, it imaged the satellite Io (closest approach of 702,200 miles), and conducted a 10-hour volcano watch of the moon, confirming Voyager 1’s finding that it harbored active volcanoes.

Voyager 2 revealed the Great Red Spot to be a complex storm system and also imaged several smaller storms in the planet’s atmosphere.

High-resolution photographs of Europa revealed extensive irregular markings on its surface, possibly indicating a frozen crust floating atop a deep ocean.

Looking back at Jupiter as it was backlit by the Sun, the space probe confirmed the existence of a thin ring surrounding the planet.

Voyager 2 also discovered a previously unknown moon, later named Adrastea , orbiting Jupiter just outside its rings.

By the time observations of Jupiter concluded on August 5, 1979, the spacecraft had returned 17,000 images of the gas giant and its satellites.

August 26, 1981: Saturn flyby

More than two years after its successful exploration of the Jovian system, Voyager 2 performed the Saturn flyby with the closest approach at 161,000 km (100,000 miles) from the center of the mass of Saturn (Voyager 1 performed its Saturn flyby on November 12, 1980).

These two Saturn encounters of the Voyager spacecraft increased our knowledge and altered our understanding of Saturn (see notes 1).

During its encounter in August 1981, the spacecraft returned a wealth of information about the planet, its spectacular rings , and its satellites .

Both Voyager spacecraft measured the rotation of Saturn (the length of a Saturnian day) at 10 hours, 39 minutes, and 24 seconds.

Saturn’s gravity altered Voyager 2’s trajectory to send it to encounter Uranus in January 1986, where it carried out the first reconnaissance of that planet, its satellites, and its rings.

Related: 20 Best Photos of Cassini’s voyage around Saturn

January 24, 1986: Uranus flyby

Voyager 2 flew closely past distant Uranus, the seventh planet from the Sun, in January 1986. At its closest, the spacecraft came within 81,500 kilometers (50,600 miles) of Uranus’s cloud tops on January 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.

Voyager 2’s images of the five largest moons around Uranus (Miranda, Ariel, Umbriel, Titania, and Oberon, which range in diameter from 472 km / 293 mi for Miranda to 1578 km / 980 mi for Titania) revealed complex surfaces indicative of varying geologic pasts. The cameras also detected 11 previously unseen moons .

Related: The first Uranus flyby was performed by Voyager 2 on January 24, 1986

August 20, 1987: 10 years in space

At this point, Voyager 2 celebrates 10 years of continuous flight and operation.

August 25, 1989: Neptune flyby

On August 25, 1989, Voyager 2 made a close flyby of Neptune , giving humanity its first close-up of our solar system’s eighth (and the outermost) planet. Marking the end of the Voyager mission’s Grand Tour of the solar system’s four giant planets – Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune – that first was also a last: No other spacecraft has visited Neptune since.

During the encounter, the Voyager 2 engineering team carefully changed the probe’s direction and speed so that it could do a close flyby of Neptune’s largest moon, Triton . The flyby showed evidence of geologically young surfaces and active geysers spewing material skyward. This indicated that Triton was not simply a solid ball of ice, even though it had the lowest surface temperature of any natural body observed by Voyager: minus 391 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 235 degrees Celsius).

With a radius of 1,350 km (839 mi), about 22% smaller than Earth’s moon , Triton is by far the largest satellite of Neptune.

It is one of only three objects in the Solar System known to have a nitrogen-dominated atmosphere (the others are Earth and Saturn’s giant moon, Titan ).

Related: Voyager 2 performed the first Neptune flyby on August 25, 1989

Triton has the coldest surface known anywhere in the Solar System (38 K, about -235 °C or -391 °F); it is so cold that most of Triton’s nitrogen is condensed as frost, making it the only satellite in the Solar System known to have a surface made mainly of nitrogen ice.

The pinkish deposits (see the image below) constitute a vast south polar cap believed to contain methane ice, which would have reacted under sunlight to form pink or red compounds. The dark streaks overlying these pink ices are believed to be an icy and perhaps carbonaceous dust deposited from huge geyser-like plumes, some of which were found to be active during the Voyager 2 flyby.

The bluish-green band visible in this image extends all the way around Triton near the equator; it may consist of relatively fresh nitrogen frost deposits. The greenish areas include what is called the cantaloupe terrain, whose origin is unknown, and a set of “cryovolcanic” landscapes apparently produced by icy-cold liquids (now frozen) erupted from Triton’s interior.

About 30 times farther from the Sun than Earth is, Neptune receives only about 0.001 times the amount of sunlight that Earth does . In such low light, Voyager 2’s camera required longer exposures to get quality images. But because the spacecraft would reach a maximum speed of about 60,000 mph (90,000 km/h) relative to Earth, a long exposure time would make the image blurry. (Imagine trying to take a picture of a roadside sign from the window of a speeding car.)

So the team programmed Voyager 2’s thrusters to fire gently during the close approach, rotating the spacecraft to keep the camera focused on its target without interrupting the spacecraft’s overall speed and direction.

October 2, 1989: Voyager 2 Interstellar Mission has begun

The conclusion of the Neptune flyby marked the beginning of the Voyager Interstellar Mission.

August 20, 1997: 20 years in space

At this point, Voyager 2 celebrates 20 years of continuous flight and operation.

August 20, 2007: 30 years in space

At this point, Voyager 2 celebrates 30 years of continuous flight and operation.

August 20, 2017: 40 years in space

At this point, Voyager 2 celebrates 40 years of continuous flight and operation.

November 5, 2018: Voyager 2 enters interstellar space

For the second time in history, a human-made object has reached the space between the stars (Voyager 1 entered interstellar space on August 25, 2012).

On November 5, 2018, the Voyager 2 probe exited the heliosphere – the protective bubble of particles and magnetic fields created by the Sun.

Voyager 2 is not headed toward any particular star, although in roughly 40,000 years it should pass 1.7 light-years from the star Ross 248.

If undisturbed for 296,000 years, it should pass by the star Sirius,  the brightest star in the night sky , at a distance of 4.3 light-years ( Sirius  is 8.6 light-years from the Sun).

Related: 5 space probes leaving the solar system (for now)

Video: Voyager 2 Trajectory through the Solar System

This 2017 visualization tracks the trajectory of the Voyager 2 spacecraft through the solar system. Launched on August 20, 1977, it was one of two spacecraft sent to visit the giant planets of the outer solar system. Like Voyager 1, Voyager 2 flew by Jupiter and Saturn, but the Voyager 2 mission was extended to fly by Uranus and Neptune 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 in the beginning and speeding up to about 11 months per second after the planet flybys are passed.

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.

Credit: NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio

Voyager 2 trajectory (images)

Along with fellow dwarf planets Pluto , Eris , and Haumea, Makemake is located in the Kuiper Belt, a donut-shaped region of icy bodies beyond the orbit of Neptune.

Slightly smaller than Pluto (radius: 1,188.3 km / 738.4 miles), Makemake (mean radius of about 715 km / 444 miles) is the second-brightest object in the Kuiper Belt as seen from Earth (while Pluto is the brightest). It takes about 305 Earth years for this dwarf planet to make one trip around the Sun.

Makemake holds an important place in the history of solar system studies because it – along with Eris – was one of the objects whose discovery prompted the International Astronomical Union to reconsider the definition of a planet and to create a new group of dwarf planets.

Makemake was first observed in March 2005 by M.E. Brown, C.A. Trujillo, and D.L. Rabinowitz at the Palomar Observatory.

Named after the Greek goddess of strife and discord, Eris is the most massive and second-largest (by volume) dwarf planet (and plutoid) in the known Solar System. Its discovery in January 2005 by a Palomar Observatory-based team led by California Institute of Technology’s (Caltech) Mike Brown is the reason why Pluto is no longer a planet.

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft measured Eris’ diameter as 2,372 ± 4 km (1,473.9 ± 2.5 mi) in July 2015.

August 20 in Science, Technology, Astronomy, and Space Exploration history

• 1960: First animals and plants returned alive from space
• 1977: Voyager 2 was launched
• Saturn’s atmosphere is almost entirely hydrogen and helium. Voyager 1 found that about 7 percent of the volume of Saturn’s upper atmosphere is helium (compared with 11 percent of Jupiter’s atmosphere), while almost all the rest is hydrogen. Since Saturn’s internal helium abundance was expected to be the same as Jupiter’s and the Sun’s, the lower abundance of helium in the upper atmosphere may imply that the heavier helium may be slowly sinking through Saturn’s hydrogen; that might explain the excess heat that Saturn radiates over energy it receives from the Sun. (Saturn is the only planet less dense than water. In the unlikely event that a lake could be found large enough, Saturn would float in it.)
• Subdued contrasts and color differences on Saturn could be a result of more horizontal mixing or less production of localized colors than in Jupiter’s atmosphere. While Voyager 1 saw few markings, Voyager 2’s more sensitive cameras saw many: Long-lived ovals, tilted features in east-west shear zones, and others similar to, but generally smaller than those on Jupiter.
• Winds blow at high speeds in Saturn. Near the equator, the Voyagers measured winds at about 500 meters a second (1,100 mph or 1,770 km/h). The wind blows mostly in an easterly direction. The strongest winds are found near the equator, and velocity falls off uniformly at higher latitudes. At latitudes greater than 35 degrees, winds alternate east and west as latitude increases. Marked dominance of eastward jet streams indicates that winds are not confined to the cloud layer, but must extend inward at least 2,000 kilometers (1,200 miles). Furthermore, measurements by Voyager 2 show a striking north-south symmetry that leads some scientists to suggest the winds may extend from north to south through the interior of the planet.
• While Voyager 2 was behind Saturn, its radio beam penetrated the upper atmosphere and measured temperature and density. Minimum temperatures of 82 Kelvins (-191 °C or -312 °F) were found at the 70-millibar level (surface pressure on Earth is 1,000 millibars). The temperature increased to 143 Kelvins (-130 °C or -202 °F) at the deepest levels probed – about 1,200 millibars. Near the north pole, temperatures were about 10 °C (18 °F) colder at 100 millibars than at mid-latitudes. The difference may be seasonal.
• The Voyagers found aurora-like ultraviolet emissions of hydrogen at mid-latitudes in the atmosphere and auroras at polar latitudes (above 65 degrees). The high-level auroral activity may lead to the formation of complex hydrocarbon molecules that are carried toward the equator. The mid-latitude auroras, which occur only in sunlit regions, remain a puzzle, since bombardment by electrons and ions, known to cause auroras on Earth , occurs primarily at high latitudes.
• Voyager mission page on the NASA website
• Voyager 2 mission page on the NASA Solar System Exploration website
• Voyager 2 Interstellar Mission page on the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory website
• Voyager 2 Mission Status on the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory website
• Voyager 2 Mission Overview on the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory website
• “Voyager 2 Explores Jupiter” on the NASA website
• “Voyager 2 Uranus Approach” on the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory website
• “Voyager 2’s Historic Neptune Flyby” on the NASA website
• “NASA’s Voyager 2 Probe Enters Interstellar Space” on the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory website
• Voyager 2 on Wikipedia
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August /september 1977 – voyager 1 and voyager 2 launched.

Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 launched from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center and traveled to explore the outer planets. Telemetry from the spacecraft was received on both the S- and X-bands at 2,560 bits per second. By the time they had reached Mars, a single signal had taken about 10 minutes to reach Earth. Due to both Voyagers’ successful encounters with Jupiter and Saturn, the mission was extended to include Neptune and Uranus in the mid 1980’s. After their encounters with the outer most planets, both Voyagers moved towards the edge of our solar system. Voyager 1 is further from the Earth than its counterpart at about 18 billion kilometers away; a signal from Voyager 1 takes over 34 hours round trip. Voyager 1 became the first man made object to exhit the solar system in August 2012 and is still supported by the Deep Space Network today.

› Voyager – The Interstellar Mission › SCaN History of the 1970’s

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?

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

Nell Greenfieldboyce

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

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After months of silence, Voyager 1 has returned NASA’s calls

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For the last five months, it seemed very possible that a 46-year-old conversation had finally reached its end.

Since its launch from Kennedy Space Center on Sept. 5, 1977, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft has diligently sent regular updates to Earth on the health of its systems and data collected from its onboard instruments.

But in November, the craft went quiet.

Voyager 1 is now some 15 billion miles away from Earth. Somewhere in the cold interstellar space between our sun and the closest stars, its flight data system stopped communicating with the part of the probe that allows it to send signals back to Earth. Engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge could tell that Voyager 1 was getting its messages, but nothing was coming back.

“We’re to the point where the hardware is starting to age,” said Linda Spilker, the project scientist for the Voyager mission. “It’s like working on an antique car, from 15 billion miles away.”

Week after week, engineers sent troubleshooting commands to the spacecraft, each time patiently waiting the 45 hours it takes to get a response here on Earth — 22.5 hours traveling at the speed of light to reach the probe, and 22.5 hours back.

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By March, the team had figured out that a memory chip that stored some of the flight data system’s software code had failed, turning the craft’s outgoing communications into gibberish.

A long-distance repair wasn’t possible. There wasn’t enough space anywhere in the system to shift the code in its entirety. So after manually reviewing the code line by line, engineers broke it up and tucked the pieces into the available slots of memory.

They sent a command to Voyager on Thursday. In the early morning hours Saturday, the team gathered around a conference table at JPL: laptops open, coffee and boxes of doughnuts in reach.

At 6:41 a.m., data from the craft showed up on their screens. The fix had worked .

“We went from very quiet and just waiting patiently to cheers and high-fives and big smiles and sighs of relief,” Spilker said. “I’m very happy to once again have a meaningful conversation with Voyager 1.”

Voyager 1 is one of two identical space probes. Voyager 2, launched two weeks before Voyager 1, is now about 13 billion miles from Earth, the two crafts’ trajectories having diverged somewhere around Saturn. (Voyager 2 continued its weekly communications uninterrupted during Voyager 1’s outage.)

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They are the farthest-flung human-made objects in the universe, having traveled farther from their home planet than anything else this species has built. The task of keeping communications going grows harder with each passing day. Every 24 hours, Voyager 1 travels 912,000 miles farther away from us. As that distance grows, the signal becomes slower and weaker.

When the probe visited Jupiter in 1979, it was sending back data at a rate of 115.2 kilobits per second, Spilker said. Today, 45 years and more than 14 billion miles later, data come back at a rate of 40 bits per second.

The team is cautiously optimistic that the probes will stay in contact for three more years, long enough to celebrate the mission’s 50th anniversary in 2027, Spilker said. They could conceivably last until the 2030s.

The conversation can’t last forever. Microscopic bits of silica keep clogging up the thrusters that keep the probes’ antennas pointed toward Earth, which could end communications. The power is running low. Eventually, the day will come when both Voyagers stop transmitting data to Earth, and the first part of their mission ends.

But on the day each craft goes quiet, they begin a new era, one that could potentially last far longer. Each probe is equipped with a metallic album cover containing a Golden Record , a gold-plated copper disk inscribed with sounds and images meant to describe the species that built the Voyagers and the planet they came from.

Erosion in space is negligible; the images could be readable for another billion years or more. Should any other intelligent life form encounter one of the Voyager probes and have a means of retrieving the data from the record, they will at the very least have a chance to figure out who sent them — even if our species is by that time long gone.

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Corinne Purtill is a science and medicine reporter for the Los Angeles Times. Her writing on science and human behavior has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Time Magazine, the BBC, Quartz and elsewhere. Before joining The Times, she worked as the senior London correspondent for GlobalPost (now PRI) and as a reporter and assignment editor at the Cambodia Daily in Phnom Penh. She is a native of Southern California and a graduate of Stanford University.

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Inside NASA's 5-month fight to save the Voyager 1 mission in interstellar space

After working for five months to re-establish communication with the farthest-flung human-made object in existence, NASA announced this week that the Voyager 1 probe had finally phoned home.

For the engineers and scientists who work on NASA’s longest-operating mission in space, it was a moment of joy and intense relief.

“That Saturday morning, we all came in, we’re sitting around boxes of doughnuts and waiting for the data to come back from Voyager,” said Linda Spilker, the project scientist for the Voyager 1 mission at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “We knew exactly what time it was going to happen, and it got really quiet and everybody just sat there and they’re looking at the screen.”

When at long last the spacecraft returned the agency’s call, Spilker said the room erupted in celebration.

“There were cheers, people raising their hands,” she said. “And a sense of relief, too — that OK, after all this hard work and going from barely being able to have a signal coming from Voyager to being in communication again, that was a tremendous relief and a great feeling.”

The problem with Voyager 1 was first detected in November . At the time, NASA said it was still in contact with the spacecraft and could see that it was receiving signals from Earth. But what was being relayed back to mission controllers — including science data and information about the health of the probe and its various systems — was garbled and unreadable.

That kicked off a monthslong push to identify what had gone wrong and try to save the Voyager 1 mission.

Spilker said she and her colleagues stayed hopeful and optimistic, but the team faced enormous challenges. For one, engineers were trying to troubleshoot a spacecraft traveling in interstellar space , more than 15 billion miles away — the ultimate long-distance call.

“With Voyager 1, it takes 22 1/2 hours to get the signal up and 22 1/2 hours to get the signal back, so we’d get the commands ready, send them up, and then like two days later, you’d get the answer if it had worked or not,” Spilker said.

The team eventually determined that the issue stemmed from one of the spacecraft’s three onboard computers. Spilker said a hardware failure, perhaps as a result of age or because it was hit by radiation, likely messed up a small section of code in the memory of the computer. The glitch meant Voyager 1 was unable to send coherent updates about its health and science observations.

NASA engineers determined that they would not be able to repair the chip where the mangled software is stored. And the bad code was also too large for Voyager 1's computer to store both it and any newly uploaded instructions. Because the technology aboard Voyager 1 dates back to the 1960s and 1970s, the computer’s memory pales in comparison to any modern smartphone. Spilker said it’s roughly equivalent to the amount of memory in an electronic car key.

The team found a workaround, however: They could divide up the code into smaller parts and store them in different areas of the computer’s memory. Then, they could reprogram the section that needed fixing while ensuring that the entire system still worked cohesively.

That was a feat, because the longevity of the Voyager mission means there are no working test beds or simulators here on Earth to test the new bits of code before they are sent to the spacecraft.

“There were three different people looking through line by line of the patch of the code we were going to send up, looking for anything that they had missed,” Spilker said. “And so it was sort of an eyes-only check of the software that we sent up.”

The hard work paid off.

NASA reported the happy development Monday, writing in a post on X : “Sounding a little more like yourself, #Voyager1.” The spacecraft’s own social media account responded , saying, “Hi, it’s me.”

So far, the team has determined that Voyager 1 is healthy and operating normally. Spilker said the probe’s scientific instruments are on and appear to be working, but it will take some time for Voyager 1 to resume sending back science data.

Voyager 1 and its twin, the Voyager 2 probe, each launched in 1977 on missions to study the outer solar system. As it sped through the cosmos, Voyager 1 flew by Jupiter and Saturn, studying the planets’ moons up close and snapping images along the way.

Voyager 2, which is 12.6 billion miles away, had close encounters with Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune and continues to operate as normal.

In 2012, Voyager 1 ventured beyond the solar system , becoming the first human-made object to enter interstellar space, or the space between stars. Voyager 2 followed suit in 2018.

Spilker, who first began working on the Voyager missions when she graduated college in 1977, said the missions could last into the 2030s. Eventually, though, the probes will run out of power or their components will simply be too old to continue operating.

Spilker said it will be tough to finally close out the missions someday, but Voyager 1 and 2 will live on as “our silent ambassadors.”

Both probes carry time capsules with them — messages on gold-plated copper disks that are collectively known as The Golden Record . The disks contain images and sounds that represent life on Earth and humanity’s culture, including snippets of music, animal sounds, laughter and recorded greetings in different languages. The idea is for the probes to carry the messages until they are possibly found by spacefarers in the distant future.

“Maybe in 40,000 years or so, they will be getting relatively close to another star,” Spilker said, “and they could be found at that point.”

Denise Chow is a reporter for NBC News Science focused on general science and climate change.

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Nasa celebrates as 1977’s voyager 1 phones home at last.

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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.

Voyager 1 has finally returned usable data to NASA from outside the solar system after five months offline.

Launched in 1977 and now in its 46th year, the probe has been suffering from communication issues since November 14. The same thing also happened in 2022 . However, this week, NASA said that engineers were finally able to get usable data about the health and status of its onboard engineering systems.

Fixing Voyager 1 has been slow work. It’s currently over 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, which means a radio message takes about 22.5 hours to reach it—and the same again to receive an answer.

The problem appears to have been its flight data subsystem, one of the spacecraft’s three onboard computers. Its job is to package the science and engineering data before it’s sent to Earth. Since the computer chip that stores its memory and some of its code is broken, engineers had to reinsert that code into a new location.

Next up for engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California is to adjust other parts of the FDS software so Voyager 1 can resume sending science data.

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The longest-running and most distant spacecraft in history, Voyager 1, was launched on September 5, 1977, while its twin spacecraft, Voyager 2, was launched a little earlier, on August 20, 1977. Voyager 2—now 12 billion miles away and traveling more slowly—continues to operate normally.

Both are now beyond what astronomers call the heliopause—a protective bubble of particles and magnetic fields created by the sun, which is thought to represent the sun’s farthest influence. Voyager 1 got to the heliopause in 2012 and Voyager 2 in 2018.

The Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of Earth taken Feb. 14, 1990, by NASA’s Voyager 1 at a distance of ... [+] 3.7 billion miles (6 billion kilometers) from the sun. The image inspired the title of scientist Carl Sagan's book, "Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space," in which he wrote: "Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us."

Pale Blue Dot

Since their launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, aboard Titan-Centaur rockets, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 have had glittering careers. Both photographed Jupiter and Saturn in 1979 and 1980 before going their separate ways. Voyager 1 could have visited Pluto, but that was sacrificed so scientists could get images of Saturn’s moon, Titan, a maneuver that made it impossible for it to reach any other body in the solar system. Meanwhile, Voyager 2 took slingshots around the planets to also image Uranus in 1986 and Neptune in 1989—the only spacecraft ever to image the two outer planets.

On February 14, 1990, when 3.7 billion miles from Earth, Voyager 1 turned its cameras back toward the sun and took an image that included our planet as “a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” Known as the “Pale Blue Dot,” it’s one of the most famous photos ever taken. It was remastered in 2019 .

Wishing you clear skies and wide eyes.

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Where are they now.

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Mission Status

Instrument status.

Where are the Voyagers now?

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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SFOS files showing Voyager activity on Deep Space Network (DSN)

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NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft finally phones home after 5 months of no contact

On Saturday, April 5, Voyager 1 finally "phoned home" and updated its NASA operating team about its health.

NASA's interstellar explorer Voyager 1 is finally communicating with ground control in an understandable way again. On Saturday (April 20), Voyager 1 updated ground control about its health status for the first time in 5 months. While the Voyager 1 spacecraft still isn't sending valid science data back to Earth, it is now returning usable information about the health and operating status of its onboard engineering systems. 

Thirty-five years after its launch in 1977, Voyager 1 became the first human-made object to leave the solar system and enter interstellar space . It was followed out of our cosmic quarters by its space-faring sibling, Voyager 2 , six years later in 2018. Voyager 2, thankfully, is still operational and communicating well with Earth. 

The two spacecraft remain the only human-made objects exploring space beyond the influence of the sun. However, on Nov. 14, 2023, after 11 years of exploring interstellar space and while sitting a staggering 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, Voyager 1's binary code — computer language composed of 0s and 1s that it uses to communicate with its flight team at NASA — stopped making sense.

Related: We finally know why NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft stopped communicating — scientists are working on a fix

In March, NASA's Voyager 1 operating team sent a digital "poke" to the spacecraft, prompting its flight data subsystem (FDS) to send a full memory readout back home.

This memory dump revealed to scientists and engineers that the "glitch" is the result of a corrupted code contained on a single chip representing around 3% of the FDS memory. The loss of this code rendered Voyager 1's science and engineering data unusable.

The NASA team can't physically repair or replace this chip, of course, but what they can do is remotely place the affected code elsewhere in the FDS memory. Though no single section of the memory is large enough to hold this code entirely, the team can slice it into sections and store these chunks separately. To do this, they will also have to adjust the relevant storage sections to ensure the addition of this corrupted code won't cause those areas to stop operating individually, or working together as a whole. In addition to this, NASA staff will also have to ensure any references to the corrupted code's location are updated.

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On April 18, 2024, the team began sending the code to its new location in the FDS memory. This was a painstaking process, as a radio signal takes 22.5 hours to traverse the distance between Earth and Voyager 1, and it then takes another 22.5 hours to get a signal back from the craft. 

By Saturday (April 20), however, the team confirmed their modification had worked. For the first time in five months, the scientists were able to communicate with Voyager 1 and check its health. Over the next few weeks, the team will work on adjusting the rest of the FDS software and aim to recover the regions of the system that are responsible for packaging and returning vital science data from beyond the limits of the solar system.

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].

Robert Lea is a science journalist in the U.K. whose articles have been published in Physics World, New Scientist, Astronomy Magazine, All About Space, Newsweek and ZME Science. He also writes about science communication for Elsevier and the European Journal of Physics. Rob holds a bachelor of science degree in physics and astronomy from the U.K.’s Open University. Follow him on Twitter @sciencef1rst.

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• Robb62 'V'ger must contact the creator. Reply
• Holy HannaH! Couldn't help but think that "repair" sounded extremely similar to the mechanics of DNA and the evolution of life. Reply
• Torbjorn Larsson *Applause* indeed, thanks to the Voyager teams for the hard work! Reply
• SpaceSpinner I notice that the article says that it has been in space for 35 years. Either I have gone back in time 10 years, or their AI is off by 10 years. V-*ger has been captured! Reply

Admin said: On Saturday, April 5, Voyager 1 finally "phoned home" and updated its NASA operating team about its health. The interstellar explorer is back in touch after five months of sending back nonsense data. NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft finally phones home after 5 months of no contact : Read more

evw said: I'm incredibly grateful for the persistence and dedication of the Voyagers' teams and for the amazing accomplishments that have kept these two spacecrafts operational so many years beyond their expected lifetimes. V-1 was launched when I was 25 years young; I was nearly delirious with joy. Exploring the physical universe captivated my attention while I was in elementary school and has kept me mesmerized since. I'm very emotional writing this note, thinking about what amounts to a miracle of technology and longevity in my eyes. BRAVO!!! THANK YOU EVERYONE PAST & PRESENT!!!

• EBairead I presume it's Fortran. Well done all. Reply

SpaceSpinner said: I notice that the article says that it has been in space for 35 years. Either I have gone back in time 10 years, or their AI is off by 10 years. V-*ger has been captured!

EBairead said: I presume it's Fortran. Well done all.

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Voyager 1 talking to Earth again after NASA engineers 24 billion kilometres away devise software fix

NASA's Voyager 1 probe — the most distant man-made object in the universe — is returning usable information to ground control following months of spouting gibberish, the US space agency says.

The spaceship stopped sending readable data back to Earth on November 14, 2023, even though controllers could tell it was still receiving their commands.

In March, teams working at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory discovered that a single malfunctioning chip was to blame.

They then had to devise a clever coding fix that worked within the tight memory constraints of its 46-year-old computer system.

"There was a section of the computer memory no longer working," project leader Dr Linda Spilker told the ABC.

"So we had to reprogram what was in that memory, move it to a different location, link everything back together and send everything up in a patch.

"And then on Saturday morning, we watched as Voyager 1 sent its first commands back and we knew we were back in communication once again."

Dr Spilker said they were receiving engineering data, so they knew the health and safety of the spacecraft.

"The next step is going to be to develop a patch so we can send back the science data," she said.

"That will really be exciting, to once again learn about interstellar space and what has been going on there that we've missed since November."

Dr Spilker said Voyager sent back data in real time, so the team had no facility to retrieve data covering the time since transmission was lost.

Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 was mankind's first spacecraft to enter the interstellar medium , in 2012, and is currently more than 24 billion kilometres from Earth.

Messages sent from Earth take about 22.5 hours to reach the spacecraft.

Its twin, Voyager 2, also left the solar system in 2018 as it was tracked by Australia's Parkes radio telescope.

Australia was also vital to a 2023 search for Voyager 2 after signals were lost, with Canberra's Deep Space Communication Complex monitoring for signals and then sending a successful command to shift the spacecraft's antenna 2 degrees . 

Both Voyager spacecraft carry " Golden Records ": 12-inch, gold-plated copper disks intended to convey the story of our world to extraterrestrials.

These include a map of our solar system, a piece of uranium that serves as a radioactive clock allowing recipients to date the spaceship's launch, and symbolic instructions that convey how to play the record.

The contents of the record, selected for NASA by a committee chaired by legendary astronomer Carl Sagan, include encoded images of life on Earth, as well as music and sounds that can be played using an included stylus.

Their power banks were expected to be depleted sometime after 2025, but Dr Spilker said several systems had been turned off, so they were hopeful the two spacecraft would function into the 2030s.

They will then continue to wander the Milky Way, potentially for eternity, in silence.

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