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Voyager turns 45: What the iconic mission taught us and what's next​

By Jamie Carter published about 15 hours ago
Can the first probe to visit Neptune and Uranus make it to its 50th anniversary?
  • launching rocket

NASA's Voyager 2 mission launched on Aug. 20, 1977. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)


Forty-five years ago, on Aug. 20, 1977, NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on a Titan III-Centaur rocket, embarking on a "grand tour" of the solar system that would include visits to the Jupiter and Saturn systems and would make it the first spacecraft to visit the ice giants Uranus and Neptune and their moons.


Voyager 2 is now 12.1 billion miles (19.5 billion kilometers) away and still sending back data on the distant and unknown heliopause, and scientists are beginning to wonder how long the iconic space probe can keep going.

Designed to take advantage of a once-every-176-years alignment in the 1970s that made it possible for spacecraft to take gravity-assist slingshots from planet to planet across the solar system, the Voyager mission consisted of two probes. Voyager 2 was the first to launch, with Voyager 1 following two weeks later. Both carried the famous "Golden Record," a 12-inch gold-plated copper disc containing sounds and images portraying the diversity of life and culture on Earth.
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Now over 14.5 billion miles (23.3 billion km) away, Voyager 1 is the farthest artificial object from Earth. But Voyager 2 is arguably more iconic because of its incredible multidecade tour of the giant planets.

Voyager's "grand tour"

Though it launched second, Voyager 1 was so called because it was to reach Jupiter and Saturn first — in March 1979 and November 1980, respectively — before exiting the plane of the planets where it took the famous "Pale Blue Dot" photo. Voyager 2 visited four planets: Jupiter in July 1979, Saturn in August 1981, Uranus in January 1986 and Neptune in August 1989.

"Both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 provided tremendous legacies for planetary exploration," Jonathan Lunine, a planetary scientist and physicist at Cornell University who is working on the Juno, Europa Clipper and James Webb Space Telescope missions, told Space.com. "Not only in what they accomplished in terms of science, but also demonstrating that it was really possible to explore the outer solar system with a couple of spacecraft."

What did the Voyager probes reveal?

Voyager's discoveries are the stuff of legend among planetary scientists, many of whom still rely on the unique images from the spacecraft's wide-angle and narrow-angle cameras. The probes spotted volcanoes on Jupiter's moon Io, discovered that Jupiter's Great Red Spot is an Earth-size storm and found that the gas giant has faint rings. They studied Saturn's rings; saw the giant moon Titan's thick, Earth-like atmosphere; and revealed the tiny moon Enceladus to be geologically active.

Voyager 2 alone then visited Uranus and Neptune. The spacecraft's first-ever images of Uranus revealed dark rings, the planet's tilted magnetic field and its geologically active moon Miranda. Neptune, meanwhile, was also discovered to have rings and many more moons than scientists initially thought. We also got to see Triton, a geologically active moon that is orbiting "backward" and, like Pluto, is now believed to be a captured dwarf planet from the Kuiper Belt.

Voyager as a catalyst​

In addition to making groundbreaking discoveries, the Voyager mission helped scientists determine what merited deeper exploration. The mission revealed Jupiter to be an incredibly complex planet, thus spurring NASA to launch the Galileo mission in 1989 and the Juno mission in 2011. The Voyager probes' work also helped to inspire the iconic Cassini mission to Saturn.

"Voyager 1's close flyby of Titan was the catalyst for the wonderful Cassini mission to Saturn and its Huygens probe," Lunine said. The Huygens probe landed on the surface of Titan in 2005 and sent back an incredible video.

Voyager 2 has also been a catalyst for investigations into the role of the ice giant planets — not only in the solar system but also in distant star systems, since most of the exoplanets found so far are roughly the size of Neptune and Uranus.

Voyager and NASA today​


NASA has spent decades following up on the Voyager missions, and those efforts continue today. The space agency's Dragonfly mission will reach Titan, Saturn's largest moon, in 2034, while Europa Clipper will study Jupiter's ocean moon, first imaged by Voyager, starting in 2030. In April, the National Academies Planetary Science Decadal Survey recommended that NASA send a $4.2 billion Uranus Orbiter and Probe mission to unveil the mysterious ice giant planet and its moons in the 2040s.

It's the latest mission that's a direct consequence of Voyager 2's brief visit to the Uranus system in January 1986. "Voyager 2's flyby of Uranus was a bull's-eye — it went directly through the plane of the moons' orbits because of the orientation of Uranus' axis to the sun," Lunine said. That made it unlike flybys at other planets, where the probes were able to visit one moon after another. "Voyager 2 got very brief images from these moons, so they're largely unexplored," Lunine said.

Ariel and Miranda, in particular, are thought to be ocean worlds and so would be specifically targeted by the Uranus Orbiter and Probe. "It's been 45 years since the launch of Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, and here we are now finally talking about a Uranus Orbiter and Probe mission," Lunine said. "It seems like a long time because these missions take so long to conceive of, fund, build, launch and execute, but it all comes from the intriguing peeks that we got from Voyager 2."

How long will Voyager last?​

Both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 still communicate with NASA's Deep Space Network (which itself was created to communicate with Voyager 2 at Uranus and Neptune), receiving routine commands and occasionally transmitting data to Earth. "We are still getting data from Voyager," Stamatios Krimigis, principal investigator for the Voyager 1 and 2 probes and the Voyager Interstellar Mission, said during a news conference held at COSPAR 22 in July. "We're looking forward to getting data for probably another five or six years."

Around the mid- to late 2020s, the probes' scientific instruments will be entirely switched off, and eventually, the spacecraft will go cold and silent — but their journeys into interstellar space will continue indefinitely. "My motto is, I want to be here after Voyager passes on," said Krimigis, who is in his 80s. "But I'm not sure that's going to happen."

In around 300 years, Voyager 1 and 2 will enter the Oort cloud, the sphere of comets surrounding the solar system. About 30,000 years later, they'll exit the neighborhood and silently orbit the center of the Milky Way for millions of years.

Their scientific work may be almost over, but the Voyager spacecraft have only just begun their journeys into the cosmos.
 

Alien-hunting array catches Voyager 1 signal from interstellar space​

By Tereza Pultarova published about 8 hours ago

The Allen Telescope Array detected signal from Voyager 1

The Allen Telescope Array detected signal from Voyager 1 (Image credit: Joe Marfia)


The Allen Telescope Array in California detected signal from the Voyager 1 probe, the NASA satellite launched 45 year ago that is currently speeding toward the outer edges of the solar system, way beyond the orbit of Pluto.


Allen Telescope Array (ATA), a recently refurbished radio observatory near San Francisco in California dedicated to the search for extraterrestrial life, made contact with the Voyager 1 probe on July 9, using 20 of its 42 dish antennas, which are each over 20 feet (6.1 meters) wide. The telescope recorded 15 minutes of data, according to a statement(opens in new tab), which were stored on a disk.

"The detection of Voyager 1, the farthest human-made object, with the refurbished Allen Telescope Array is an excellent display of the telescope's capabilities and strengths, and a representation of the outstanding hard work put by the ATA team since the start of the refurbishment program in 2019," the team said in the statement.
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The statement didn't provide any additional information about the signal it caught. NASA has been investigating a strange glitch that has caused Voyager 1 to send back nonsense data about its location in space. NASA first reported the glitch in May, although it has not specified when the issue began. The agency is confident the spacecraft is safe because if the gibberish data were accurate, the signal from Voyager 1 wouldn't be properly pointed toward Earth.

Currently located about 14.5 billion miles (23.3 billion kilometers) away from Earth, 156 times the sun-Earth distance, Voyager 1 is still being tracked by NASA's Deep Space Network, sending a meager 160 bits per second of data back home. For comparison, a regular home broadband connection is measured in megabits per second, that is millions of bits per second.

The spacecraft, which entered what astronomers define as interstellar space 10 years ago, is measuring properties of the interstellar medium beyond the edge of the heliosphere, the bubble of plasma created by the sun that surrounds the planets.


Voyager 1 still has to fly through the Oort Cloud, a spherical disc of comets and asteroids at the farthest reaches of the solar system, more than 200 sun-Earth distances away from the sun.

No spacecraft has ever visited the Oort Cloud and Voyager 1 will take about 300 years to get there. By then, however, the probe will long be dead as it's expected to run out of fuel to power its systems as early as 2025.

 

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