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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
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  • 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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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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Let’s take a moment to look at the mesmerizing images from Voyager 1

“The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff.” —Carl Sagan

In 1977, NASA launched two Voyager probes, equipped with golden records describing human accomplishment, on a mission to explore the farthest reaches of the solar system. Each record catalogued our music, our greetings, our art and photography.

Forty years later, both spacecrafts are still hurtling through space , exploring parts of the universe where nothing from Earth has visited before. Voyager 1 is now in interstellar space, 13 billion miles away from Earth. Voyager 2 is passing through the heliosheath, the outermost layer of the heliosphere, before it, too, reaches interstellar space.

Last week, in an amazing feat of engineering, NASA engineers turned on Voyager 1’s backup thrusters after they’d been dormant for 37 years. The thrusters will help reorient the spacecraft’s antenna back to Earth, so we can receive its signal for just a little longer.

It’s a fine moment to reflect on the incredible images Voyager 1 has sent back over its lifetime. The probe gave us the first “ portrait ” of our solar system, and memorably mesmerizing shots of Saturn and Jupiter.

Our crescent Earth and moon in the first picture of its kind ever captured by a spacecraft. Taken on Sept. 18, 1977, 7 million miles (12 million km) away from Earth.

Watch NASA’s moving compilation of images from both Voyagers below:

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Voyager 1's Historic Flyby of Jupiter in Photos

On March 5, 1979, NASA's Voyager 1 flew by Jupiter , the largest planet in the solar system, in a historic encounter with the largest planet in our solar system. The photos of Jupiter beamed back by Voyager 1 were amazing, as was the science they returned. See Voyager 1's most amazing photos of Jupiter and its moons in our gallery here. 

Parts of a Whole

Voyager 1 and 2 launched in 1977 to explore the cosmos. Voyager 1 took a series of images of Jupiter, which were compiled to create this mosaic of one entire hemisphere of the planet.

While the two spacecraft were originally designed for a five-year mission to explore Jupiter and Saturn, their successes and reliability allowed for additional exploration of Uranus, Neptune and more.

Credit: JPL

Standing Out in the Cosmos

Voyager 1 took three separate photos, using three different color filters, of Jupiter this day in 1979. Back on Earth in the Image Processing Lab at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the images were combined, creating this colorful and breathtaking view of the Jovian planet.

Credit: JPL/NASA

A Planet and Two Moons

Io, Europa and Jupiter pose for a family photo. Io seems almost caught in Jupiter's Great Red Spot and glows with a very different color from Europa. Europa, on the other hand gives away very little detail about its composition with a glance from such a distance.

Jupiter's Night Light(s)

From within Jupiter's shadow Voyager 1 sent home this image detailing the planet's north pole, an aurora in action and possibly even some lightning. The image itself was taken over a long exposure of 3 minutes, 12 seconds with a wide angle camera.

A Window Inside?

Researchers believe this large brown oval, which was imaged Mar. 2, 1979, could allow a view into lower cloud levels of Jupiter if studied more closely.

Just above the brown spot lies the pale orange North Temperate Belt bordered to the south by the high speed North Temperate Current which moves with wind speeds up to 260 mi/hr (120 meters/sec).

A Big Ol' Spot

In early March 1979,  Voyager 1 collected this image of the Great Red Spot and some other surrounding atmospheric activity. The smallest white ovals featured are 20 miles (30 km) across, some of which were observed four decades ago, at formation. The different disturbances in Jupiter's atmosphere move around the planet at different speeds.

Such Beautiful Contrast

Just below Jupiter's Great Red Spot, the planet's atmosphere has a great variation of textures and patterns. Using special computer processing, these details are enhanced to enable study in hopes of deepening understanding of the Jovian atmosphere.

Ring Around the Jupiter

On Mar. 4, 1979, this multiple exposure image provided the first evidence of a ring around the Jovian planet. Stars in the image appear as broken hairpins resulting from Voyager 1's motion during the more than 11 minute exposure. The image successfully completed it mission of searching for such rings at Jupiter.

The Galilean Moons of Jupiter

In 1610, Galileo Galilei observed these four moons orbiting Jupiter. As a result, the group is referred to as the Galilean satellites of Jupiter. Shown here the relative sizes are compared — Io, on the top left; Europa, on the top right; Ganymede, on the bottom left; and Callisto, on the bottom right. 

Ganymede and Callisto are larger than planet Mercury while Io and Europa are similar in size to Earth's moon. Io consists of active volcanoes and likely has a sulfurous composition. Ganymede and Callisto appear to consist mainly of water and water ice. Europa's make up is still largely a mystery waiting to be solved.

Active Volcanoes

To create this image of Jupiter's Io, several photos of the moon were snapped by Voyager 1 on Mar. 4, 1979. Centered on the moon a circular element has been connected to an known erupting volcano while across the image similar features can be identified. Io is the first-known body, other than Earth, where active volcanism has been seen.

Photobomber

While mapping Jupiter, Io snuck into the frame. Voyager 1 captured the side of the moon Jupiter never sees, revealing never-before-seen details of the Jovian satellite: several circles with dark centers and bright rims may be craters unknown on the moon until now. Without further study, researchers won't know if they are impact of volcanic craters.

Surprising Natural Colors

A color image of Jupiter's closest Galilean moon, Io, stuns viewers with its rich colors. Scientists believe the orange and red hues arise from sulfur compounds, salts and other volcanic sublimates. While volcanic craters and lava flows may explain the dark spots across the image.

Loki, In Detail

The detailed structure of Loki, a volcano on Jupiter's Io, visualized clearly here in a Voyager 1 image. In this photo, the majority of the eruptive activity emanated from the possible rift in the dark linear feature. Also, a u-shaped "lava-lake" component reveals strange details, possibly solid sulfur "icebergs" in a liquid sulfur lake. This region claimed the hottest area on this moon at about 150 degrees Celsius.

Activity Afar

An active plume near the Loki volcano shines off the horizon of Io. The mosaic also presents views of fallout deposits from the active plume Pele at the heart-shaped feature to the southeast of Loki.

Credit: JPL/USGS/NASA

Small but Not Insignificant

The smallest of the Galilean moons, Europa displays bright areas, surmised to be ice deposits, and darker spots expected to be rocky surfaces. Long linear structures across the northern hemisphere are features unique on the satellite. One theory suggests these lines could be fractures or faults in the moon's surface.

Similar but Not the Same

From about 2.6 million miles (4.2 million km) away, Voyager 1 snapped this image of Ganymede. Though larger than planet Mercury, the moon is much less dense. Ganymede, while reminiscent of Earth's moon, is four times as bright. Scientists speculate the Jovian moon could have areas, such as the north polar region, covered in water frost creating the brightness seen here.

Explaining the Sights

Several bright impact craters glow brightly in Voyager 1's image of Ganymede from Mar. 5, 1979. Many older impact craters, missing their rays, are visible as well. Some of the erosion may be caused by faulting of the surface materials.

Strange Patterns

Jupiter's largest moon, Ganymede was imaged by Voyager 1 on Mar. 5, 1979. The image reveals intricate patterns of ridges and grooves. Scientists believe these features to be deformations in the satellite's thick icy crust.

A Trio of Info

Three images of Jupiter's Callisto combine to create this high resolution photo of the satellite. A large basin-like feature, discovered by Voyager 1, appears clearly on the upper left area of the moon. Across the center of this basin a brighter contrast is seen. Researchers believe these shining areas contain more clean ice as compared to the majority of Callisto's "dirty-ice" surface.

A Triad of Data

A mosaic of Callisto came from three different spacecraft. Voyager 1 contributed the left-side image and Voyager 2 provided the right-side image, both collected in 1979. The third, central portion originated from Galileo in September of 1996.

Credit: JPL/DLR/NASA

A Peak at What's Inside

March 6, 1979, Voyager 1 snapped this image of Callisto, one of Jupiter's largest moons, from almost 200,000 km away. The central focus of the image shows the complex circular structure that mirrors impact basins seen on Earth's moon and planet Mercury. Experts believe the patterns on Callisto demonstrate the planet's low density and lack of internal strength.

Christine Lunsford

Christine Lunsford joined the Space.com team in 2010 as a freelance producer and later became a contributing writer, covering astrophotography images, astronomy photos and amazing space galleries and more. During her more than 10 years with Space.com, oversaw the site's monthly skywatching updates and produced overnight features and stories on the latest space discoveries. She enjoys learning about subjects of all kinds. 

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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.

last photos from voyager 1

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.

last photos from voyager 1

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

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

voyager_1_tops_trajectories

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

voyager_1_mjs_77_artwork_1975

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

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

voyager_1_instruments

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

voyager_1_earth_and_moon_from_voyager_1_1977

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

voyager_1_saturn_departure_nov_16_1980_3_3_m_miles

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

voyager_1_family_portrait

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

earth-palebluedot-6bkm-voyager1

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

voyager_1_golden_record

The voyage continues…

Voyager 1 to Take Pictures of Solar System Planets

last photos from voyager 1

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 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 bring Voyager 1 back from the brink.
  • The probe, showing its age, has been sending back garbled data since November. 
  • Engineers sent a "poke" to the ancient probe and received a surprising response. 

Insider Today

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

The probe has been sending back a steady flow of gibberish since November, worrying scientists who are 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 set of data in the signal sent back in response to their prompt. This may hold the key to deciphering the spacecraft's cryptic signal, the agency said.

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

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.

Today, Voyager 1 and 2 hold a unique position in space exploration history as the only spacecraft to have ventured into interstellar space. They are 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, recently told Business Insider .

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 the repeat malfunctions are signs they are entering the last moments of their functional life.

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

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

One NASA engineer managed to decode this precious signal, unlocking a "read-out" 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," said NASA.

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

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

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

Watch: 40 years ago, NASA sent a message to aliens — here's what it says

last photos from voyager 1

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  • Where Are They Now
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galleries  /  images voyager took

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. From Voyager's great distance Earth is a mere point of light, less than the size of a picture element even in the narrow-angle camera. Earth was a crescent only 0.12 pixel in size. Coincidentally, Earth lies right in the center of one of the scattered light rays resulting from taking the image so close to the sun. This blown-up image of the Earth was taken through three color filters — violet, blue and green — and recombined to produce the color image. The background features in the image are artifacts resulting from the magnification.

Solar System Portrait - 60 Frame Mosaic.

Solar System Portrait - 60 Frame Mosaic.

Solar System Portrait - Earth as 'Pale Blue Dot'.

Solar System Portrait - Earth as 'Pale Blue Dot'.

last photos from voyager 1

Voyager 1 Sputters Back to Life

Signs of life.

L ate last year, NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft, which has been traveling through space since launching almost 50 years ago, started sending nonsensical messages back to Earth, as if senility was catching up with it.

"We'd gone from having a conversation with Voyager, with the 1’s and 0’s containing science data, to just a dial tone," Voyager project scientist Linda Spilker told Scientific American .

But now, according to NASA's latest update , the Voyager mission team has spotted a sign of life — in the form of a signal that turned out to be readout of the memory of the aging spacecraft's flight data subsystem (FDS), an onboard computer that readies packets of data to be transmitted to Earth.

The data wasn't in the proper format, but at least it was  something.  So while there are no guarantees, it's a hopeful sign of life that could allow Voyager 1 to continue its decades-long mission.

"It’s an excellent development on Voyager," Joe Westlake, director of NASA’s heliophysics division, told SciAm .

Excellent Development

The memory contains a wealth of data about Voyager 1's status, including "science or engineering data for downlink," per NASA.

The engineers are now comparing the data to the previous readout to figure out if there are any discrepancies that could explain why the spacecraft has been acting so strangely.

But it'll likely take some time to come to any conclusions.

"The team is analyzing the readout," the space agency's update reads. "Using that information to devise a potential solution and attempt to put it into action will take time."

The ancient spacecraft has already been through many challenging times, from dwindling power supplies  and  grimy thrusters  to  near-fatal software glitches .

Despite the many hurdles, scientists are still trying to squeeze every bit of life that may — or may not — be left.

"My motto for a long time was 50 years or bust," astronomer Stamatios Krimigis, who has worked on the Voyager 1 mission since the 1970s, told  NPR earlier this month, "but we're sort of approaching that."

More on Voyager: NASA Concerned as Voyager 1 Sending Back Incomprehensible Code

The post Voyager 1 Sputters Back to Life appeared first on Futurism .

An engineer with the Deep Space Network figured out a way to decode a mysterious

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NASA's Voyager 1 Spacecraft Briefly Reconnects, Keeping Hope Alive for the Historic Mission

The 46-year-old spacecraft has been transmitting gibberish for months, but the team may be close to identifying the source of the glitch..

Voyager 1 is the farthest object made by humans.

The Voyager 1 spacecraft sent a new signal that contains valuable data, which may save the aging probe. Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory are currently looking for discrepancies in the message in order to find out why the spacecraft—the farthest piece of human technology from Earth—has been speaking gibberish for the past few months.

On March 3, the team behind the Voyager 1 mission received a promising signal from the spacecraft’s flight data system (FDS). Although it wasn’t in the format regularly used by Voyager 1 when the spacecraft is operating normally, it was still different than the unreadable data stream that the mission has been transmitting since it developed an odd glitch in November 2023 .

The mission team was initially confused by the new message, but an engineer at NASA’s Deep Space Network, radio antennas that the space agency uses to communicate with its deep space missions, decoded the signal and found that it contains a readout of the entire FDS memory, NASA wrote in a blog update.

“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,” the space agency said.

Voyager 1 transmitted this data in response to the team sending a “poke” to the spacecraft’s data system on March 1, or a command that gently prompts FDS “to try different sequences in its software package in case the issue could be resolved by going around a corrupted section,” according to NASA.

FDS collects data from Voyager’s science instruments, as well as engineering data about the health of the spacecraft, and combines them into a single package that’s transmitted to Earth through one of the probe’s subsystems, the telemetry modulation unit (TMU), in binary code.

The Voyager 1 team suspects that the ongoing anomaly may have something to do with FDS and TMU having trouble communicating with one another. As a result, TMU has been sending data to mission control in a repeating pattern of ones and zeroes.

For months, things have been looking bleak for the Voyager 1 mission, which has been cruising through the cosmos for more than 46 years. With the new signal, however, the team may be able to pinpoint the exact source of the glitch by comparing this memory readout with a previous one to look for discrepancies in the code.

Voyager 1 launched in 1977, less than a month after its twin probe, Voyager 2, began its own journey to space. The craft ventured into interstellar space in August 2012, becoming the first spacecraft to leave the heliosphere.

Voyager 1 is currently 15.14 billion miles away (24.4 billion kilometers), flying at a speed of 38,000 miles per hour (61,155 kilometers per hour). Because of this vast distance, it takes around two days to send a message and receive a reply from the spacecraft. So, NASA is asking us to be patient as it works to resolve the issue with its iconic mission.

“The team is analyzing the readout,” the space agency wrote. “Using that information to devise a potential solution and attempt to put it into action will take time.”

For more spaceflight in your life, follow us on X (formerly Twitter) and bookmark Gizmodo’s dedicated Spaceflight page .

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After 6 months in space and a fiery return over the U.S., NASA's Crew-7 is back home

Russell Lewis

Russell Lewis

last photos from voyager 1

The four members of NASA's Crew-7 mission pose for a portrait inside their crew quarters on the International Space Station. Clockwise from bottom are, astronauts Jasmin Moghbeli, Andreas Mogensen, Satoshi Furukawa, and Loral O'Hara. The SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule splashed down at 5:48 a.m. ET on Tuesday, March 12, 2024 to end a six-month mission. NASA hide caption

The four members of NASA's Crew-7 mission pose for a portrait inside their crew quarters on the International Space Station. Clockwise from bottom are, astronauts Jasmin Moghbeli, Andreas Mogensen, Satoshi Furukawa, and Loral O'Hara. The SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule splashed down at 5:48 a.m. ET on Tuesday, March 12, 2024 to end a six-month mission.

Four people of NASA's Crew-7 mission streaked across the Midwest and Southern U.S. in the pre-dawn hours Tuesday with a successful and fiery return to Earth.

The SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule could be seen by people who looked up and watched it zip across the darkened sky.

Over the course of an hour, the capsule went from 17,500 mph in orbit and plunged through the atmosphere to bleed off speed. It came to a gentle splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico under a canopy of parachutes off Pensacola, Fla. capping six months aboard the International Space Station.

Liftoff! Four people are on their way to the space station on NASA's Crew-8 mission

Liftoff! Four people are on their way to the space station on NASA's Crew-8 mission

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

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

The crew was made up of mission commander and NASA astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli , the European Space Agency's Andreas Mogensen , Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's Satoshi Furukawa and Russian cosmonaut Konstantin Borisov .

It was the first trip to space for Moghbeli and Borisov. Furukawa and Mogensen completed their second spaceflights.

The crew on the science and research mission conducted more than 200 experiments. According to NASA , these included studying blood samples that, for the first time, allowed researchers to monitor the impact of spaceflight on immune function during the flight. Previously, this could only be studied before and after a mission.

The crew also spent time testing special membranes designed to eliminate contaminants from wastewater. As NASA and others plan to send humans deeper into space, having a way to filter and reuse water is critical to the success of long-range missions.

They were relieved by members of the Crew-8 mission which launched on a SpaceX rocket to the I.S.S. last week . The Crew-8 team will spend the next half-year aboard the orbital outpost. The rotation is part of NASA's Commercial Crew program . After the shuttle fleet retired in 2011, the agency pays commercial companies to fly people to and from the space station .

The next NASA mission to the I.S.S. is scheduled to be the first human flight of Boeing's long-delayed Starliner capsule . It's scheduled for a two-week test mission with a pair of astronauts aboard in May.

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IMAGES

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

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

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  3. NASA Voyager 1 photos: Amazing images from the space probe launched in

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  4. Voyager 1 Last Photo Of Earth

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  5. Voyager 1 Celebrates 40 Years Of Space Travel

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

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VIDEO

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  3. Last message of Voyager 1|voyager 1 distance covered ? Voyager 1 😱 #fact #amazingfacts #shorts

  4. Unknown Force Detected: Voyager 1 Terrifying Encounter

  5. VOYAGER 1 और VOYAGER 2 सैटेलाइट्स की अनोखी खोजें

  6. 3 MINUTES AGO: Voyager 1 Just Turned Back And Made A Terrifying Discovery

COMMENTS

  1. Voyager

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

  2. Voyager 1's Pale Blue Dot

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

  3. 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...

  4. 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 .

  5. 40 Years Ago: Voyager 1 Explores Saturn

    Two weeks after its launch from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on Sep. 5, 1977, Voyager 1 turned its cameras back toward its home planet and took the first single-frame image of the Earth-Moon system, providing a taste of future discoveries at the outer planets.

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

    Updated Aug 1, 2023, 4:01 AM PDT This montage shows examples of striking images of the solar system Voyager 1 and 2 took on their missions. NASA/JPL/Insider Nearly 46 years after their...

  7. Voyager

    Images on the Golden Record 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. Images Voyager Took

  8. Voyager 1

    Results 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.

  9. 'Pale Blue Dot' Revisited

    The Pale Blue Dot view was created using the color images Voyager took of Earth. The popular name of this view is traced to the title of the 1994 book by Voyager imaging scientist Carl Sagan, who originated the idea of using Voyager's cameras to image the distant Earth and played a critical role in enabling the family portrait images to be taken.

  10. Voyager Image Gallery

    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 Spot (top) and one of the white ovals. Credit: NASA/JPL Full Image Details

  11. 10 Things You Might Not Know About Voyager's Famous 'Pale Blue Dot' Photo

    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.

  12. Images taken by the Voyager Mission

    1720x1720x3. PIA18182: Uranus as seen by NASA's Voyager 2. Full Resolution: TIFF (8.879 MB) JPEG (78.82 kB) 1989-10-02. Triton. Voyager. 932x1884x1. PIA14448:

  13. Voyager 1's Iconic 'Pale Blue Dot' Photo Is 30 Years Old ...

    Taken at 4:48 GMT on Feb. 14, 1990, "Pale Blue Dot" and other images that made-up the "Family Portrait" collection were the last thing Voyager 1's cameras ever did.

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

    Image: NASA / JPL / Ted Stryk. The Pale Blue Dot from Voyager 1 This image of Earth was taken by Voyager 1 on February 14, 1990 from a distance of more than 6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles). Earth shows as a mere dot within a ray of light scattered inside the spacecraft's camera optics Image: NASA / JPL.

  15. NASA Voyager 1 photos: Amazing images from the space probe ...

    Our crescent Earth and moon in the first picture of its kind ever captured by a spacecraft. Taken on Sept. 18, 1977, 7 million miles (12 million km) away from Earth. Voyager 1's closest approach ...

  16. Voyager 1's Historic Flyby of Jupiter in Photos

    published 5 March 2019 On the Job On March 5, 1979, NASA's Voyager 1 flew by Jupiter, the largest planet in the solar system, in a historic encounter with the largest planet in our solar...

  17. Voyager 1

    Last contact: TBD: Flyby of Jupiter; Closest approach: March 5, 1979: Distance: 349,000 km (217,000 mi) ... Voyager 1 is a space probe launched by NASA on ... includes photos of the Earth and its lifeforms, a range of scientific information, spoken greetings from people such as the Secretary-General of the United Nations and the President of ...

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

    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 ...

  19. NASA Communicates with Ailing Voyager 1 Spacecraft

    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 ...

  20. 45 Years Ago: Voyager 1 Begins its Epic Journey to the Outer ...

    Today, 45 years after its launch and 14.6 billion miles from Earth, four of Voyager 1's 11 instruments continue to return useful data, having now spent 10 years in interstellar space. Signals from the spacecraft take nearly 22 hours to reach Earth, and 22 hours for Earth-based signals to reach the spacecraft.

  21. Voyager 1 to Take Pictures of Solar System Planets

    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.

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

    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 set of data in the signal sent back ...

  23. 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.

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

    The last time Voyager 1 experienced a similar, but not identical, issue with the flight data system was in 1981, and the current problem does not appear to be connected to other glitches the ...

  25. Voyager 1 Sputters Back to Life

    Signs of Life. L ate last year, NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft, which has been traveling through space since launching almost 50 years ago, started sending nonsensical messages back to Earth, as if ...

  26. NASA's Voyager 1 Spacecraft Briefly Reconnects, Keeping Hope ...

    Voyager 1 launched in 1977, less than a month after its twin probe, Voyager 2, began its own journey to space. The craft ventured into interstellar space in August 2012, becoming the first ...

  27. NASA's Crew-7 mission returns on SpaceX capsule from I.S.S. : NPR

    The four crewmembers spent a half-year on the International Space Station conducting dozens of experiments and science research. NASA's Crew-8 mission relieved them on the orbital outpost last week.