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News | August 23, 2016

​35 years on, voyager's legacy continues at saturn.

Saturn seen by Voyager 2

Up-close views from the Voyagers, like this one from Voyager 2, showed Saturn and its rings as never before . Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Saturn, with its alluring rings and numerous moons, has long fascinated stargazers and scientists. After an initial flyby of Pioneer 11 in 1979, humanity got a second, much closer look at this complex planetary system in the early 1980s through the eyes of NASA's twin Voyager spacecraft.

Voyager 2 made its closest approach to Saturn 35 years ago -- on Aug. 25, 1981. What the Voyagers revealed at the planet was so phenomenal that, just one year later, a joint American and European working group began discussing a mission that would carry on Voyager's legacy at Saturn. That mission -- named Cassini -- has been studying the Saturn system since 2004. Cassini has followed up on many of Voyager's discoveries, and has deepened our understanding of what some might call a "mini solar system."

"Saturn, like all of the planets the Voyagers visited, was full of exciting discoveries and surprises," said Ed Stone, Voyager project scientist at Caltech in Pasadena, California. "By giving us unprecedented views of the Saturn system, Voyager gave us plenty of reasons to go back for a closer look."

Many Mysterious Moons

Voyager's Saturn flybys provided a thrilling look at the planet's moons -- a diverse menagerie of worlds, each with unique character and charm. Voyager's images transformed the moons from points of light to fully realized places. Dramatic landscapes on Tethys, Dione, Rhea, Iapetus and other moons tantalized scientists with features hinting at tortured pasts.

"The stars of the Saturn system are the moons, which surprised all of us on both the Voyager and Cassini missions," said Linda Spilker, project scientist for Cassini at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena. Spilker also served on the Voyager science team.

One of the key findings of the Voyagers' visits to Saturn was that the planet's moons had evidence of past geological activity and that Enceladus -- the brightest, most reflective planetary body scientists had ever seen -- could still be active.

Cassini set out to delve deeper into the nature of these moons, and found that, indeed, icy Enceladus has geysers erupting to this day. Cassini also confirmed that Enceladus is the source of Saturn's E ring, which was suggested by Voyager. But while Voyager images of wispy terrain hinted at ice volcanoes on Dione, Cassini found this feathery coating was actually a system of bright canyons.

…Especially Titan

Titan, Saturn's largest moon, was a high-priority target for the Voyager mission. Gerard Kuiper, for whom the Kuiper Belt is named, had discovered in 1944 that Titan had an atmosphere containing methane. Observations from both Voyagers showed that Titan's atmosphere was primarily composed of nitrogen, with a few percent methane and smaller amounts of other complex hydrocarbons, such as ethane, propane and acetylene. No other moon in the solar system has a dense atmosphere.

Mission planners mapped out a path through the Saturn system that provided the gravitational boost needed to send Voyager 2 onward to Uranus . But because of intense interest in Titan's atmosphere, the giant moon was the higher priority. In fact, the team would have directed Voyager 2 much closer to Titan if Voyager 1 had not been successful in observing it.

"To fly close to Titan, Voyager 2 would have swung upward out of the plane of the planets, and couldn't have gone on to visit any others," Stone said. "It was fortunate that Voyager 1's observations of Titan went flawlessly, so that Voyager 2 could continue traveling to Uranus and Neptune."

To the Voyagers, Titan appeared as a featureless orange ball because of dense haze in its atmosphere. Seeing through this haze was a chief goal of the Cassini mission. Cassini carried cameras with infrared vision that could see through the haze, a radar that could map the surface in detail, and the European Huygens probe, which landed on the moon's frigid surface on Jan. 14, 2005. We now know, thanks to Cassini, that smoggy Titan has methane lakes and flooded canyons .

New Shapes and Sizes

Voyager discovered four new moons and sharpened our view of some that were previously known. The spacecraft also revealed how the gravitational pull of these satellites causes ripples in Saturn's rings, much like the wake of a ship on the sea. There were also surprising gaps in the rings, some caused by moons embedded within them.

Voyager also revealed an immense hexagonal feature in the clouds that surrounded Saturn's north pole, which Cassini found was still going strong a quarter century later. Additionally, Voyager measured the wind speeds, temperature and density of Saturn's atmosphere. With Voyager's measurements as a starting point, Cassini further explored how Saturn's atmosphere changes with the seasons.

Lingering Mysteries of Saturn and Beyond

While both missions have vastly improved our understanding of Saturn, its rings and moons, there are still mysteries galore. For example, the exact length of Saturn's day continues to elude researchers. The Voyagers measured it to be a period of 10.66 hours, but Cassini has measured two different, changing periods in the north and south.

Voyager also made the first up-close observations of Saturn's rings, discovering new thin and faint rings, along with the ghostly features called spokes. But despite more than a decade of observations with Cassini, scientists are still unsure about the age of the rings -- they could be hundreds of millions of years old, or several billion. Cassini, in turn, has prompted new questions of its own, such as whether the ocean worlds Enceladus and Titan could be habitable.

"The twin Voyagers rewrote the textbooks on Saturn, its rings and moons, and we couldn't wait to go back with Cassini," Spilker said. "New mysteries uncovered by Cassini will await the next missions to follow in the footsteps of Voyager."

Voyager 2’s mission of discovery continues to this day. It is now part of the Heliophysics System Observatory, a collection of missions that explore our space environment, and which contribute to protecting future missions on their journeys. Voyager now explores what's known as the interstellar boundary region, where material blowing out from the sun encounters similar winds from other stars.

The two Voyager spacecraft, as well as Cassini, were built by JPL, which continues to operate the three missions. JPL is a division of Caltech. For more information about the Voyager spacecraft, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/voyager

http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov

Elizabeth Landau Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. 818-354-6425 [email protected]

Written by Elizabeth Landau and Preston Dyches

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Rae Paoletta • Mar 03, 2022

The best space pictures from the Voyager 1 and 2 missions

Launched in 1977, NASA’s Voyager 1 and 2 missions provided an unprecedented glimpse into the outer solar system — a liminal space once left largely to the imagination. The spacecraft provided views of worlds we’d never seen before, and in some cases, haven’t seen much of since.

The Voyager probes were launched about two weeks apart and had different trajectories, like two tour guides at the same museum. Only Voyager 2 visited the ice giants — Uranus and Neptune — for example.

The Voyagers hold a unique position in the pantheon of space history because they’re still making it; even right now, Voyagers 1 and 2 are the only functioning spacecraft in interstellar space. Both hold a Golden Record that contains sights and sounds of Earth in case alien life were to find one of the spacecraft.

As the Voyager missions voyage on, it’s good to look back at how they captured our solar system before leaving it.

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When Voyager gave us the first close-up pictures of Saturn’s rings

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For centuries, astronomers using telescopes spied a ring of material circling the planet’s equator. Pinpricks of light, the planet’s moons, floated nearby. Technical advances led to better views, until scientists could see gaps or divisions in the material ringing Saturn. They also saw oddities on its moons: One seemed to hold a methane atmosphere laced with clouds, while another was two-faced, bright on one half but dark as asphalt on the other.

But it would take Voyager 1 and 2, a pair of visiting spacecraft, to fully reveal the beautiful and intriguing ringed world and its equally fascinating system of moons. The planet hosts a wide array of astronomical processes and structures, and the Voyager probes were the first to show scientists how incredible the Saturn system truly is. The system they uncovered was too intriguing not to revisit, laying the foundation for the groundbreaking Cassini mission decades later.

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The twin Voyager spacecraft launched 16 days apart in 1977, beginning their Grand Tour of the outer solar system. They took separate journeys to the ringed planet and its diverse moons. Voyager 1 arrived in November 1980, and afterward used the planet’s gravity to slingshot itself out of the solar system’s plane. Voyager 2 swung through in August 1981, continuing on to Uranus and Neptune.

The pair of probes revealed many unexpected details about the Saturn system, but Voyager 1 was not the first mission to snap an up-close view of the planet. That title belongs to Pioneer 11, which flew by the ringed world in 1979. Its photographs, combined with ground-based detections, helped planetary scientists better plan the Voyagers’ Saturn flyby routes, as well as choose which targets to focus on.

Each closest approach was a quick encounter — after all, the probes were traveling faster than 9 miles per second (15 km/s). But the mission team began collecting detailed observations of each target weeks in advance. And for the two weeks surrounding each nearest encounter of Saturn, all the science teams would converge at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, for an intense observing session.

Remarkable features of the rings  

Before Voyager arrived at Saturn, scientists knew of two empty paths splitting Saturn’s rings: the Cassini Division and the Encke Gap. But based on observations from both Pioneer and ground-based telescopes, “we thought we would find bland, featureless sheets of material separated by gaps,” says Linda Spilker, who studied the rings as part of the Voyager team and is now the Cassini project scientist. Instead, the twin spacecraft revealed the rings are anything but bland.

ffring

As Voyager 1 neared closest approach and the resolution improved, the team could make out more details. “It looked like grooves on a phonograph record,” says Spilker of the rings. Hundreds of concentric rings circled Saturn. Scientists saw waves along the edges of gaps between those rings, as well as braided features and spiral structures within the rings — all due to the gravitational influence of small moons embedded in and sitting just outside of the rings. They even saw patterns that looked like propeller wings spiraling out from moonlets, showing how large boulders clear material along gaps in their orbit. Studying the behavior of moonlets in a “debris disk” such as Saturn’s rings has allowed scientists to indirectly study how planets form around stars in protostellar disks. “The rings were just so much more than I had imagined,” adds Spilker.

But it wasn’t just the beautiful images of the photogenic ring system that surprised scientists. When Voyager 2 approached Saturn in August, it observed starlight from Delta Scorpii as the rings passed in between that background star and the spacecraft. Called an occultation, this filtered view allowed researchers to see even finer details in the rings. In fact, they saw the particles in the rings with a resolution 10 to 20 times better than by just photographing the rings directly.

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With those data, scientists could estimate the thickness at the edge of each ring: between 33 and 656 feet (10–200m). They saw smaller structures in the rings: clumps, twists, and waves — all due to the gravity of Saturn’s satellites. That occultation using Delta Scorpii was one of the most crucial observations Voyager made at Saturn. And with only one such event, the data was extremely precious, says Spilker.

What a difference a generation of technology design makes: Today, scientists have hundreds of occultation observations from the Cassini spacecraft, which studied the Saturn system from 2004 until September of this year. Cassini’s 13 years of observations provided answers about how the moons and Saturn itself shape the rings.

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Before either Voyager arrived at Saturn, most of the planet’s moons were no more than pinpricks of light. Ground-based telescopes couldn’t resolve their surfaces, so scientists had little information about the immense variation these worlds hold.

First up was Titan, the planet’s largest moon. Voyager 1 made its closest approach to the orange sphere in the late hours of November 11, 1980, when it flew less than 310,000 miles (500,000km) from the moon. Scientists hoped to see through the thick atmosphere to learn about the surface, but Titan’s mysteries weren’t so easy to solve. The visible and infrared cameras could not penetrate the clouds. Fortunately, researchers could get a radio signal to the surface and back, and used it to calculate the atmosphere’s density: 1.6 times that of Earth.

During the analysis of the radio data, a hushed rumor spread among the dozens of Voyager scientists stationed at JPL, recalls planetary scientist Carolyn Porco, that liquid nitrogen might exist on the surface of Titan. “It turned out the initial analysis was incorrect,” she says. “But I’ll never forget the indescribable thrill of hearing that rumor. It felt, for a moment, like all of us . . . were crewmates on the starship Enterprise, and we had just come upon the most alien of worlds yet seen. We were indeed planetary explorers.” Porco later explored the Saturnian system as a member of the Cassini team.

What Voyager did reveal of Titan, though — knowledge of its atmosphere’s density and composition, the possibility of hydrocarbons perhaps in liquid form at the surface — made Titan even more intriguing for further study. In fact, says Spilker, “it was really the Voyager flyby of Titan, and what we learned and what we didn’t learn, that led to this strong desire to go back.” And ultimately, it was that flyby that sparked the Cassini mission.

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Observations from Earth of a ring around Saturn at the distance of Enceladus’ orbit already hinted that perhaps that small moon somehow feeds the ring. Could there be ice volcanoes on Enceladus, providing the sloshy material that would fill in impact craters? If so, some of that gushing material perhaps could escape the surface and orbit Saturn as part of the E ring. Those first detailed observations from Voyager triggered an ongoing fascination with this small, reflective moon, adds Ingersoll.

Scientists now know from the Cassini mission that an underground water ocean feeds geysers at Enceladus’ south pole. They’ve also discovered likely hydrothermal activity at the ocean floor. On Earth, biological ecosystems thrive in such environments. Could they do the same on Enceladus? That’s a question a future dedicated mission to the small moon might answer.

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Scientists didn’t send Voyager to Saturn to study only its rings and moons. The planet and its atmosphere were also a science focus. Like that of its sister giant planet, Jupiter, Saturn’s atmosphere hosts incredible storms and enormous jet streams, and the Voyager twins were the first spacecraft to photograph the details in those cloud tops up close.

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And then there are Saturn’s winds themselves. “I remember being amazed at how fast the winds were blowing,” recalls Ingersoll — although how fast isn’t actually known yet. That’s because scientists don’t have a reference against which to measure the wind speeds, explains Ingersoll, who has studied planetary atmospheres for decades. “On Earth, we measure the wind relative to the continents,” explains Ingersoll, and Saturn, of course, doesn’t have any continents. But if scientists could measure how fast the planet’s solid core rotates, that speed would serve as the reference.

To get at that rotation rate for a giant planet, researchers track the planet’s magnetic field, which is produced in the solid core. On Jupiter, the magnetic field’s axis is tilted in relation to the rotation axis, which means as the core rotates, the magnetic field wobbles. “You see the magnetic field wobble back and forth like a . . . top, and so that tells you how fast the interior of the planet is rotating,” says Ingersoll. Unfortunately, Saturn’s magnetic field axis and rotation axis are too similar to produce a measurable wobble on the Voyagers’ instruments. But in its final mission phase, skimming just above the cloud tops, Cassini may finally get close enough to the planet to better track the wobble.

On September 15, Cassini will end its study of Saturn, closing the door on up-close observations of the ringed planet, just like Voyager’s departure in 1981. Both missions have answered long-standing questions about the ringed world and its system, as well as introduced new mysteries for future spacecraft to resolve.

This world holds beautiful rings that mimic some characteristics of disks around young stars, intense atmospheric storms, and a variety of moons — including one with an Earth-like weather system and another with the ingredients of a habitable environment. “The study of Saturn has provided scientists the means to study processes that are at work all across our solar system and scale-invariant across the cosmos,” says Porco. “No other planet can claim as much.”

Because of Voyager 1 and 2, we know why the Saturn system continues to tempt planetary explorers.

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Voyager: 15 incredible images of our solar system captured by the twin probes (gallery)

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NASA's twin probes Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 have captured some truly remarkable images of our solar system and are currently roaming through interstellar space. 

Despite its name Voyager 2 launched before Voyager 1 , when it lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space Launch Complex 41 aboard a Titan IIIE-Centaur on Aug. 20, 1977. Voyager 1 followed suit about two weeks later on Sept. 5. 

While Voyager 1 primarily focused on Jupiter and Saturn , Voyager 2 visited both gas giants and then ventured on to Uranus and Neptune . But the duo didn't stop there. Voyager 1 officially entered interstellar space on Aug. 25, 2012, while Voyager 2 entered on Nov. 5, 2018. The pair continue to journey through the cosmos and have enough power and fuel to keep scientific instruments running until at least 2025, according to NASA . 

Here we celebrate the achievements of both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 with some incredible images captured by the pair. 

This image was taken when NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft zoomed toward Jupiter in January and February 1979, capturing hundreds of images during its approach, including this close-up of swirling clouds around Jupiter's Great Red Spot . 

This image of the Earth and moon are in a single frame. Voyager was the first spacecraft to achieve this and captured the iconic image on Sept. 18, 1977, by Voyager 1 when it was 7.25 million miles from Earth. The moon is at the top of the picture and beyond the Earth as viewed by Voyager. 

Color composite by Voyager 2 showing Jupiter's faint ring system. Images captured in July 1979. 

A Voyager 1 image of Jupiter's moon Io showing the active plume of the volcano Loki. The heart-shaped feature southeast of Loki consists of fallout deposits from the active plume Pele. The images that make up this mosaic were taken from an average distance of approximately 340,000 miles (490,000 kilometers) from the moon. 

Layers of haze covering Saturn's moon Titan are seen in this image taken by Voyager 1 on Nov. 12, 1980, at a range of 13,700 miles (22,000 km). This false-color image shows the details of the haze that covers Titan. The upper level of the thick aerosol above the moon's limb appears orange. 

This view of Uranus was recorded by Voyager 2 on Jan. 25, 1986, as the spacecraft left the planet behind and set forth on the cruise to Neptune. Even at this extreme angle, Uranus retains the pale blue-green color seen by ground-based astronomers and recorded by Voyager during the historic encounter. 

This Voyager 2 high-resolution color image provides obvious evidence of vertical relief in Neptune's bright cloud streaks. These clouds were observed at a latitude of 29 degrees north near Neptune's east terminator, the "line" on a planet where daylight meets darkness. 

Global color mosaic of Triton , taken in 1989 by Voyager 2 during its flyby of the Neptune system. The color was synthesized by combining high-resolution images taken through orange, violet and ultraviolet filters; these images were displayed as red, green and blue images and combined to create this color version. 

Saturn and three of its moons, Tethys, Dione and Rhea, seen by a Voyager spacecraft on Aug. 4, 1982, from a distance of 13 million miles (21 million km). 

This narrow-angle color image of the Earth, dubbed the "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 (6 billion km) from Earth and about 32 degrees above the ecliptic, which is the plane that contains most of the planets of the solar system. 

Voyager 1 took photos of Jupiter and two of its satellites (Io, left, and Europa ).

Enhanced color view of Saturn's ring system captured by Voyager 2 on Aug. 17, 1981, at a distance of 5.5 million miles (8.9 million km). The color variations between the rings possibly indicate variations in chemical composition from one part of Saturn's ring system to another.  

Close-up of the surface of Jupiter's moon Europa captured by Voyager 2 at a distance of 152,000 miles (246,000 km). 

Voyager 2 captured this image of Neptune's rings on Aug. 26, 1989, from a distance of 175,000 miles (280,000 km).  

A false-color image of Callisto captured on July 7, 1979, by Voyager 2 at a distance of about 677,000 miles (1.09 million km). Callisto is the second largest moon of Jupiter and is the most heavily cratered of the Galilean satellites. 

Daisy Dobrijevic

Daisy Dobrijevic joined Space.com in February 2022 having previously worked for our sister publication All About Space magazine as a staff writer. Before joining us, Daisy completed an editorial internship with the BBC Sky at Night Magazine and worked at the National Space Centre in Leicester, U.K., where she enjoyed communicating space science to the public. In 2021, Daisy completed a PhD in plant physiology and also holds a Master's in Environmental Science, she is currently based in Nottingham, U.K. Daisy is passionate about all things space, with a penchant for solar activity and space weather. She has a strong interest in astrotourism and loves nothing more than a good northern lights chase! 

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100 Saturn Voyager Stock Photos & High-Res Pictures

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An artist's impression of NASA's Voyager 1 space probe passing behind the rings of Saturn, using cameras and radio equipment to measure how sunlight...

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The most distant human-made object

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No spacecraft has gone farther than NASA's Voyager 1. Launched in 1977 to fly by Jupiter and Saturn, Voyager 1 crossed into interstellar space in August 2012 and continues to collect data.

Mission Type

What is Voyager 1?

Voyager 1 has been exploring our solar system for more than 45 years. The probe is now in interstellar space, the region outside the heliopause, or the bubble of energetic particles and magnetic fields from the Sun.

  • Voyager 1 was the first spacecraft to cross the heliosphere, the boundary where the influences outside our solar system are stronger than those from our Sun.
  • Voyager 1 is the first human-made object to venture into interstellar space.
  • Voyager 1 discovered a thin ring around Jupiter and two new Jovian moons: Thebe and Metis.
  • At Saturn, Voyager 1 found five new moons and a new ring called the G-ring.

In Depth: Voyager 1

Voyager 1 was launched after Voyager 2, but because of a faster route, it exited the asteroid belt earlier than its twin, having overtaken Voyager 2 on Dec. 15, 1977.

Voyager 1 at Jupiter

Voyager 1 began its Jovian imaging mission in April 1978 at a range of 165 million miles (265 million km) from the planet. Images sent back by January the following year indicated that Jupiter’s atmosphere was more turbulent than during the Pioneer flybys in 1973–1974.

Beginning on January 30, Voyager 1 took a picture every 96 seconds for a span of 100 hours to generate a color timelapse movie to depict 10 rotations of Jupiter. On Feb. 10, 1979, the spacecraft crossed into the Jovian moon system and by early March, it had already discovered a thin (less than 30 kilometers thick) ring circling Jupiter.

Voyager 1’s closest encounter with Jupiter was at 12:05 UT on March 5, 1979 at a range of about 174,000 miles (280,000 km). It encountered several of Jupiter’s Moons, including Amalthea, Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto, returning spectacular photos of their terrain, opening up completely new worlds for planetary scientists.

The most interesting find was on Io, where images showed a bizarre yellow, orange, and brown world with at least eight active volcanoes spewing material into space, making it one of the most (if not the most) geologically active planetary body in the solar system. The presence of active volcanoes suggested that the sulfur and oxygen in Jovian space may be a result of the volcanic plumes from Io which are rich in sulfur dioxide. The spacecraft also discovered two new moons, Thebe and Metis.

Voyager 1 at Saturn

Saturn

Following the Jupiter encounter, Voyager 1 completed an initial course correction on April 9, 1979 in preparation for its meeting with Saturn. A second correction on Oct. 10, 1979 ensured that the spacecraft would not hit Saturn’s moon Titan.

Its flyby of the Saturn system in November 1979 was as spectacular as its previous encounter. Voyager 1 found five new moons, a ring system consisting of thousands of bands, wedge-shaped transient clouds of tiny particles in the B ring that scientists called “spokes,” a new ring (the “G-ring”), and “shepherding” satellites on either side of the F-ring—satellites that keep the rings well-defined.

During its flyby, the spacecraft photographed Saturn’s moons Titan, Mimas, Enceladus, Tethys, Dione, and Rhea. Based on incoming data, all the moons appeared to be composed largely of water ice. Perhaps the most interesting target was Titan, which Voyager 1 passed at 05:41 UT on November 12 at a range of 2,500 miles (4,000 km). Images showed a thick atmosphere that completely hid the surface. The spacecraft found that the moon’s atmosphere was composed of 90% nitrogen. Pressure ad temperature at the surface was 1.6 atmospheres and 356 °F (–180°C), respectively.

Atmospheric data suggested that Titan might be the first body in the solar system (apart from Earth) where liquid might exist on the surface. In addition, the presence of nitrogen, methane, and more complex hydrocarbons indicated that prebiotic chemical reactions might be possible on Titan.

Voyager 1’s closest approach to Saturn was at 23:46 UT on 12 Nov. 12, 1980 at a range of 78,000 miles(126,000 km).

Voyager 1’s ‘Family Portrait’ Image

Following the encounter with Saturn, Voyager 1 headed on a trajectory escaping the solar system at a speed of about 3.5 AU per year, 35° out of the ecliptic plane to the north, in the general direction of the Sun’s motion relative to nearby stars. Because of the specific requirements for the Titan flyby, the spacecraft was not directed to Uranus and Neptune.

The final images taken by the Voyagers comprised a mosaic of 64 images taken by Voyager 1 on Feb. 14, 1990 at a distance of 40 AU of the Sun and all the planets of the solar system (although Mercury and Mars did not appear, the former because it was too close to the Sun and the latter because Mars was on the same side of the Sun as Voyager 1 so only its dark side faced the cameras).

This was the so-called “pale blue dot” image made famous by Cornell University professor and Voyager science team member Carl Sagan (1934-1996). These were the last of a total of 67,000 images taken by the two spacecraft.

Voyager 1’s Interstellar Mission

All the planetary encounters finally over in 1989, the missions of Voyager 1 and 2 were declared part of the Voyager Interstellar Mission (VIM), which officially began on Jan. 1, 1990.

The goal was to extend NASA’s exploration of the solar system beyond the neighborhood of the outer planets to the outer limits of the Sun’s sphere of influence, and “possibly beyond.” Specific goals include collecting data on the transition between the heliosphere, the region of space dominated by the Sun’s magnetic field and solar field, and the interstellar medium.

On Feb. 17, 1998, Voyager 1 became the most distant human-made object in existence when, at a distance of 69.4 AU from the Sun when it “overtook” Pioneer 10.

On Dec. 16, 2004, Voyager scientists announced that Voyager 1 had reported high values for the intensity for the magnetic field at a distance of 94 AU, indicating that it had reached the termination shock and had now entered the heliosheath.

The spacecraft finally exited the heliosphere and began measuring the interstellar environment on Aug. 25, 2012, the first spacecraft to do so.

On Sept. 5, 2017, NASA marked the 40th anniversary of its launch, as it continues to communicate with NASA’s Deep Space Network and send data back from four still-functioning instruments—the cosmic ray telescope, the low-energy charged particles experiment, the magnetometer, and the plasma waves experiment.

The Golden Record

The Titan/Centaur-6 launch vehicle was moved to Launch Complex 41 at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida to complete checkout procedures in preparation for launch.

Each of the Voyagers contain a “message,” prepared by a team headed by Carl Sagan, in the form of a 12-inch (30 cm) diameter gold-plated copper disc for potential extraterrestrials who might find the spacecraft. Like the plaques on Pioneers 10 and 11, the record has inscribed symbols to show the location of Earth relative to several pulsars.

The records also contain instructions to play them using a cartridge and a needle, much like a vinyl record player. The audio on the disc includes greetings in 55 languages, 35 sounds from life on Earth (such as whale songs, laughter, etc.), 90 minutes of generally Western music including everything from Mozart and Bach to Chuck Berry and Blind Willie Johnson. It also includes 115 images of life on Earth and recorded greetings from then U.S. President Jimmy Carter (1924– ) and then-UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim (1918–2007).

By January 2024, Voyager 1 was about 136 AU (15 billion miles, or 20 billion kilometers) from Earth, the farthest object created by humans, and moving at a velocity of about 38,000 mph (17.0 kilometers/second) relative to the Sun.

The Voyager spacecraft against a sparkly blue background

National Space Science Data Center: Voyager 1

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Our Solar System

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The Voyager spacecraft will probably last a billion years, says a scientist on the mission for nearly 5 decades

  • Alan Cummings has worked on the Voyager mission for over 50 years.
  • Since their launch, the two Voyager spacecraft have made breakthrough discoveries that keep Cummings engaged.
  • Cummings thinks they will continue traveling for a billion years.

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The twin Voyager spacecraft launched almost five decades ago, and there's no reason they shouldn't keep going for a billion years, one of its scientists, Alan Cummings told Business Insider.

Cummings started working on the Voyager mission when he was a graduate student at Caltech in 1973, about four years before the two spacecraft launched.

Now a senior research scientist at Caltech, Cummings has seen the program dwindle from over 300 people to fewer than a dozen.

Voyagers 1 and 2 have traveled over 10 billion miles into space, further than any human-made object. Cummings said being a part of this historic mission for so many decades has been the backbone of his career.

"The Hubble Telescope is a great mission," he said. " JWST is a great mission, but I think Voyager's in that kind of category."

Voyagers' endurance

The Voyager mission has been gathering groundbreaking data and photos since the beginning.

The first time Cummings saw Jupiter's moon Io in 1979, for example, he thought it was a joke. "It looked like a poorly made pizza," he said.

Its colorful, volcano-covered surface looked so different from Earth's gray, pockmarked moon . "This can't be real," he said, "and it was real."

The Voyagers offered us a new perspective on our outer solar system, unlike anything we could have imagined.

They discovered Saturn wasn't the only planet with rings — Jupiter has them too. They revealed new moons around Jupiter and Saturn.

In total, the two spacecraft snapped 67,000 images of our solar system, the final of which was the "pale blue dot" photo made famous by Carl Sagan who said:

"To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world."

"It rewrote the textbooks," Cummings said of the mission.

Both Voyagers were initially planned as five-year missions, but Cummings said, from the beginning, he expected the spacecraft to last at least 30 to 40 years.

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"A remarkable engineering team has kept this thing going," Cummings said.

Now, as the two spacecraft approach their 50th anniversaries, they're running low on fuel.

Engineers have had to shut down different instruments to keep them going and the data coming in.

Cummings said once the Voyagers lose power and communication, they'll continue traveling. "I think it's going to go for a billion years," he said. "There's nothing to stop it."

Joining Voyager

If it weren't for an unfortunate accident, Cummings may never have joined the Voyager mission.

Before Voyager, Cummings was part of an experiment to measure cosmic rays using a balloon.

For several summers, he had released the balloon from northern Manitoba, Canada.

But during its final flight, the balloon didn't descend as expected and ended up over Russia, instead.

By the time Cummings got to Russia, the instrument was destroyed.

"It was very fortunate for me," he said, because he was able to then join the Voyager mission.

He put his cosmic ray experience to use, working on telescopes for the mission's experiments.

"I have my little initials scratched on one of those" telescopes he said, "so I guess I'm going to be immortal."

Interstellar space

Cummings has worked on other projects over the decades, but Voyagers' continual transmission of new data has kept him excited and involved.

"There's always some new phenomenon that you see," he said.

In fact, Voyager's data has become increasingly more interesting to Cummings in recent years because the two spacecraft are now in interstellar space , the region of space beyond our sun's influence.

After passing by the four giant planets of Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus, many of the instruments were still in working order. So, the spacecraft transitioned to an interstellar mission.

In 2012, Voyager 1 became the first human-made spacecraft to enter interstellar space and Voyager 2 followed six years later.

"That is really what I was most interested in anyway," Cummings said, since cosmic rays are his field of expertise and in interstellar space, those rays aren't disrupted by the sun, Earth, and other obstructions in our solar system.

Voyager is "making its most interesting measurements in some ways right now," he said.

Currently, Voyager 1 is having issues with one of its onboard computers that could compromise the mission.

Cummings hopes the Voyagers can hang on a little longer, especially since interstellar space is a long way off for any other spacecraft.

Watch: NASA released this 5-year time-lapse of Mars from its Curiosity rover — and the footage looks amazing

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March 14, 2024

10 min read

Voyager 1’s Immortal Interstellar Requiem

NASA is reaching across more than 15 billion miles to rescue its malfunctioning Voyager 1 probe—but this hallowed interstellar mission can’t live forever

By Nadia Drake

Voyager spacecraft leaving Solar System. The spacecraft is in silhouette with the light from the distant sun shining through

An artist's concept of NASA's Voyager 1, the space agency's venerable and farthest-flung interplanetary probe.

Mark Garlick/Science Photo Library

In the fall of last year, one of NASA’s most venerable spacecraft started beaming home nonsense. Its usual string of 1’s and 0’s—binary code that collectively told of its journey into the unknown—became suddenly unintelligible.

Some 15 billion miles from Earth, beyond the protective bubble blown by the sun and in interstellar space, Voyager 1 was in trouble.

“We’d gone from having a conversation with Voyager, with the 1’s and 0’s containing science data, to just a dial tone,” says Linda Spilker , Voyager project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

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Spilker joined JPL in 1977, the same year that NASA launched Voyager 1 and its twin, Voyager 2 , on what, in a way, was an endless odyssey: from Earth, to the outer solar system and ultimately to interstellar infinity . Today there are several billion people on Earth who have never taken a breath without the Voyagers in our sky, people who, like me, have only ever existed in a cosmos shared with these talkative twin spacecraft. But like people, spacecraft get old. They break down .

And all good things—and even great ones—must come to an end. After days, and weeks and then months of nothing but indecipherable binary babbling, Voyager 1’s earthbound stewards had to reckon with the idea that maybe, after more than 46 years, its time had at last run out.

The Voyager 1 team at JPL had traced the problem to the spacecraft’s Flight Data System, an onboard computer that parses and parcels engineering and science measurements for subsequent radio transmittal to Earth. One possibility was that a high-energy cosmic particle had struck Voyager 1 and caused a bit flip within the system’s memory — something that has happened more frequently as the craft navigates the hostile wilds of interstellar space. Normally, the team would simply ask the spacecraft for a memory readout, allowing its members to find and reset the errant bit.

“We’ve recovered from bit flips before. The problem this time is we don’t know where the bit flip is because we can’t see what the memory is,” says Suzanne Dodd , Voyager project manager at JPL, who, like Spilker, began her long career with work on the probes. “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.”

Yesterday, the team announced a significant step in breaking through to Voyager 1. After months of stress and unsuccessful answers they have managed to decode at least a portion of the spacecraft’s gobbledygook, allowing them to (maybe) find a way to see what it has been trying to say.

“It’s an excellent development on Voyager,” says Joe Westlake , director of NASA’s heliophysics division, which oversees the mission.

In the time it will take you to read this story, Voyager 1 will have traversed approximately 10,000 miles of mostly empty space ; in the weeks it took me to report it, the probe traveled some 26 million miles. And since its communication first became garbled last November, the spacecraft has sailed another 10 light-minutes away from home. Voyager 1 and its twin are slipping away from us as surely as the passage of time itself. Sooner or later, these hallowed space-age icons will fall silent, becoming no more than distant memories.

And even among the space community, which of course loves all of its robotic explorers equally, the Voyagers are special. “They are incredibly important and much beloved spacecraft,” says Nicola Fox , NASA’s associate administrator for science. “Voyager 1 is a national treasure, along with Voyager 2 .”

As envisioned, the Voyager mission would exploit a once-in-175-year alignment of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune to slingshot through the solar system’s sparsely charted hinterlands. Legend has it that NASA’s administrator sold the project to President Richard Nixon by noting that the last time the planets were so favorably arranged, Thomas Jefferson was living in the White House. Outfitted with nuclear power sources, the Voyagers were built to last—in utter defiance of the adage that what must go up, must come down. Neither was ever intended to make planetfall again; instead they were bound for the stars. And now, nearly a half-century later, the pair have become the longest-lived and farthest-flung probes ever dispatched by humankind. (Voyager 1 is the front-runner, with its sibling trailing close behind.)

Spilker was straight out of college when she started working on the Voyagers, eager to see the outer solar system through their robotic eyes as they surfed the rare celestial alignment. “I had a telescope in third grade that I used to look at Jupiter and Saturn,” she says. “I wanted to get up really close and get a look at what these planets look like.”

Between 1979 and 1981, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 zipped by the gas giants , returning stunning images of banded Jupiter and buttery Saturn and their bewildering collection of moons. Voyager 2 went on to scrutinize the ice giants: Uranus in 1986 and Neptune in 1989. These were the first and only times anyone had seen each of these bluish ringed worlds up close.

“They were small little pinpoints of light, and now you’re flying close,” Spilker says. “And you see the cliffs of Miranda”—a bizarre Uranian moon—“and Triton, with active geysers going off.” (Nobody had expected to see an active icy world in orbit around Neptune, and even now Voyager’s 35-year-old image is still the best we have of that strange little moon.)

When the Voyagers left the realm of the known planets, each followed a different path into darkness: Voyager 1 arced up and out of the plane of the solar system, and Voyager 2 looped downward. Spilker also followed her own path: she went to graduate school and earned her doctorate in planetary science using Voyager data—not knowing that several decades later, after leading NASA’s Cassini mission to Saturn, she’d again be part of the mission that started it all.

“The chance came to go back to Voyager,” she says. “And I said, ‘Of course. I’d love to go back.’”

In the interim, as the Voyagers sailed farther from their Earthly harbor, teams shut down many of the onboard instruments, including the cameras. But the pair kept studying the space that they alone were visiting. Their main job was now to characterize the heliosphere—the solar-system-encompassing, cosmic-ray-blocking bubble formed by our sun’s wind and magnetic field. They would document the alien mix of particles and fields that pervade near nothingness. And maybe, if they got lucky, the twins would each escape the protective solar caul entirely to be reborn as true interstellar wanderers.

In 2012 Voyager 1 transcended this boundary , known as the heliopause, where the sun’s influence wanes. Before that scientists could only guess at what lay beyond this barrier and could only model how it shielded Earth from the harshness of the void. Now Voyager 1 could tell us directly about the stuff between the stars. Voyager 2 followed in 2018 , and Fox—then the new chief of NASA’s heliophysics division—was in the midst of the action.

“You’re looking at the cosmic rays going up and the solar wind going down, and it was one of those ‘oh, my god, this is so exciting’ moments,” Fox recalls. “I think of the Voyagers as one mission,” she says. “We’re putting all the data together, but they’re the ones that are out there. They’re the brave spacecraft that have left the protective bubble of the heliosphere and are out exploring interstellar space. It’s hard not to be excited by them.”

This wasn’t the first time Voyager 1 had started speaking an unintelligible language. In 2022, when the probe suffered an earlier bout of garbled telemetry, JPL engineer Bob Rasmussen was shaken out of retirement. The lab wanted to know if Rasmussen, who’d joined the spacecraft’s systems engineering team in 1975, was willing to have a think about the situation.

“I’d been happily retired for a bit more than a year at that point, with plenty else to keep me busy,” Rasmussen says. “But I like solving puzzles, and this was a tough one that I just couldn’t pass up. Cracking it took a few months, but the puzzle stream hasn’t slowed since then.”

Afterward, he stayed on-call. So last November, when Voyager 1 again started transmitting nonsense, Rasmussen was ready for more problem-solving. He was joined by a hand-picked team of specialists, and together they dove into the details for getting the ailing spacecraft back in action.

The problems were at least three layers deep. First, it takes a long time to communicate with Voyager 1. Traveling at the speed of light, the radio signals used to command the spacecraft take 22.5 hours to travel 15 billion miles—and 22.5 hours to come back. Second, the Voyagers are not exactly modern technology.

“Most things don’t last 46 years. Your clock radio and toaster aren’t going to last 46 years,” says Dodd, who started on the Voyager project straight out of school, then worked on other missions and is now back on this one.

Plus, many of the people who built and developed the spacecraft in the 1970s aren’t around to explain the rationale behind the designs.

And third, unluckily enough, whatever had mangled the spacecraft had managed to take out Voyager 1’s ability to send meaningful communications. The team was in the dark, trying to find the invisible source of an error. (Imagine trying to revive a stalled desktop computer with a frozen screen: you can’t see your cursor, and your clicks risk causing more problems—except in this case each input carries a multiday lag and could damage a precious, misbehaving artifact that is more than 15 billion miles away.) Perhaps the most vexing part was the team’s knowledge that Voyager 1 was otherwise intact and functioning as it should be.

“It’s still doing what it’s supposed to be doing,” Westlake says. “It just can’t quite figure out how to send the correct message home.”

Rasmussen and his colleagues set out to understand the spacecraft in as much detail as possible. That meant poring over the original design schematics, now yellowed and pinned to various walls—an effort that resembled “a bit of an archaeology dig,” Dodd says—and studying how past teams had addressed anomalies. That was tricky, Dodd says, because even though the team members could figure out how engineers solved a problem, they couldn’t necessarily discern the rationale behind various solutions. They’d send commands to Voyager 1 about once a week—usually on Fridays—and by Sunday, they’d hear back from the spacecraft.

“There’s suspense after each cautious move, hope with each piece that falls into place, disappointment if our hunches are wrong,” Rasmussen says.

Progress was slow. And as time crept on, the team grew more concerned. But no one was giving up, at any level of leadership.

“I will rely on the Voyager team to say, ‘Hey, Nicky, we’ve done everything , ’” Fox says. “We wouldn’t make any decisions until we knew that every single thing had been tried and tried again because we really do want to get Voyager 1 back talking to us.”

And then, in early March, something changed. In response to a command, instead of beaming back absolute gibberish, the spacecraft sent a string of numbers that looked more familiar. It proved to be a Rosetta stone moment. Soon an unnamed engineer at NASA’s Deep Space Network—the globe-girdling array of radio dishes that relays information from Earth to spacecraft—had learned how to speak Voyager 1’s jumbled language.

After translating that vaguely familiar portion of the spacecraft’s transmission, the team could see that it contained a readout of the flight data system’s memory. Now they face new questions: Can they find and correct the source of the mutated code? Can they learn whether the spacecraft is sending useful science data? Can they restore Voyager 1’s lexicon to its original state—or will they need to continue speaking in the probe’s new postheliopause patois? “The hope is that we’ll get good science data back,” Westlake says. “Thinking about something that’s been a constant throughout my entire career going away is really tough to think about.”

But either by glitch or time’s slow decay of radioactive power sources, the Voyagers will, of course, eventually fade away. Each year they lose four watts of power, and they grow ever colder. “Whether it’s this particular anomaly that gets us or one downstream, or the spacecraft gets old enough and cold enough —one day you’ll go to look for it and it has just stopped working,” Spilker says.

Like silent ambassadors or wordless emissaries, the Voyagers will keep sailing outward, still carrying us with them into the stars—“sort of like a message a bottle,” Spilker says.

Besides their science payloads, a fraction of each spacecraft’s mass was devoted to casting a cosmic message into the interstellar ocean from a lonely island called Earth. Mounted to each probe is a golden record etched with grooves encoding a selection of sights and sounds from our small corner of space and time. An accompanying stylus is positioned to play the record from the beginning, alongside a pictographic and arithmetic instruction manual.

The records are gold because gold is stable for eons, and they’re records because that was the best way to store a lot of information in the 1970s. Should they ever be recovered and decoded, the message will tell the stories of we humans—at least as envisioned (and in some cases performed) by a small group of folks that included my parents ( the late astrophysicist Frank Drake and his surviving spouse Amahl Shakhashiri Drake), astronomer Carl Sagan, documentary producer Ann Druyan and science writer Timothy Ferris. Those stories are imperfect. They’re filled with lopsided optimism and scrubbed of references to war, famine, poverty and most any other Earthly failing—a deliberate decision to hide the defects of our broken world. I know this because my dad, the record’s technical director and a pioneer in the scientific quest to find cosmic civilizations, told me about the hard choices he’d made in selecting the photographs. And I know it because my mom, who recorded the message’s Arabic greeting (“Greetings to our friends in the stars. We wish that we will meet you someday”), helped, too.

For me, as the Voyagers travel through space , they’re not only helping us understand the cosmic context in which we exist; they’re also bearing a memento of my parents into the stars. These spacecraft—and their gleaming paean to Earth—will survive for billions of years. Long after our world, our sun and everything we hold dear becomes unrecognizable, the Voyagers will remain, resolutely speeding ever farther from a home that no longer exists and containing artifacts of a civilization that once was.

That’s why, over nearly half a century, the Voyagers and their interstellar tidings have come to be bigger than the already audacious mission they were designed to accomplish. Their reach is broader. And their inevitable silence will be profound.

“The thought that they’re out there on their own and you can no longer communicate with them—it’s traumatic,” Fox says. “It’s sad. It’s really sad.”

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40 years ago: voyager 2 explores saturn, johnson space center.

Forty years ago, the Voyager 2 spacecraft made its closest approach to Saturn. Managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, the Voyagers are a pair of spacecraft launched in 1977 to explore the outer planets. Initially targeted only to visit Jupiter and Saturn, Voyager 2 went on to investigate Uranus and Neptune as well, taking advantage of a rare planetary alignment that occurs once every 175 years to use the gravity of one planet to redirect it to the next. Although not the first to explore the ringed planet – Pioneer 11 completed the first flyby in 1979 – the Voyagers carried more sophisticated instruments to conduct in-depth investigations. Voyager 2’s twin, Voyager 1 , made its closest approach to Saturn in November 1980. Forty-four years after their departure from Earth, both spacecraft continue to operate and report on the conditions of interstellar space.

voyager_2_saturn_1_launch

Each Voyager carried a suite of 11 instruments, 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; and
  • a plasma wave system to study the planet’s magnetosphere.

voyager_2_saturn_3_instruments

Voyager 2 launched first on Aug. 20, 1977. The spacecraft successfully crossed the asteroid belt between Dec. 10, 1977, and Oct. 21, 1978. In April 1978, its primary radio receiver failed, and it has been operating on its backup receiver ever since. The spacecraft flew within 350,000 miles of Jupiter’s cloud tops on July 9, 1979, and during the four-month encounter returned 17,000 photographs and useful scientific information about the giant planet and many of its moons.  Using the giant planet for a gravity assist, Voyager 2 began its 29-month journey to its next destination, Saturn. Following Voyager 1’s successful encounter with Saturn , and especially its important study of Titan, in November 1980, mission planners targeted Voyager 2 so it could image some of the moons not studied by its twin and use Saturn’s gravity to speed it onward to encounter Uranus in 1986 and Neptune in 1989.

voyager_2_saturn_5_flyby_false_color_30_m_miles_jul_12_1981

Voyager 2 began its long-range observations of Saturn on June 5, 1981, when the spacecraft was still 41 million miles from the planet, and sent back progressively sharper images of the planet, its atmosphere, and its rings as Voyager 2 closed in on its target. It returned spectacular photographs of the rings and small shepherd moons such as Prometheus and Pandora that act to herd the rings’ particles. Three days before its closest approach to Saturn, Voyager 2 imaged the two-toned moon Iapetus from 565,000 miles away, and two days later it photographed the moon Hyperion from 310,000 miles. Eighteen hours before closest approach, it passed within 413,000 miles of Saturn’s largest satellite Titan and returned images of its orange cloud cover. After passing within 26,000 miles of Saturn’s cloud tops, Voyager 2 photographed the icy moon Enceladus from 54,000 miles, the small moon Janus from 140,000 miles, and Tethys from 58,000 miles. Three days after its closest approach, Voyager 2 turned its camera on a partially backlit Saturn, returning stunning photographs from 2.1 million miles away. On Sept. 4, it imaged the tiny moon Phoebe from 1.3 million miles, revealing little of its surface features. By the time observations of the Saturn system concluded on Sept. 28, the spacecraft had returned 16,000 images of the planet, its rings, and its satellites.

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On Sept. 29, the day after completing its observations of Saturn, Voyager 2 fired its thrusters for a course correction to send it onward to its next target, Uranus. In January 1986 , Voyager 2 carried out the first reconnaissance of that planet, its satellites, and its rings. In turn, Voyager 2 picked up a gravity assist at Uranus to send it to its final planetary encounter, exploring Neptune in August 1989 .  Voyager 2 then began its Interstellar Mission extension that continues to this day. Over the years, several of the spacecraft’s instruments have been turned off to conserve power, beginning with the imaging system in 1998, but it continues to return data about cosmic rays and the solar wind. On Nov. 5, 2018, six years after its twin, Voyager 2 crossed the heliopause, the boundary between the heliosphere, the bubble-like region of space created by the Sun, and the interstellar medium. It is expected that Voyager 2 will continue to return data from interstellar space until about 2025. And just in case it may one day be found by an alien intelligence, Voyager 2, 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. Scientists thoughtfully included instructions on how to play the record.

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Voyager 1, First Craft in Interstellar Space, May Have Gone Dark

The 46-year-old probe, which flew by Jupiter and Saturn in its youth and inspired earthlings with images of the planet as a “Pale Blue Dot,” hasn’t sent usable data from interstellar space in months.

voyager photos saturn

By Orlando Mayorquin

When Voyager 1 launched in 1977, scientists hoped it could do what it was built to do and take up-close images of Jupiter and Saturn. It did that — and much more.

Voyager 1 discovered active volcanoes, moons and planetary rings, proving along the way that Earth and all of humanity could be squished into a single pixel in a photograph, a “ pale blue dot, ” as the astronomer Carl Sagan called it. It stretched a four-year mission into the present day, embarking on the deepest journey ever into space.

Now, it may have bid its final farewell to that faraway dot.

Voyager 1 , the farthest man-made object in space, hasn’t sent coherent data to Earth since November. NASA has been trying to diagnose what the Voyager mission’s project manager, Suzanne Dodd, called the “most serious issue” the robotic probe has faced since she took the job in 2010.

The spacecraft encountered a glitch in one of its computers that has eliminated its ability to send engineering and science data back to Earth.

The loss of Voyager 1 would cap decades of scientific breakthroughs and signal the beginning of the end for a mission that has given shape to humanity’s most distant ambition and inspired generations to look to the skies.

“Scientifically, it’s a big loss,” Ms. Dodd said. “I think — emotionally — it’s maybe even a bigger loss.”

Voyager 1 is one half of the Voyager mission. It has a twin spacecraft, Voyager 2.

Launched in 1977, they were primarily built for a four-year trip to Jupiter and Saturn , expanding on earlier flybys by the Pioneer 10 and 11 probes.

The Voyager mission capitalized on a rare alignment of the outer planets — once every 175 years — allowing the probes to visit all four.

Using the gravity of each planet, the Voyager spacecraft could swing onto the next, according to NASA .

The mission to Jupiter and Saturn was a success.

The 1980s flybys yielded several new discoveries, including new insights about the so-called great red spot on Jupiter, the rings around Saturn and the many moons of each planet.

Voyager 2 also explored Uranus and Neptune , becoming in 1989 the only spacecraft to explore all four outer planets.

voyager photos saturn

Voyager 1, meanwhile, had set a course for deep space, using its camera to photograph the planets it was leaving behind along the way. Voyager 2 would later begin its own trek into deep space.

“Anybody who is interested in space is interested in the things Voyager discovered about the outer planets and their moons,” said Kate Howells, the public education specialist at the Planetary Society, an organization co-founded by Dr. Sagan to promote space exploration.

“But I think the pale blue dot was one of those things that was sort of more poetic and touching,” she added.

On Valentine’s Day 1990, Voyager 1, darting 3.7 billion miles away from the sun toward the outer reaches of the solar system, turned around and snapped a photo of Earth that Dr. Sagan and others understood to be a humbling self-portrait of humanity.

“It’s known the world over, and it does connect humanity to the stars,” Ms. Dodd said of the mission.

She added: “I’ve had many, many many people come up to me and say: ‘Wow, I love Voyager. It’s what got me excited about space. It’s what got me thinking about our place here on Earth and what that means.’”

Ms. Howells, 35, counts herself among those people.

About 10 years ago, to celebrate the beginning of her space career, Ms. Howells spent her first paycheck from the Planetary Society to get a Voyager tattoo.

Though spacecraft “all kind of look the same,” she said, more people recognize the tattoo than she anticipated.

“I think that speaks to how famous Voyager is,” she said.

The Voyagers made their mark on popular culture , inspiring a highly intelligent “Voyager 6” in “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” and references on “The X Files” and “The West Wing.”

Even as more advanced probes were launched from Earth, Voyager 1 continued to reliably enrich our understanding of space.

In 2012, it became the first man-made object to exit the heliosphere, the space around the solar system directly influenced by the sun. There is a technical debate among scientists around whether Voyager 1 has actually left the solar system, but, nonetheless, it became interstellar — traversing the space between stars.

That charted a new path for heliophysics, which looks at how the sun influences the space around it. In 2018, Voyager 2 followed its twin between the stars.

Before Voyager 1, scientific data on the sun’s gases and material came only from within the heliosphere’s confines, according to Dr. Jamie Rankin, Voyager’s deputy project scientist.

“And so now we can for the first time kind of connect the inside-out view from the outside-in,” Dr. Rankin said, “That’s a big part of it,” she added. “But the other half is simply that a lot of this material can’t be measured any other way than sending a spacecraft out there.”

Voyager 1 and 2 are the only such spacecraft. Before it went offline, Voyager 1 had been studying an anomalous disturbance in the magnetic field and plasma particles in interstellar space.

“Nothing else is getting launched to go out there,” Ms. Dodd said. “So that’s why we’re spending the time and being careful about trying to recover this spacecraft — because the science is so valuable.”

But recovery means getting under the hood of an aging spacecraft more than 15 billion miles away, equipped with the technology of yesteryear. It takes 45 hours to exchange information with the craft.

It has been repeated over the years that a smartphone has hundreds of thousands of times Voyager 1’s memory — and that the radio transmitter emits as many watts as a refrigerator lightbulb.

“There was one analogy given that is it’s like trying to figure out where your cursor is on your laptop screen when your laptop screen doesn’t work,” Ms. Dodd said.

Her team is still holding out hope, she said, especially as the tantalizing 50th launch anniversary in 2027 approaches. Voyager 1 has survived glitches before, though none as serious.

Voyager 2 is still operational, but aging. It has faced its own technical difficulties too.

NASA had already estimated that the nuclear-powered generators of both spacecrafts would likely die around 2025.

Even if the Voyager interstellar mission is near its end, the voyage still has far to go.

Voyager 1 and its twin, each 40,000 years away from the next closest star, will arguably remain on an indefinite mission.

“If Voyager should sometime in its distant future encounter beings from some other civilization in space, it bears a message,” Dr. Sagan said in a 1980 interview .

Each spacecraft carries a gold-plated phonograph record loaded with an array of sound recordings and images representing humanity’s richness, its diverse cultures and life on Earth.

“A gift across the cosmic ocean from one island of civilization to another,” Dr. Sagan said.

Orlando Mayorquin is a general assignment and breaking news reporter based in New York. More about Orlando Mayorquin

What’s Up in Space and Astronomy

Keep track of things going on in our solar system and all around the universe..

Never miss an eclipse, a meteor shower, a rocket launch or any other 2024 event  that’s out of this world with  our space and astronomy calendar .

A nova named T Coronae Borealis lit up the night about 80 years ago. Astronomers say it’s expected to put on another show  in the coming months.

Voyager 1, the 46-year-old first craft in interstellar space which flew by Jupiter and Saturn in its youth, may have gone dark .

Two spacecraft have ended up askew on the moon this year, illustrating that it’s not so easy to land upright on the lunar surface. Here is why .

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The Voyager 1 spacecraft has a big glitch. Now, NASA must figure out how to fix it

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Regina Barber, photographed for NPR, 6 June 2022, in Washington DC. Photo by Farrah Skeiky for NPR.

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Margaret Cirino, photographed for NPR, 6 June 2022, in Washington DC. Photo by Farrah Skeiky for NPR.

Margaret Cirino

Geoff Brumfiel, photographed for NPR, 17 January 2019, in Washington DC.

Geoff Brumfiel

voyager photos saturn

This artist's concept shows the Voyager 1 spacecraft entering the space between stars. Interstellar space is dominated by plasma, ionized gas (illustrated here as brownish haze). NASA/JPL-Caltech hide caption

This artist's concept shows the Voyager 1 spacecraft entering the space between stars. Interstellar space is dominated by plasma, ionized gas (illustrated here as brownish haze).

The Voyager 1 space probe is the farthest human-made object in space. It launched in 1977 with a golden record on board that carried assorted sounds of our home planet: greetings in many different languages, dogs barking, and the sound of two people kissing, to name but a few examples. The idea with this record was that someday, Voyager 1 might be our emissary to alien life – an audible time capsule of Earth's beings. Since its launch, it also managed to complete missions to Jupiter and Saturn. In 2012, it crossed into interstellar space.

But a few months ago, the probe encountered a problem. "It's an elderly spacecraft," says NPR science correspondent Nell Greenfieldboyce , "and it had some kind of electronic stroke." Greenfieldboyce talks to Short Wave Host Regina G. Barber about the precarious status of Voyager 1 – the glitch threatening its mission, and the increasingly risky measures NASA is taking to try and restore it.

What interstellar adventure should we cover next? Email the show at [email protected] .

Listen to Short Wave on Spotify , Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts .

Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave .

This episode was produced by Margaret Cirino and edited by Geoff Brumfiel. Gilly Moon was the audio engineer.

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Ailing voyager 1 spacecraft offers glimmer of hope to nasa.

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A NASA image of one of the Voyager space probes. Voyager 1 and its identical sister craft Voyager 2 ... [+] were launched in 1977 to study the outer Solar System and eventually interstellar space. (Photo by NASA/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

NASA’s pioneering Voyager 1 spacecraft is adventuring beyond our solar system, but all is not well with the elderly machine. Voyager 1 has essentially been speaking gibberish since November and NASA has been involved in a long-distance troubleshooting operation ever since. A new development is giving scientists and engineers some reason for hope.

Voyager 1 launched in 1977 on a mission to study the outer solar system. It just kept on going and eventually crossed into interstellar space in 2012. It’s had a remarkable life, but NASA intends to maintain contact with the probe and continue to gather data from a part of the universe never before visited by an Earth spacecraft. The recent data issue put a pause on Voyager 1’s science work.

The culprit seems to be the flight data subsystem, which gathers data from the spacecraft’s science instruments and also monitors the probe’s health. The FDS is supposed to talk to a telemetry modulation unit that sends the data back to Earth. The data has been unintelligible and unusable, but on March 3, something changed. “The Voyager mission team saw activity from one section of the FDS that differed from the rest of the computer’s unreadable data stream,” NASA said in an update on March 13.

The new signal was confusing, but at least it was different. An engineer working with NASA’s Deep Space Network—the communications and tracking network that talks to Voyager 1—decoded the signal and discovered a readout of the FDS memory. “The FDS memory includes its code, or instructions for what to do, as well as variables, or values used in the code that can change based on commands or the spacecraft’s status,” said NASA. “It also contains science or engineering data for downlink.”

The Voyager 1 team is now engaged in a sleuthing exercise that will compare the readout with previous information from before the glitch. This might help NASA finally diagnose the problem and come up with a fix. The new signal wasn’t just random. NASA sent a command known as a “poke” to the spacecraft on March 1 to prompt the FDS to flex its software and find a workaround to whatever is causing the problem.

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It’s complicated enough to fix a spacecraft when it’s near Earth, but Voyager 1 is 15 billion miles away. A radio signal must travel 22.5 hours to reach the probe and then it takes another 22.5 hours to receive a response. That’s like troubleshooting while swimming in molasses. NASA is also dealing with decades-old hardware, software and documentation. “The team is analyzing the readout,” said NASA. “Using that information to devise a potential solution and attempt to put it into action will take time.”

Voyager 1 and its twin Voyager 2 launched when disco reigned and Star Wars was just getting started. The spacecraft were built to last five years, but have now been in operation for over 46 years. NASA has turned off some of Voyager 1’s science instruments over time, but the spacecraft still has life left in it if the team can work through the data issue. It’s too soon to count the space pioneer out.

Amanda Kooser

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IMAGES

  1. Saturn as seen by Voyager 1

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  2. Voyager 2 Photo Of Saturn Photograph by Nasa/science Photo Library

    voyager photos saturn

  3. Saturn

    voyager photos saturn

  4. Voyager 2 Composite Of Saturn & 6 Of Its Moons Photograph by Nasa

    voyager photos saturn

  5. Voyager 2 Photograph Of Saturn's Rings Photograph by Nasa

    voyager photos saturn

  6. See Voyager 1’s Luminous Pictures of Saturn

    voyager photos saturn

COMMENTS

  1. Voyager

    Images Voyager Took of Saturn. 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. For a summary of scientific ...

  2. Voyager

    The Voyager 1 and 2 Saturn encounters occurred nine months apart, in November 1980 and August 1981. Voyager 1 is leaving the solar system. ... (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 ...

  3. Voyager

    Saturn Approach. Three Voyager 2 images, taken through ultraviolet, violet and green filters, were combined to make this photograph. 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 ...

  4. Images of Saturn and All Available Satellites

    Your search criteria found 121 images Target is Saturn (and available satellites) Go to PIAxxxxx: Refine this list of images by: Target: Spacecraft: Instrument: Click on an image for detailed information ... Voyager 2 Image of Saturn Full Resolution: TIFF (611.5 kB) JPEG (183.8 kB) 1998-11-13: Saturn: Voyager: VG ISS - Narrow Angle: 850x1054x1 ...

  5. 40 Years Ago: Voyager 1 Explores Saturn

    Nov 12, 2020. Today, Voyager 1 is the most distant spacecraft from Earth, more than 14 billion miles away and continuing on its journey out of our solar system. Forty years ago, it made its closest approach to Saturn. Although it was not the first to explore the giant ringed planet, as the Pioneer 11 spacecraft completed the first flyby in 1979 ...

  6. Saturn Taken from Voyager 2

    Saturn Taken from Voyager 2. Dec. 5, 1998. This true color picture was assembled from Voyager 2 Saturn images obtained Aug. 4 from a distance of 21 million kilometers (13 million miles) on the spacecraft's approach trajectory. Three of Saturn's icy moons are evident at left.

  7. Voyager 1 Image of Saturn

    A few of the spokelike ring features discovered by Voyager appear in the rings as bright patches in this image, taken at a distance of 5.3 million kilometers (3.3 million miles) from the planet. Saturn's shadow falls upon the rings, and the bright Saturn crescent is seen through all but the densest portion of the rings. From Saturn, Voyager 1 ...

  8. Voyager Images of Saturn

    Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were both launched in 1977. They both flew by Jupiter in 1979 before encountering Saturn. Voyager 1 made its closest approach to Saturn on November 12, 1980 at a distance of 124,000 km. Voyager 2 made its flyby on August 26, 1981 from a distance of 101,000 km. 121K Though this looks more like Jupiter, this is a Voyager 1 ...

  9. 35 Years On, Voyager's Legacy Continues at Saturn

    Voyager's Saturn flybys provided a thrilling look at the planet's moons-- a diverse menagerie of worlds, each with unique character and charm. Voyager's images transformed the moons from points of light to fully realized places. Dramatic landscapes on Tethys, Dione, Rhea, Iapetus and other moons tantalized scientists with features hinting at ...

  10. August 1981

    Voyager 2 came within 101,000 kilometers (63,000 miles) of Saturn. Voyager 2 noticed changes in Saturn's atmosphere since the Voyager 1 encounter and took more detailed images of the planet's rings. Voyager 2 was downlinking at a rate of 44.8 kilobits per second. After its encounter with Saturn, Voyager 2 headed to Uranus.

  11. 40 Years On, Remembering Voyager's Legacy at Saturn

    The Voyager Saturn flybys provided a thrilling look at the planet's moons - a diverse menagerie of worlds, each with unique character and charm. The Voyager images transformed the moons from points of light to fully realized places. Dramatic landscapes on Tethys, Dione, Rhea, Iapetus, and other moons tantalized scientists with features ...

  12. Saturn Then and Now: 30 Years Since Voyager Visit

    The puzzling hexagon-shaped weather pattern around Saturn's north pole was first found in images from Voyager 2 (left). Cassini has obtained higher-resolution pictures of the hexagon (such as the one on the right, taken in 2009) - which tell scientists the hexagon is a remarkably stable wave in one of the jet streams that remains 30 years later.

  13. Voyager Images of Saturn's Rings

    Voyager Images of Saturn's Rings . Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were both launched in 1977. They both flew by Jupiter in 1979 before encountering Saturn. Voyager 1 made its closest approach to Saturn on November 12, 1980 at a distance of 124,000 km. Voyager 2 made its flyby on August 26, 1981 from a distance of 101,000 km. ...

  14. The best space pictures from the Voyager 1 and 2 missions

    Saturn as seen by Voyager 1 The last picture from Voyager 1's approach to Saturn in which the entire planet and ring system can be seen in a single frame. Image: NASA/JPL/Björn Jónsson Voyager 2's best view of Enceladus This was the Voyager mission's best view of Enceladus, captured by Voyager 2 on August 26, 1981 from a distance of about ...

  15. Saturn Then and Now: 30 Years Since Voyager Visit

    For instance, scientists first spotted a hexagonal weather pattern when they stitched together Voyager images of Saturn's north pole. Cassini has obtained higher-resolution pictures of the hexagon - which tells scientists it's a remarkably stable wave in one of the jet streams that remains 30 years later - but scientists are still not sure ...

  16. When Voyager gave us the first close-up pictures of Saturn's rings

    Voyager was the first to image Saturn's rings in enough detail to make out features like the "spokes" seen here in the B ring on August 22, 1981, from a distance of 2.5 million miles (4 ...

  17. Voyager: 15 incredible images of our solar system (gallery)

    Here we celebrate the achievements of both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 with some incredible images captured by the pair. ... Layers of haze covering Saturn's moon Titan are seen in this image taken by ...

  18. Voyager

    Each Voyager space probe carries a gold-plated audio-visual disc in the event that the spacecraft is ever found by intelligent life forms from other planetary systems. Examine the images and sounds of planet earth. The Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft explored Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune before starting their journey toward interstellar space.

  19. NASA Voyager Probes: 18 Best Pictures As 46-Year Journey ...

    NASA used three Voyager 2 images — taken through ultraviolet, violet and green filters — to make this photograph. NASA/JPL In 1980 and 1981, the probes reached Saturn .

  20. Images taken by the Voyager 1 Spacecraft

    Saturn: Voyager: 971x855x3: PIA00024: Saturn With Tethys and Dione Full Resolution: ... Early Voyager 1 Images of Jupiter Full Resolution: TIFF (491.5 kB) JPEG (21.78 kB) 1996-09-26: Jupiter: Voyager: Imaging Science Subsystem: 400x400x3: PIA00029: First Close-up Image of ...

  21. Saturn Voyager Photos and Premium High Res Pictures

    Saturn from Voyager Probe. of 2. Browse Getty Images' premium collection of high-quality, authentic Saturn Voyager stock photos, royalty-free images, and pictures. Saturn Voyager stock photos are available in a variety of sizes and formats to fit your needs.

  22. Voyager 1

    At Saturn, Voyager 1 found five new moons and a new ring called the G-ring. In Depth: Voyager 1. Nation. United States of America (USA) Objective(s) Jupiter Flyby, Saturn Flyby ... The final images taken by the Voyagers comprised a mosaic of 64 images taken by Voyager 1 on Feb. 14, 1990 at a distance of 40 AU of the Sun and all the planets of ...

  23. Alan Cummings Has Worked on the Voyager Mission for Over 50 Years

    The Voyager mission has been gathering groundbreaking data and photos since the beginning. The first time Cummings saw Jupiter's moon Io in 1979, for example, he thought it was a joke. "It looked ...

  24. NASA Communicates with Ailing Voyager 1 Spacecraft

    Between 1979 and 1981, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 zipped by the gas giants, returning stunning images of banded Jupiter and buttery Saturn and their bewildering collection of moons. Voyager 2 went on ...

  25. 40 Years Ago: Voyager 2 Explores Saturn

    The images do not show the moons to scale. Saturn's moons Enceladus, left, Janus, Tethys, and Phoebe imaged by Voyager 2 after its closest approach to the planet. The images do not show the moons to scale. Voyager 2's parting view of Saturn, taken from 2.1 million miles.

  26. Voyager 1, First Craft in Interstellar Space, May Have Gone Dark

    When Voyager 1 launched in 1977, scientists hoped it could do what it was built to do and take up-close images of Jupiter and Saturn. It did that — and much more.

  27. NASA is trying to fix Voyager 1, but the old spacecraft's days are

    The last time Stamatios "Tom" Krimigis saw the Voyager 1 space probe in person, it was the summer of 1977, just before it launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida.. Now Voyager 1 is over 15 billion ...

  28. Voyager 1 responds to 'poke' sent by NASA engineers

    A "poke" sent to the Voyager 1 probe received a response that could help NASA restore reliable communication with the aging spacecraft 15 billion miles away.

  29. How NASA is trying to fix the aging Voyager 1 : Short Wave : NPR

    The Voyager 1 space probe is the farthest human-made object in space. It launched in 1977 with a golden record on board that carried assorted sounds of our home planet: greetings in many different ...

  30. Ailing Voyager 1 Spacecraft Offers Glimmer Of Hope To NASA

    It's complicated enough to fix a spacecraft when it's near Earth, but Voyager 1 is 15 billion miles away. A radio signal must travel 22.5 hours to reach the probe and then it takes another 22. ...