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Iconic ‘pale blue dot’ photo – Carl Sagan’s idea – turns 30

By blaine friedlander.

In the pantheon of famous self-portraits, this one is less than a pixel – and it is us.

The iconic photograph of planet Earth from distant space – the “pale blue dot” – was taken 30 years ago – Feb. 14, 1990, at a distance of 3.7 billion miles, by the NASA spacecraft Voyager 1 as it zipped toward the far edge of the solar system. The late Cornell astronomy professor Carl Sagan came up with the idea for the snapshot, and coined the phrase.

“The Pale Blue Dot image shows our world as both breathtakingly beautiful and fragile, urging us to take care of our home,” said Lisa Kaltenegger, associate professor of astronomy and director of Cornell’s  Carl Sagan Institute .

“We are living in an amazing time,” she said, “where for the first time ever we have the technical means to spot worlds orbiting other stars. Could one of them be another pale blue dot, harboring life? That is what we are trying to find out at the Carl Sagan Institute.”

Pale Blue Dot

The iconic “pale blue dot” photograph of planet Earth, which was taken Feb. 14, 1990 by NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft, from a distance of 3.7 billion miles. Now 30 years later, Voyager 1 is nearly 14 billion miles away.

NASA’s Voyager 1 launched on Sept. 5, 1977, to explore the solar system and beyond. The spacecraft flew past Jupiter on March 5, 1979, and by Saturn on Nov. 12, 1980. A decade later, it was time for a solar system family portrait.

Sagan, part of Voyager’s imaging team, is credited with the idea of having Voyager 1 take images of Earth and its sibling planets. Sagan knew the picture would render Earth as just a dot of light, but as stated on the NASA website, the Voyager team “wanted humanity to see Earth’s vulnerability and that our home world is just a tiny, fragile speck in the cosmic ocean.”

On Feb. 13, 1990, NASA and Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineers sent commands to Voyager 1 to face Earth in order to get the photo. A day later, three Earth-as-a-dot images were taken – then NASA shut down Voyager 1’s camera permanently, to conserve energy for the rest of its decadeslong mission.

Downloading the images took several weeks: The final download occurred May 1, 1990, via NASA’s Deep Space Network.

As of Feb. 14, the elapsed mission time for the Voyager 1 spacecraft is 42 years, five months and 10 days. The craft is about 13.8 billion miles from Earth and traveling at 38,000 miles per hour. NASA and the JPL still keeps tabs on it; the next check will be Feb. 16.

“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.” Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan

In addition to conceptualizing the famed photo, Sagan was one of the creators of the  Golden Record  – a 12-inch, gold-covered copper disc, carrying an interstellar message – aboard Voyager 1 and the spacecraft’s sibling, Voyager 2. Ann Druyan, Sagan’s widow and a Peabody and Emmy award-winning writer and producer, served as creative director of Voyager’s Interstellar Message.

In their 1994 book, “Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space,” Druyan and Sagan took a poetic and holistic view of Earth – as a tiny speck, a pixel – in the famed photo.

“Look again at that dot,” they wrote. “That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.”

30 years ago, Carl Sagan requested the Voyager 1 spacecraft take one last picture of Earth. This is the legacy of the Pale Blue Dot.

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10 Things You Might Not Know About Voyager’s Famous ‘Pale Blue Dot’ Photo

Earth as a tiny bluish dot suspended in a grainy beam of light.

Thirty years ago on Feb. 14, 1990, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft sent home a very special Valentine: A mosaic of 60 images that was intended as what the Voyager team called the first “ Family Portrait ” of our solar system.

The spacecraft was out beyond Neptune when mission managers commanded it to look back for a final time and snap images of the worlds it was leaving behind on its journey into interstellar space.

It captured Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter, Earth and Venus. A few key members didn’t make the shot: Mars was obscured by scattered sunlight bouncing around in the camera, Mercury was too close to the Sun and dwarf planet Pluto was too tiny, too far away and too dark to be detected. But the images gave humans an awe-inspiring and unprecedented view of their home world and its neighbors.

One of those images, the picture of Earth, would become known as the “ Pale Blue Dot .” The unique view of Earth as a tiny speck in the cosmos inspired the title of scientist Carl Sagan's book, "Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space,"

But the image almost didn’t happen.

Here are 10 things you might not know about Voyager 1’s famous Pale Blue Dot photo.

1. Not in the Plan

Neither the “ Family Portrait ” nor the “ Pale Blue Dot ” photo was planned as part of the original Voyager mission. In fact, the Voyager team turned down several requests to take the images because of limited engineering resources and potential danger to the cameras from pointing them close to the Sun. It took eight years and six requests to get approval for the images.

2. A Unique Perspective

Voyager 1 remains the first and only spacecraft that has attempted to photograph our solar system. Only three spacecraft have been capable of making such an observation: Voyager 1 , Voyager 2 and New Horizons . ( Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 — the other two spacecraft headed into interstellar space — had similar vantage points, but technical challenges prevented them from getting such a shot.)

3. A Mote of Dust

The Voyager imaging team wanted show Earth’s vulnerability — to illustrate how fragile and irreplaceable it is — and demonstrate what a small place it occupies in the universe. Earth in the image is only about a single a pixel, a pale blue dot.

4. A Happy Coincidence

The image contains scattered light that resembles beams of sunlight, making the tiny Earth appear even more dramatic. In fact, these sunbeams are camera artifacts that resulted from the necessity of pointing the camera within a few degrees of the Sun.

Voyager 1 was 40 astronomical units from the Sun at the time so Earth appeared very near our brilliant star from Voyager's vantage point. One astronomical unit is 93 million miles, or 150 million kilometers That one of the rays of light happened to intersect with Earth was a happy coincidence.

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us.

Carl sagan

"Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space."

The prominent planetary scientist Carl Sagan ( 1934-1996) — a member of the Voyager imaging team — had the original idea to use Voyager’s cameras to image Earth in 1981, following the mission's encounters with Saturn. Sagan later wrote in poetic detail about the image and its meaning in his book, "Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space."

6. Cold Cameras

Voyager 1 powered up its cameras for the images on Feb. 13 and it took three hours for them to warm up. The spacecraft’s onboard tape recorder saved all the images taken, for later playback to Earth.

7. Light Time

The images of Earth snapped by Voyager 1 captured light that had left our planet five hours and 36 minutes earlier. (This was, of course, reflected sunlight that had left the Sun eight minutes before that.)

8. Downloading...

Voyager 1 was so far from Earth it took several communications passes with NASA's Deep Space Network, over a couple of months, to transmit all the data. The last of the image data were finally downloaded on Earth on May 1, 1990.

A pale, yellowish crescent-shaped Moon is near the top of this image with a blue, crescent Earth at the bottom.

9. Another Unique Perspective

Voyager 1 also took the first image of the entire Earth and Moon together near the start of its mission on Sept. 18, 1977. The images were taken 13 days after launch at a distance of about 7.3 million miles (11.66 million kilometers) from Earth.

10. Parting Shot

After taking the images for “The Family Portrait” at 05:22 GMT on Feb. 14, 1990, Voyager 1 powered down its cameras forever. As of early 2020 the spacecraft is still operating, but no longer has the capability to take images.

  • The Story Behind Voyager 1's Pale Blue Dot
  • The Story Behind Voyager 1's Family Portrait
  • Pale Blue Dot Poster
  • Voyager 1 Mission Page
  • Voyager 2 Mission Page

Acknowledgements: Amanda Barnett, Phil Davis and Preston Dyches contributed to this story. Some of the information in this article came from the account of the solar system family portrait detailed in Kosm ann , Hansen and Sagan, "The Family Portrait of the Solar System: The last set of images taken by Voyager 1 and the fascinating story of how they came to be," 70th International Astronautical Congress (IAC), IAC-19-F4.1.8, 2019.

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On February 14, 1990, the Voyager 1 spacecraft saw Earth from a distance of nearly four billion miles, capturing a view of our planet later described by scientist Carl Sagan as a “Pale Blue Dot.”

The first person to see the 'Pale Blue Dot' image still has it stashed in her closet

"Somewhere in that little bright speck, I was sitting at my desk."

Thirty years ago today, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft had already traveled well beyond the realm of the planets and was shooting toward interstellar space. Nearly a billion miles farther out than Neptune, it suddenly swiveled around and stared backward. There, pressed onto a star-studded sky, were a dazzling array of planets—ringed Saturn, giant Jupiter, bright white Venus, and a stunningly pale, blue, watery Earth.

On Valentine’s Day in 1990, Voyager methodically assembled a family portrait of the solar system’s many worlds. Carl Sagan had first proposed the observation nearly a decade earlier, only to have the idea rejected over and over again for several reasons, including concerns that the images wouldn’t provide any scientific value. But Voyager was hurtling toward the edge of the solar system, and its cameras were imminently shutting down. From its perch nearly four billion miles away, the spacecraft had one last chance to snap a photo of its home planet.

“Really, this was the last-ever opportunity,” says the Planetary Science Institute’s Candy Hansen , who helped plan the photo sequence. (Now, Hansen is the force behind JunoCam , which is riding aboard NASA’s Juno spacecraft and returning ethereal, gorgeous pictures of Jupiter.)

At the time, Hansen was part of the Voyager imaging team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory . Her job, as the experiment representative, included planning the spacecraft’s observations and then checking the resulting images to make sure everything worked as planned—which meant that of the billions of people on Earth, she was the first human to see the image now referred to as the Pale Blue Dot .

“It was really quite overwhelming to think about,” Hansen recalls. “That our little spacecraft from so far away—that this was a picture of home, and somewhere in that little bright speck, I was sitting at my desk.”

Thirty-four minutes after capturing Earth, Voyager’s cameras turned off forever. In the now-iconic image, a small, unobtrusive pinprick of light hovers amid a ray of scattered sunlight, appearing cosmically inconsequential. The photo’s legacy is that it has inspired the opposite response: a deep recognition of Earth’s importance, its fragility, its uniqueness.

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“That’s here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives … on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam,” Sagan later wrote in his book , Pale Blue Dot . “In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.”

Hansen spoke with National Geographic about what the Pale Blue Dot meant to her then, what it means to her now, and where she’s stashed the original photograph. ( This interview has been edited for length and clarity. )

How did you end up being the first human to see the Pale Blue Dot?

I went to work for the Voyager imaging team in 1977, and I started out as the assistant to the assistant experiment representative. The imaging team, who were a bunch of scientists scattered around the country, relied on the experiment rep at JPL to implement everything on their behalf.

My main job was planning for all of our observations and camera commands for the flybys themselves. I had been helping Carl with this observation since its beginning. It was his vision. But as the person on the scene at JPL, it was my job to fill out the form that says, “Here’s the request, here’s what we want to do,” go to the meetings, just do the legwork.

We’d gotten turned down a bunch of times, but then finally in 1989, realizing that really, this was the last-ever opportunity, we got permission to go forward with this observation. So I had been involved in planning the observation as well as ultimately looking at the pictures.

How did you all design the observation?

One of the sequence designers and I sat down and looked at what we could do. Carl’s idea was to mosaic the whole sky and have the whole star background of all of the planets—but we just didn’t have enough space on the tape recorder. So we came up with a picture of every planet, in color, and some stars. We did this kind of hobby-horse-looking thing that connected all the planets with wide-angle images, and then we did the images of the sun.

And then, finally, the pictures started to hit the ground.

So you were checking the images and making sure the observations had worked.

Yes. And because it was first in, first out on the tape recorder, and we had started out at Neptune, we were working our way in. I was looking first at the Neptune images, and it was like, Oh yeah, OK, there’s Neptune, and then Uranus—oh yeah, there’s Uranus, and then Saturn, and then Jupiter—and those are relatively large planets, so they were relatively large little spots.

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I could recognize almost immediately the blemishes and the specks of dust that are in every image, so I could pretty quickly pull up an image and identify “Blemish, blemish, dust, ah, there’s Neptune,” and I was just very systematically working my way in.

And when I got to the picture that should have had the Earth in it, I didn’t see it at first.

I checked the other two filters, and I was like, How could we have missed the Earth? We got all these other planets, and our whole idea was to capture the Earth! That was a moment of terror, panic, that something had—after all these years when we finally had this opportunity—that something had gotten screwed up.

So I’m sitting there thinking, What are we going to do? What are we going to say? And then I noticed, Oh wait, over in this ray of scattered light, there’s a bright spot that I don’t recognize as dust or a blemish. So I thought, OK, let me get the other two filters. Sure enough, it was in all three images, and I knew positively it wasn’t an artifact or anything else because I knew how to recognize those.

It was the Earth.

I just sat there. It was, honestly, it was really quite overwhelming to think about. That our little spacecraft was so far away, that this was a picture of home, and somewhere in that little bright speck, I was sitting at my desk. And it was so dramatic with it being in that ray of scattered light.

Logically, I knew this was just scattered light in the optics. I knew that. But my heart was like, Oh it looks so special. The sun is shining on us! So then after I composed myself, I started making calls to let people know that we had gotten it, it looked good, all three colors, and then everything else happened after that.

Did you know that you were looking at an image that would have such an impact?

I felt it, yeah. I always did. I’d had to, in a sense, sell the observation. So I had definitely given it some thought. But giving it some thought and the actual emotional impact are two different things.

In coming back to it now, I’ve really come to realize how timeless that image is. When we took it in 1990, the Cold War was still going on. It was still the Soviet Union and the United States with nuclear warheads pointed at each other. So the message at that point in time was, Let’s not screw up the home planet by nuking each other.

And today, it’s still every bit as relevant. Let’s not screw up our home world by cooking our atmosphere—climate change. In that regard, it’s really timeless. It’s the sense that we only have one home. Mars is really not that hospitable. And neither is the moon. We have one home world, and we really do need to take care of it.

I think people kind of know that conceptually, but actually seeing Earth—and I’m thinking about Earthrise as well—seeing the planet as a whole seems to really drive that point home in an emotional way.

Yes. And that image, Earthrise, oh my god it is incredibly important to how we see ourselves.

When you look at the Pale Blue Dot today, do you still have the same kinds of reactions that you did when you first saw it?

Yes. I still get chills down my back. It’s that whole, a picture is worth a thousand words—well maybe that particular one is worth a million.

We put up the images in JPL’s von Kármán auditorium, and they took up a whole stretch of wall space, and they were just sort of mounted, the wide angles connecting together, and then the narrow angles of the planets themselves. And the person who was in charge of that, he told me one time that he always had to replace the picture of Earth, because people would come up and they would touch it. Isn’t that cool? That’s where we live!

I wonder how many images of Earth he had to replace.

I don’t know! Wouldn’t that be fun to find out?

Or where all of the originals are.

Oh those, I can tell you. They’re in a box in my closet.

Are you serious?

Yeah, I am. Not the digital data, of course, that’s in the archive. But all those original hard copies that we pinned up, that we had laying around, those are all in a box in my closet.

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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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Astronomers Are Already Planning for the Next 'Pale Blue Dot'

In 2019, the New Horizons spacecraft will attempt to break the record for the farthest image ever taken of Earth.

The planet Earth as a very small dot, seen through a sunbeam

In 1977, humans launched twin robotic probes into space several weeks apart. The two Voyager spacecraft barreled away from Earth for a tour of our planet’s siblings in the solar system. At each encounter, the Voyagers set records for the best-looking pictures of these planets humanity had ever taken, far better than anything seen through a telescope. There was Jupiter , furiously churning with gargantuan storms. There was Saturn , encircled by vinyl-like rings. There was Uranus , robin’s-egg blue and featureless. There was Neptune , cloud-speckled and cerulean.

When the planetary safari was over, Voyager 1 turned back toward Earth in 1990 for one last picture before its cameras were shut off. The resulting photograph, the “ Pale Blue Dot ” image at the top of this story, became the most distant image ever taken of Earth.

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Voyager has held onto that record for 28 years. But a year from now, it may get knocked out of first place.

Sometime after January 2019, New Horizons, the spacecraft that brought us photos of the heart-shaped terrain on Pluto , will turn back toward Earth. The probe’s camera, the Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager, or LORRI for short, will start snapping away. Nearly three decades after the original, humanity will get another “Pale Blue Dot.”

“We’ve been talking about it for years,” says Andy Cheng of the plan to take another ‘Pale Blue Dot’ image. Cheng is a scientist at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory and the principal investigator for LORRI .

It’s a risky move. The attempt requires pointing LORRI close enough to the sun so that objects in the darkness are illuminated, but not so close that sunlight damages or destroys the camera. “But we’re going to do it anyway, for the same reason as before,” Cheng says. “It’s just such a great thing to try.”

The photo shoot will take considerable coordination. “All activities on the spacecraft need to be choreographed in elaborate detail and then checked and checked again,” Cheng says. “Taking a LORRI image involves more than just LORRI —the spacecraft needs to point the camera in the right direction, LORRI needs to be operated, the image data needs to be put in the right place and then accessed and transmitted to Earth, which requires more maneuvers of the spacecraft, all of which needs to happen on a spacecraft almost 4 billion miles away.”

At that distance, our home in the universe will look tremendously small. “It’ll be very hard to pick out that tiny, bright dot,” he says.

The shot will come more than 70 years after the creation of the first image of Earth from space . On October 24, 1946, more than a decade before Sputnik, a V-2 missile launched from New Mexico with a camera in tow. The missile flew for only a few minutes before crashing back down, but its camera managed to capture a grainy, black-and-white view of Earth against the blackness of space.

LORRI and the other instruments on New Horizons are currently in hibernation. In December, LORRI photographed two objects in the Kuiper Belt, a region of asteroid, comets, and small rocks beyond Neptune. The resulting images, which NASA revealed last week , broke Voyager’s record for the farthest images ever taken from Earth. Voyager was about 3.75 billion miles from Earth when it captured the “Pale Blue Dot” image. New Horizons was 3.79 billion miles from Earth when it photographed the Kuiper Belt objects. The spacecraft travels over more than 700,000 miles of space every day.

LORRI and the other instruments will wake up this summer in preparation for a flyby of MU69, a Kuiper Belt object discovered in 2014 with the Hubble Space Telescope. The object is so far from Earth that even with Hubble’s eyes, astronomers don’t know whether MU69 is one object or two . LORRI will solve that mystery next year when it sends back detailed images. After that, it’ll get in position to photograph Earth and try to recreate the famous “Pale Blue Dot” shot.

“Taking images and returning them from the greatest distances—it’s just mankind’s reach extending farther,” Cheng says.

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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.

nasa voyager last picture of earth

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.

nasa voyager last picture of earth

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

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Voyager 1 to Take Pictures of Solar System Planets

nasa voyager last picture of earth

NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft, having completed its mission along with Voyager 2 to explore the outer planets, will use its cameras February 13-14 to take an unprecedented family portrait of most of the planets in our solar system.

The collection of images will be from a unique point-of-view -- looking down on the solar system from a position 32 degrees above the ecliptic plane in which the planets orbit the Sun. No other spacecraft has ever been in a position to attempt a similar series of photos of most of the planets.

Voyager 1, launched in 1977, is now about 6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles) from Earth. The Voyager spacecraft are controlled by and their data received at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

"This is not just the first time, but perhaps the only time for decades that we'll be able to take a picture of the planets from outside the solar system," said Voyager Project Scientist Dr. Edward C. Stone of Caltech. No future space missions are planned that would fly a spacecraft so high above the ecliptic plane of the solar system, he said.

Starting shortly after 5 p.m. (PST) on Feb. 13 and continuing over the course of four hours, Voyager 1 will point its wide- and narrow-angle cameras at Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Earth and Venus. Mercury is too close to the Sun to be photographed by Voyager's cameras, and Pluto is too far away and too small to show up in images taken by the spacecraft. Beginning with the dimmest of the targets - Neptune -- and working toward the Sun, Voyager 1 will shutter about 64 images of the planets and the space between them.

The constellation Eridanus (The River), stretching behind the planets from Voyager 1's perspective, will provide the backdrop for the images.

Due to the schedules of several spacecraft being tracked by NASA's Deep Space Network (DSN), the images will be recorded on board Voyager 1 and played back to DSN receivers on Earth in late March. The Voyager imaging team estimates that processing the images to reveal as much detail as possible will take several weeks. Most of the planets will appear as relatively small dots (about one to four pixels, or picture elements, in the 800-by-800 pixel frame of one Voyager image).

The enormous scale of the subject matter makes it unlikely that the entire set of images can be mosaicked to produce for publication a single photograph showing all the planets. Even an image covering the planets out to Jupiter would easily fill a poster-sized photographic print. At the least, imaging team hopes to assemble a mosaicked image composed of the frames showing Earth, Venus and perhaps Mars together.

Voyager 1, rather than Voyager 2, received the solar system photo assignment largely because of Voyager 1's improved viewpoint of the planets.

Voyager 1 completed flybys of Jupiter and Saturn in 1979 and 1980, respectively. Voyager 2 flew past Jupiter in 1979, Saturn in 1981, Uranus in 1986 and Neptune last August. Both are now on missions that will take the spacecraft to the boundary of our solar system and into interstellar space.

According to Voyager engineers and scientists, the only potential damage from pointing the cameras toward the Sun is that the shutter blades of the wide-angle camera might warp. There are no plans, however, to use Voyager 1's cameras after the solar system photo series is completed.

The Voyager mission is conducted by Caltech's JPL for NASA's Office of Space Science and Applications.

Voyager 1 is 15 billion miles from home and broken. Here's how NASA is trying to fix it.

A scrambled computer signal may be the key that helps NASA engineers resume data transmission from the distant Voyager 1, a spacecraft that was launched in 1977 and now, 15 billion miles from home, is the farthest a human-made object has traveled from Earth.

Voyager 1 – and its sister craft, Voyager 2 – are robotic space probes that became the first spacecraft to leave our solar system and plunge into interstellar space, 11 billion miles from the sun.

They were designed to last five years , but have become the longest-operating spacecraft in history. Both carry gold-plated copper discs containing sounds and images from Earth, contents that were chosen by a team headed by celebrity astronomer Carl Sagan .

Voyager 2, now 12.7 billion miles from Earth, is functioning normally. However, a computer problem aboard Voyager 1 on Nov. 14, 2023, corrupted the stream of science and engineering data the craft is sending to Earth, making it unreadable , arstechnica.com reported.

Voyager 1 can receive communications from Earth. It is still transmitting, but its returning signals have been replaced “with a monotonous dial tone ,” according to space.com.

Unable to see our graphics? Click here to see them .

What's the problem with Voyager 1?

NASA and Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineers traced the problem to one of Voyager’s three onboard computers, one called a Flight Data System. The system collects information, including:

◾ Data from science instruments that monitor cosmic rays, solar wind particles, the sun's magnetic field, and other phenomena.

◾ Engineering data on spacecraft operating systems.

The Flight Data System gives that information to the spacecraft’s Telemetry Modulation Unit. The The unit converts the data to binary code – consisting of zeros and ones, the simplest form of computer code – then transmits that code to Earth, using Voyager's 12-foot antenna dish.

The data is received by NASA's Deep Space Network , giant 112-foot radio antennas placed around the world. The network handles space communications from several missions.

In November, the Telemetry Modulation Unit transmissions became a repeating pattern of zeros and ones " as if it were stuck ," NASA said.

Engineers restarted the Flight Data System in December, but that failed to fix the problem.

Voyager 1 is far away – and it's getting old

Voyager 1 has been in space for more than 46 years. Attempts to fix problems aboard the spacecraft often mean "consulting original, decades-old documents written by engineers who didn’t anticipate the issues that are arising today," NASA says. 

Engineers have consulted archived documents to find solutions to other Voyager problems in the past, wired.com says.

Engineers need time to understand how new commands will affect the spacecraft and to avoid unintended consequences. It's a complicated, time-consuming process.

A long time lag makes solving the problem more difficult. Voyager is moving at about 38,000 mph. It takes 22.5 hours for an Earth radio signal to reach Voyager and another 22.5 hours for the spacecraft’s reply to reach antenna networks on Earth.

That means engineers must wait 45 hours to get a response and learn if a command has been successful.

What was the key computer signal?

The key signal was received after engineers "poked" the spacecraft.

◾ March 1: Teams send a command known as a “poke” to Voyager. In essence, the poke tells the Flight Data System to try different sequences in its software program, in the hope a corrupted portion can be found and bypassed.

◾ March 3: Engineers receive a new signal from Voyager that is different from both the unreadable dial tone and the spacecraft’s original transmission stream.

◾ March 7: Engineers begin decoding the signal.

◾ March 10: A Deep Space Network engineer finishes decoding the new signal and finds it contains a readout of the spacecraft’s entire Flight Data System memory. That includes instructions for the spacecraft when it receives commands or when its operational status changes. 

The memory also contains science or engineering data for downlink, NASA says.

What happens next?

Engineers will compare the readout to those transmitted before the problem started. They hope to find differences that will help diagnose the problem.

Voyager 2 was launched first on Aug. 20, 1977. Voyager 1 was launched Sept. 5, 1977. It was put on a faster, shorter trajectory, which took it to interstellar space ahead of Voyager 2.

The Voyagers are the only spacecraft in the interstellar void. NASA's New Horizons probe , launched Jan. 19, 2006, flew past Pluto in 2015 and is expected to enter interstellar space in the 2040s.

NASA finds clue while solving Voyager 1's communication breakdown case

An outlier signal has brought ground control closer to decoding the troubling problem.

An illustration shows Voyager 1 in interstellar space

NASA engineers are a step closer to solving the communication problem that left the Voyager 1 spacecraft, which presently sits outside the solar system, unable to send usable data back to Earth.

In 2012, Voyager 1 became the first human-made object to leave the solar system and enter interstellar space . For 11 years following this achievement, the spacecraft dutifully sent data to ground control. This was data that detailed how space works beyond the influence of the sun. In Nov. 2023, however, Voyager 1's communications with ground operators stopped making sense. 

To be clear, however, Voyager 2 , which followed its spacecraft sibling out of the solar system in 2018, is still operational and communicating with Earth.

"Effectively, the call between the spacecraft and the Earth was still connected, but Voyager's 'voice' was replaced with a monotonous dial tone," Voyager 1's engineering team previously told Space.com .

The source of the issue appears to be one of Voyager 1's three onboard computers: The flight data subsystem (FDS). This computer, NASA says , is responsible for packaging science and engineering data before it's sent to Earth by the spacecraft's telemetry modulation unit.

Related: NASA's Voyager 1 glitch has scientists sad yet hopeful: 'Voyager 2 is still going strong'

The positive step towards solving communications issues between ground control and Voyager 1 came on March 3 when the Voyager mission team detected activity from one section of the FDS that was different from the rest of the computer’s garbled data stream.

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Voyager 1's messaging to Earth comes in the form of 1s and 0s, a computer language called binary code — but since the end of last year, this code has carried no meaning. Even the newly detected signal is still not in the correct format Voyager 1 should be using when FDS is functioning as designed, meaning the operating team was initially not quite sure what to make of it.

This changed, however, when an engineer at NASA's Deep Space Network , which is tasked with operating radio antennas that communicate with Voyager 1 and its interstellar sibling Voyager 2, as well as other NASA spacecraft closer to home, got a look at the code. The unnamed engineer was able to decode the outlier signal, discovering that it contained a readout of the FDS' entire memory.

a groovy poster shows a space probe with large white satellite dish mounted on a metal frame body with various length instruments jut out. surrounding colors are gold and orange, with a dark hombre background.

Encoded with the FDS memory are performance instructions and code values that can change either if the spacecraft's status changes or if commanded to do so. Science and engineering data to be sent back to Earth are also locked up in the memory. 

The team will now compare this new signal, which occurred because of a prompt, or "poke," from mission control, to data that was sent back to Earth just before Voyager 1 started spouting binary nonsense. Finding discrepancies between regular Voyager 1 data and this poke-prompted signal will help the crew hunt for the source of the issue. The idea of the poke was to prompt FDS to try using different sequences in its software package and determine if the communication issue could be resolved by navigating around a corrupted or damaged section.

—  Voyager 2: An iconic spacecraft that's still exploring 45 years on

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—  NASA Voyager 2 spacecraft extends its interstellar science mission for 3 more years

Voyager 1 is currently around 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, meaning that solving communication issues can be a painstaking process. It takes 22.5 hours to receive a radio signal from Voyager 1, then another 22.5 hours to receive a response via the Deep Space Network's antennas.

That means the results of NASA's poke were received on March 3, and on March 7 engineers started working to decode this signal. Three days later they determined the signal contains an FDS memory readout.

NASA scientists and engineers will continue to analyze this readout to restore communication with the pioneering space mission that extended humanity's reach beyond 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

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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This artist's concept shows NASA's Voyager spacecraft.

Since November 2023, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft has been sending a steady radio signal to Earth, but the signal does not contain usable data.

Engineers are working to resolve an issue with one of Voyager 1’s three onboard computers, called the flight data system (FDS).

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The efforts should help extend the lifetimes of the agency's interstellar explorers.

Screenshot of the video 'Voyager at 40: Keep Reaching for the Stars'.

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NASA's Voyager 1 sends readable message to Earth after 4 nail-biting months of gibberish

After four months of being unable to detect comprehensible data from the Voyager 1 spacecraft, NASA scientists have had fresh luck after sending a "poke."

Artists conception of Voyager 1 spacecraft entering interstellar space

After a nail-biting four months, NASA has finally received a comprehensible signal from its Voyager 1 spacecraft. 

Since November 2023, the almost-50-year-old spacecraft has been experiencing trouble with its onboard computers. Although Voyager 1, one of NASA's longest-lived space missions, has been sending a steady radio signal to Earth, it hasn't contained any usable data , which has perplexed scientists. 

Now, in response to a command prompt, or "poke," sent from Earth on March 1, NASA has received a new signal from Voyager 1 that engineers have been able to decode. Mission scientists hope this information may help them explain the spacecraft's recent communication problems. 

"The source of the issue appears to be with one of three onboard computers, the flight data subsystem (FDS), which is responsible for packaging the science and engineering data before it's sent to Earth by the telemetry modulation unit," NASA said in a blog post Wednesday (March 13) .

Related: NASA's 46-year-old Voyager 1 probe is no longer transmitting data

On March 1, as part of efforts to find a solution to Voyager 1's computer issues, NASA sent a command to the FDS on the spacecraft, instructing it to use different sequences in its software package, which would effectively mean skirting around any data that may be corrupted. 

Voyager 1 is more than 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth. This means any radio signals sent from our planet take 22.5 hours to reach the spacecraft, with any response taking the same time to be picked up by antennas on Earth. 

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On March 3, NASA detected activity from one section of the FDS that differed from the "unreadable data stream" they'd previously been receiving. Four days later, engineers started the heavy task of trying to decode this signal. By March 10, the team discovered that the signal contained a readout of the entire FDS memory. This included the instructions for what the FDS needed to do, any values in its code that can be changed depending on commands from NASA or the spacecraft's status, and downloadable science or engineering data.  

Voyager 1 has ventured farther from Earth than any other human-made object . It was launched in 1977, within weeks of its twin spacecraft , Voyager 2. The initial aim of the mission was to explore Jupiter and Saturn . Yet after almost five decades, and with countless discoveries under their belts, the mission continues beyond the boundaries of the solar system . 

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NASA scientists will now "compare this readout to the one that came down before the issue arose and look for discrepancies in the code and the variables to potentially find the source of the ongoing issue," they said in the blog post.  

However, NASA stressed that it will take time to determine if any of the insights gained from this new signal can be used to solve Voyager 1's long-standing communication issues. 

Emily Cooke

Emily is a health news writer based in London, United Kingdom. She holds a bachelor's degree in biology from Durham University and a master's degree in clinical and therapeutic neuroscience from Oxford University. She has worked in science communication, medical writing and as a local news reporter while undertaking journalism training. In 2018, she was named one of MHP Communications' 30 journalists to watch under 30. ( [email protected]

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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.”

Voyager 1 briefly came back to life after a 'poke' from NASA, giving scientists hope for the 46-year-old probe

  • NASA engineers may have found a clever trick to get Voyager 1 talking in ways engineers understand.
  • The probe, showing its age, has been sending back garbled data since November. 
  • Engineers sent a "poke" to the aged probe and received a surprising response. 

Insider Today

Voyager 1 has taken to improvising in its old age, making it very difficult to understand what it has to say.

The probe has sent back a steady flow of gibberish since November, worrying scientists trying to capture the final slivers of information from the 46-year-old spacecraft.

Undeterred, NASA engineers have been working to rescue the data. A "poke" sent to Voyager 1's internal systems on March 3 may have brought it back from the brink, NASA announced on Wednesday.

NASA engineers spotted an unusual dataset in the response to their prompt. This may hold the key to deciphering the spacecraft's cryptic signal, the agency said.

The Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 probes have been feeding data about our universe since the late '70s when NASA first launched them.

They remain marvels of engineering — no one expected them to survive longer than five years. But they have continued to send back information about the cosmos, exceeding their lifespan more than nine times over.

Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 hold unique positions in space-exploration history as the only spacecraft to have ventured into interstellar space. Each spacecraft is more than 10 billion miles away from Earth and getting farther every day.

Related stories

While their instruments are feeling the weight of their age, NASA has managed to continue squeezing information out of the spacecraft with clever engineering tricks.

This approach has provided an unprecedented glimpse into what happens beyond the sun's reach.

"That's what's most important is keeping these spacecraft operating as long as possible," Suzanne Dodd, NASA's project manager for Voyager, told Business Insider in January.

The glitch in Voyager 1 data is hardly unexpected. It is only the latest in a series of issues in the probes' systems NASA has had to tackle. Experts have been concerned that repeat malfunctions are signs the probes are entering the last moments of their functional lives.

But NASA appears to have found a solution. Engineers knew Voyager 1's issue seemed to lie with one of the three on-board computers that package the probe's data before sending it to Earth — the flight-data subsystem, or FDS.

The ping to the FDS on March 1 returned a mostly muddled signal on March 3, but it contained some data that "differed from the rest of the computer's unreadable data stream."

One NASA engineer with its Deep Space Network decoded this precious signal, unlocking a "readout" of the FDS's memory that contains instructions and variables the engineers can use to understand what went wrong.

This doesn't mean all is saved.

"The team is analyzing the readout. Using that information to devise a potential solution and attempt to put it into action will take time," NASA said.

Regardless of what happens, the probes' final missions will continue.

Even when they can no longer communicate with Earth, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 will continue to drift through the galaxy, carrying golden records with information about humanity.

The hope is that these could act as interstellar messages for potential intelligent life that may intercept the iconic spacecraft.

nasa voyager last picture of earth

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IMAGES

  1. Last image of the earth taken by Voyager 1 spacecraft : pics

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  2. Voyager 2 Last Photo Of Earth

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  3. Voyager-1 spacecraft: 40 years of history and interstellar flight

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  4. Voyager 2 Last Pictures Of Earth

    nasa voyager last picture of earth

  5. TIL in February 14, 1990 as the Voyager 1 completed its primary mission

    nasa voyager last picture of earth

  6. Last Picture Of Earth From Voyager 1

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  5. The last Earth's picture from voyager-I in 1990 #shorts #science #space

  6. Why NASA sent these 116 IMAGES to ALIENS?

COMMENTS

  1. Voyager 1's Pale Blue Dot

    PIA23645. Language. english. 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.

  2. Pale Blue Dot at 30: Voyager 1's iconic photo of Earth from space

    On Feb. 14, 1990, NASA's Voyager 1 probe snapped a photo of Earth from 3.7 billion miles (6 billion kilometers) away. The image shows our home planet as it truly is — a tiny, lonely outpost of ...

  3. Pale Blue Dot

    Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of Earth taken on February 14, 1990, by the Voyager 1 space probe from an unprecedented distance of approximately 6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles, 40.5 AU), as part of that day's Family Portrait series of images of the Solar System.. In the photograph, Earth's apparent size is less than a pixel; the planet appears as a tiny dot against the vastness of ...

  4. Iconic 'pale blue dot' photo

    The iconic photograph of planet Earth from distant space - the "pale blue dot" - was taken 30 years ago - Feb. 14, 1990, at a distance of 3.7 billion miles, by the NASA spacecraft Voyager 1 as it zipped toward the far edge of the solar system. The late Cornell astronomy professor Carl Sagan came up with the idea for the snapshot, and ...

  5. 10 Things You Might Not Know About Voyager's Famous ...

    This picture of a crescent-shaped Earth and Moon - the first of its kind ever taken by a spacecraft - was recorded Sept. 18, 1977, by NASA's Voyager 1 when it was 7.25 million miles (11.66 million kilometers) from Earth. The Moon is at the top of the picture and beyond the Earth as viewed by Voyager.

  6. Twenty years since Voyager's last view

    In the image the Earth is a mere point of light, a crescent only 0.12 pixel in size. Our planet was caught in the center of one of the scattered light rays resulting from taking the image so close to the Sun. This image is part of Voyager 1's final photographic assignment which captured family portraits of the Sun and planets. Image: NASA / JPL

  7. 'Pale Blue Dot': Meet the scientist who first saw the iconic NASA

    On February 14, 1990, the Voyager 1 spacecraft saw Earth from a distance of nearly four billion miles, capturing a view of our planet later described by scientist Carl Sagan as a "Pale Blue Dot."

  8. Voyager

    Solar System Portrait. This narrow-angle color image of the Earth, dubbed 'Pale Blue Dot', is a part of the first ever 'portrait' of the solar system taken by Voyager 1. The spacecraft acquired a total of 60 frames for a mosaic of the solar system from a distance of more than 4 billion miles from Earth and about 32 degrees above the ecliptic.

  9. NASA Voyager Probes: 18 Best Pictures As 46-Year Journey Nears End

    As its last photographic hurrah in 1990, Voyager 1 took 60 images of the solar system from 4 billion miles away. Advertisement It gave us the Earth's longest selfie, dubbed the "pale blue dot."

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

    Image: NASA / JPL / Ted Stryk. 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 ...

  11. Voyager Image Gallery

    Each of the two Voyager spacecraft launched in 1977 carry a 12-inch gold-plated phonograph record with images and sounds from Earth. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech ... This photo of Jupiter was taken by NASA's Voyager 1 on the evening of March 1, 1979, from a distance of 2.7 million miles (4.3 million kilometers). The photo shows Jupiter's Great Red ...

  12. New Horizons Aims to Outdo Voyager's 'Pale Blue Dot' Photo

    The resulting images, which NASA revealed last week, broke Voyager's record for the farthest images ever taken from Earth. Voyager was about 3.75 billion miles from Earth when it captured the ...

  13. NASA scientist viewed first Voyager images. What he saw gave him chills

    The NASA Voyager craft have traveled through space, beyond the planets, for decades. Scientist Alan Cummings saw some of the first images returned to Earth. ... were built to last five years. They ...

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

    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. Credit... NASA/JPL-Caltech

  15. Voyager 1 to Take Pictures of Solar System Planets

    NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft, having completed its mission along with Voyager 2 to explore the outer planets, will use its cameras February 13-14 to take an unprecedented family portrait of most of the planets in our solar system. The collection of images will be from a unique point-of-view -- looking down on the solar system from a position 32 ...

  16. NASA works to fix Voyager 1 radio link from 15 billion miles away

    Voyager 1, which left Earth 46 years ago, is now 15 billion miles away. NASA is sifting through computer codes and old documents to fix a problem. Photos: Stylish royal Amazon's Big Spring Sale ...

  17. NASA finds clue while solving Voyager 1's communication breakdown case

    In 2023, humanity's pioneering space mission, Voyager 1, stopped sending understandable data back to Earth. Now, NASA engineers may be closer to discovering the source of the issue.

  18. Voyager

    This is a real-time indicator of Voyager 1's distance from Earth in astronomical units (AU) and either miles (mi) or kilometers (km). Note: Because Earth moves around the sun faster than Voyager 1 is speeding away from the inner solar system, the distance between Earth and the spacecraft actually decreases at certain times of year.

  19. NASA's Voyager 1 sends readable message to Earth after 4 nail-biting

    Voyager 1 has ventured farther from Earth than any other human-made object. It was launched in 1977, within weeks of its twin spacecraft , Voyager 2. The initial aim of the mission was to explore ...

  20. NASA Communicates with Ailing Voyager 1 Spacecraft

    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 ...

  21. Voyager 1 Comes Back to Life After a 'Poke' From NASA, Hope Still Alive

    An artist's impression of the Voyager probes next to a montage of examples of striking images of the solar system Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 took on their missions. NASA/JPL

  22. 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. ...

  23. Voyager 1 Takes the First Image of the Earth-Moon System in a ...

    Sep 18, 1977. Image Article. Voyager 1 snapped this picture from a distance of 7.25 million miles. Voyager 1 snapped this picture from a distance of 7.25 million miles. It was the first to include both the Earth and the Moon in a single frame taken by a spacecraft. Voyager 1 snapped this picture from a distance of 7.25 million miles.

  24. Voyager 1 sends back surprising response after 'poke' from NASA

    Meanwhile, Voyager 2 has traveled more than 12.6 billion miles (20.3 billion kilometers) from our planet. Both are in interstellar space and are the only spacecraft ever to operate beyond the ...