voyager 1 where now

Voyager 1 live position and data

This page shows Voyager 1 location and other relevant astronomical data in real time. The celestial coordinates, magnitude, distances and speed are updated in real time and are computed using high quality data sets provided by the JPL Horizons ephemeris service (see acknowledgements for details). The sky map shown in the background represents a rectangular portion of the sky 60x40 arcminutes wide. By comparison the diameter of the full Moon is about 30 arcmins, so the full horizontal extent of the map is approximately 2 full Moons wide. Depending on the device you are using, the map can be dragged horizondally or vertically using the mouse or touchscreen. The deep sky image in the background is provided by the Digitized Sky Survey ( acknowledgements ).

Current close conjunctions

List of bright objects (stars brighter than magnitude 9.0 and galaxies brighter than magmitude 14.0) close to Voyager 1 (less than 1.5 degrees):

Additional resources

• 15 Days Ephemerides
• Interactive Sky Map (Planetarium)
• Rise & Set Times
• Distance from Earth

Astronomy databases

• The Digitized Sky Survey, a photographic survey of the whole sky created using images from different telescopes, including the Oschin Schmidt Telescope on Palomar Mountain
• The Hipparcos Star Catalogue, containing more than 100.000 bright stars
• The PGC 2003 Catalogue, containing information about 1 million galaxies
• The GSC 2.3 Catalogue, containing information about more than 2 billion stars and galaxies

Object Search

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Where is Voyager 1 now? Repairs bring space probe back online as journey nears 50 years

After many months of extremely long-distance repairs, NASA’s Voyager 1 space probe is fully operational once again.

“The spacecraft has resumed gathering information about interstellar space,” the agency announced last Thursday, and has resumed its normal operations.

The spacecraft , now travelling through interstellar space more than 15 billion miles from Earth, began sending back corrupted science and engineering data last November.

Over the ensuing months, engineers worked to troubleshoot the problem, a tedious and complicated process given the vast distance between Earth and Voyager 1. Each message took 22.5 hours to transmit, meaning each communication between engineers and the spacecraft was a nearly two day long process.

By April, NASA engineers had traced to root of the problem to a single chip in Voyager 1’s Flight Data System, allowing them to begin rearranging lines of computer code so that the spacecraft could continue transmitting data. Last month, NASA announced that it had restored functionality to two of the spacecraft’s science instruments, followed by the announcement last week that Voyager 1 had been fully restored to normal operations.

Voyager 1: Still traveling 1 million miles per day

Launched in 1977 along with its sister craft Voyager 2, the twin craft are robotic space probes that are now the longest operating spacecraft in history. Their initial mission was to study the outer planets of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, but they have continued their long journey in the ensuing decades, travelling farther and wider than any other man-made object in history.

In 1990, Voyager 1 transmitted the famous “ Pale Blue Dot ” photograph of Earth, taken when the spacecraft was 3.7 billion miles from the Sun.

By 2012, Voyager 1 became the first spacecraft to enter interstellar space, where they have continued transmit data on plasma waves, magnetic fields and particles in the heliosphere – the outermost region of space directly influenced by the Sun.

As part of their one-way mission, both Voyager spacecraft also carry copies of the “ Golden Records ,” gold plated copper discs containing sounds and images from Earth that were curated by the astronomer Carl Sagan.

Currently travelling roughly one million miles per day, Voyager 1 will continue it journey until at least early next year, when NASA estimates that diminishing power levels may “ prevent further operation .”

June 14, 2024

Voyager 1 Is Back! NASA Spacecraft Safely Resumes All Science Observations

NASA’s venerable Voyager 1 spacecraft has resumed normal science operations with all four functioning instruments for the first time in more than six months

By Meghan Bartels

Artist concept of Voyager 1.

NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA’s beloved Voyager 1 mission is back to normal science operations for the first time in more than six months, according to agency personnel. The announcement was made after NASA received data from all four of the spacecraft’s remaining science instruments.

The venerable spacecraft launched in 1977 and passed into interstellar space in 2012 , becoming the first human-made object to accomplish that feat. Today Voyager 1 and its twin, Voyager 2, are NASA’s longest-running missions . But the title has been challenging to hold on to for spacecraft that were designed to operate for just four years. The aging probes are stuck in the deep cold of outer space, their nuclear power sources are producing ever less juice, and glitches are becoming increasingly common.

Most recently, Voyager 1 faced a communications issue that began in November 2023. “We’d gone from having a conversation with Voyager, with the 1’s and 0’s containing science data, to just a dial tone,” said Linda Spilker, Voyager project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), of the spacecraft’s troubles in an interview with Scientific American in March.

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After more than six months of long-distance troubleshooting—Voyager 1 is more than 15 billion miles from Earth, and any signal takes more than 22.5 hours to travel from our planet to the spacecraft—mission personnel have finally coaxed Voyager 1 to gather and send home data with all its remaining science instruments, according to a NASA statement .

The fix required months of analysis to track the issue to a particular chip within the spacecraft’s flight data subsystem. That chip’s code couldn’t be relocated in one fell swoop, however, so mission personnel split the information chip into chunks that could be tucked into stray corners of the rest of the system’s memory. NASA began implementing the new commands in April . And in May the agency directed the aging spacecraft to resume collecting and transmitting science data. Voyager 1’s plasma-wave subsystem and magnetometer bounced back immediately. Its cosmic-ray detector and ow-energy-charged-particles instrument required additional troubleshooting, but both are now finally operating normally, according to NASA.

And although the spacecraft is back to normal operations, the work isn’t quite over. To complete spacecraft recovery from the glitch, mission personnel still need to resynchronize timekeeping software across Voyager 1’s three computers and to maintain the recorder for the spacecraft’s plasma-wave instrument, in addition to completing smaller tasks.

Taken together, Voyager 1’s four remaining instruments offer scientists a precious glimpse of interstellar space. Voyager 1 and 2 are the only two operational spacecraft to cross out of the heliosphere, the bubble of charged particles that marks the influence of the sun across the solar system. This bubble grows and shrinks as the sun passes through its 11-year activity cycle . Inside the heliosphere, space is dominated by particles of the solar wind, while outside of it, cosmic rays reign.

Scientists never dreamed that Voyager 1 would be able to taste these exotic particles. Its primary science targets were Jupiter, Saturn, and the latter planet’s rings and largest moon, Titan—all of which the spacecraft flew past within a few years of its launch. But the mission has survived every challenge to continue trekking through the solar system and into interstellar space, informing scientists about its environment along the way.

Voyager 1 Sends Clear Data to NASA for the First Time in Five Months

The farthest spacecraft from Earth had been transmitting nonsense since November, but after an engineering tweak, it finally beamed back a report on its health and status

Will Sullivan

Daily Correspondent

For the first time in five months, NASA has received usable data from Voyager 1, the farthest spacecraft from Earth.

The aging probe, which has traveled more than 15 billion miles into space, stopped transmitting science and engineering data on November 14. Instead, it sent NASA a nonsensical stream of repetitive binary code . For months, the agency’s engineers undertook a slow process of trial and error, giving the spacecraft various commands and waiting to see how it responded. Thanks to some creative thinking, the team identified a broken chip on the spacecraft and relocated some of the code that was stored there, according to the agency .

NASA is now receiving data about the health and status of Voyager 1’s engineering systems. The next step is to get the spacecraft to start sending science data again.

“Today was a great day for Voyager 1,” Linda Spilker , a Voyager project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), said in a statement over the weekend, per CNN ’s Ashley Strickland. “We’re back in communication with the spacecraft. And we look forward to getting science data back.”

Hi, it's me. - V1 https://t.co/jgGFBfxIOe — NASA Voyager (@NASAVoyager) April 22, 2024

Voyager 1 and its companion, Voyager 2, separately launched from Earth in 1977. Between the two of them, the probes have studied all four giant planets in the outer solar system—Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune—along with 48 of their moons and the planets’ magnetic fields. The spacecraft observed Saturn’s rings in detail and discovered active volcanoes on Jupiter’s moon Io .

Originally designed for a five-year mission within our solar system, both probes are still operational and chugging along through space, far beyond Pluto’s orbit. In 2012, Voyager 1 became the first human-made object to reach interstellar space, the area between stars. The probe is now about eight times farther from the sun than Uranus is on average.

Over the decades, the Voyager spacecraft have transmitted data collected on their travels back to NASA scientists. But in November, Voyager 1 started sending gibberish .

Engineers determined Voyager 1’s issue was with one of three onboard computers, called the flight data system (FDS), NASA said in a December blog post . While the spacecraft was still receiving and executing commands from Earth, the FDS was not communicating properly with a subsystem called the telemetry modulation unit (TMU). The FDS collects science and engineering data and combines it into a package that the TMU transmits back to Earth.

Since Voyager 1 is so far away, testing solutions to its technical issues requires time—it takes 22.5 hours for commands to reach the probe and another 22.5 hours for Voyager 1’s response to come back.

On March 1, engineers sent a command that coaxed Voyager 1 into sending a readout of the FDS memory, NASA said in a March 13 blog post . From that readout, the team confirmed a small part—about 3 percent—of the system’s memory had been corrupted, NASA said in an April 4 update .

The core of the problem turned out to be a faulty chip hosting some software code and part of the FDS memory. NASA doesn’t know what caused the chip to stop working—it could be that a high-energy particle from space collided with it, or the chip might have just run out of steam after almost 50 years spent hurtling through the cosmos.

“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,” Suzanne Dodd , Voyager project manager at JPL, told Scientific American ’s Nadia Drake in March.

To receive usable data again, the engineers needed to move the affected code somewhere else that wasn’t broken. But no single location in the FDS memory was large enough to hold all of the code, so the engineers divided it into chunks and stored it in multiple places, per NASA .

The team started with moving the code responsible for sending Voyager’s status reports, sending it to its new location in the FDS memory on April 18. They received confirmation that the strategy worked on April 20, when the first data on the spacecraft’s health since November arrived on Earth.

In the next several weeks, the team will relocate the parts of the FDS software that can start returning science data.

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Will Sullivan | | READ MORE

Will Sullivan is a science writer based in Washington, D.C. His work has appeared in Inside Science and NOVA Next .

The most distant spacecraft in the solar system — Where are they now?

Humans have been flinging things into deep space for 50 years now, since the 1972 launch of Pioneer 10. We now have five spacecraft that have either reached the edges of our solar system or are fast approaching it: Pioneer 10, Pioneer 11, Voyager 1, Voyager 2 and New Horizons. 

Most of these probes have defied their expected deaths and are still operating long beyond their original mission plans. These spacecraft were originally planned to explore our neighboring planets, but now they're blazing a trail out of the solar system , providing astronomers with unique vantage points in space — and they've been up to a lot in 2022.

Voyagers 1 and 2

The Voyager missions celebrated a very special anniversary this year: 45 years of operations . From close fly-bys of the outer planets to exploring humans' furthest reach in space, these two spacecraft have contributed immensely to astronomers' understanding of the solar system. 

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

Their main project now is exploring where the sun 's influence ends, and other stars' influences begin. Voyager 1 crossed the heliopause, the boundary where the sun's flow of particles ceases to be the most important influence, in 2012 with Voyager 2 following close after, in 2018. 

"Voyager 1 has now been in interstellar space for a decade…and it's still going, still going strong," Linda Spilker, Voyager project scientist and a planetary scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California, told Space.com.

The mission team hit one major hiccup this year, when the spacecraft began sending home garbled information about its location. The engineers found the cause — the spacecraft was using a bad piece of computer hardware when it shouldn't have — and restored operations.

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These kinds of incidents are to be expected with an aging spacecraft, though. The team is also actively managing the power supply onboard each spacecraft, which is dwindling each year as the probes' radioactive generators grow increasingly inefficient. This year, mission personnel turned off heaters keeping a number of scientific instruments on board warm in the harsh, cold environment of space — and, much to everyone's surprise, those instruments are still working perfectly well.

The cameras may have been turned off decades ago, but the spacecrafts' other instruments are collecting data on the plasma and magnetic fields from the sun at a great distance away from the star itself. Because particles of the solar wind — the constant stream of charged particles flowing off the sun — take time to travel such a long way, distant observations allow scientists to see how changes from the sun propagate throughout our cosmic neighborhood. 

The edges of the solar system have been full of surprises, too. It would make sense that plasma from the sun becomes more sparse and spread out as you move away from the center of the solar system, but in fact, the Voyagers have encountered much denser plasma after crossing the heliopause. Astronomers are still puzzled about that one.

"It's just so amazing that even after all this time we continue to see the sun's influence in interstellar space," Spilker said. "I'm looking forward to Voyager continuing to operate, perhaps reaching the 50th anniversary." 

Pioneers 10 and 11

The Pioneer spacecraft hold a special place in space history because of their role as, you guessed it, pioneers. Unfortunately, these milestone 50-year-old spacecraft are non-functional — Pioneer 10 lost communications back in 2003, and Pioneer 11 has been silent since its last contact in 1995. 

But both these spacecraft are marks of humanity's presence in the solar system, and they are still continuing on their journeys, even if we're not sending them commands or firing their rockets anymore. Once a spacecraft is set on a trajectory out of the solar system, according to the laws of physics, it won't stop unless something changes its course.

New Horizons

New Horizons is by far the youngest sibling of these groundbreaking missions, having just launched in 2006 . After completing its famous flyby of dwarf planet Pluto in 2015 , this probe has been zooming out of the solar system at record speed, set to reach the heliopause around 2040. 

Not only has it completed its primary mission, but it successfully completed a flyby of the smaller Kuiper Belt object, Arrokoth , in 2019 as its first mission extension. Earlier this year, the spacecraft was put into hibernation mode because an extended mission hadn't yet been approved. But now, the team is excitedly moving into New Horizons' 2nd Kuiper Belt Extended Mission, or KEM2 for short. KEM2 began on Oct. 1 , although the spacecraft will hibernate until March 1, 2023.

In the meantime, the mission team is preparing for exciting new observations. With cutting-edge instruments — far more advanced than what the Voyagers carried in the 1970s — the team is prepared to use New Horizons as a powerhouse observatory in the distant solar system, providing a viewpoint we can't achieve here on Earth . 

Bonnie Burrati, planetary scientist at JPL and member of the New Horizons team, is particularly looking forward to new views of Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs), the chunks of ice and rock beyond Neptune . New Horizons' unique position in the outer solar system provides new angles of looking at these KBOs, she said. Different views can tell astronomers about how rough the objects' surfaces are, among other things, based on how light scatters and creates shadows on them. 

Another planetary scientist on the team from Southwest Research Institute in Colorado, Leslie Young, wants to use the spacecraft for a new look at something closer to home: the ice giants, Uranus and Neptune. New Horizons’ unique viewpoint provides scientists with information about how light scatters through the planets’ atmospheres—information we can’t get from here on Earth, since we can’t see Uranus and Neptune from that angle. Planetary scientists are eager for more information about these planets, especially as NASA begins planning for a new mission to visit Uranus.

— The icy 'space snowman' Arrokoth in deep space just got names for its best features — Pale Blue Dot at 30: Voyager 1's iconic photo of Earth from space reveals our place in the universe — Destination Pluto: NASA's New Horizons mission in pictures  

When the spacecraft wakes from hibernation, it will be past the so-called "Kuiper cliff," where scientists currently think there are far fewer large KBOs. "When we look at other star systems, we see debris disks extending to much larger distances from their host stars," Bryan Holler, an astronomer at Baltimore's Space Telescope Science Institute, told Space.com. "If ET were to look at our solar system, would they see the same thing?"

This next extended mission will even venture beyond New Horizons' original domain of planetary science. Now, the spacecraft will provide better-than-ever measurements of the background of light and cosmic rays in space, trace the distributions of dust throughout our solar system, and obtain crucial information on the sun's influence, complimentary to the Voyagers. Since the three functional far out spacecraft are heading in separate directions, they allow astronomers to map out irregularities in the solar system's structure.

Luckily for New Horizons, signs indicate that the spacecraft will have enough power to last through the 2040s and possibly beyond — each year, moving 300 million miles (480 million kilometers) farther into uncharted territory.

Follow the author at @ briles_34 on Twitter. Follow us on Twitter @ Spacedotcom and on Facebook .

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].

Briley Lewis (she/her) is a freelance science writer and Ph.D. Candidate/NSF Fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles studying Astronomy & Astrophysics. Follow her on Twitter @briles_34 or visit her website www.briley-lewis.com . 

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Voyager 1 Distance from Earth

Voyager 1 distance from sun, voyager 1 one-way light time, voyager 1 cosmic ray data, voyager 2 distance from the earth, voyager 2 distance from the sun, voyager 2 one-way light time, voyager 2 cosmic ray data.

Voyager 1: 'The Spacecraft That Could' Hits New Milestone

NASA's Voyager 1 probe swaps thrusters in tricky fix as it flies through interstellar space

NASA's most distant spacecraft had a critical thruster problem far from home. Fixing it required a long-distance call to overcome extreme cold and dwindling power.

The distant and cold Voyager 1 spacecraft did a clever thruster trick to help it phone home.

Voyager 1, the most distant human object that is now flying through interstellar space, had thruster issues making it difficult for the spacecraft to stay pointed at Earth when calling home. Unless Voyager 1 could make a switch to a different thruster set, the 47-year-old spacecraft would sail on alone without help from Earth. Making matters worse, Voyager 1 is so old that sudden changes could damage the spacecraft.

"All the decisions we will have to make going forward are going to require a lot more analysis and caution than they once did," Suzanne Dodd, Voyager's project manager at NASA 's Jet Propulsion Laboratory that manages the mission, said in a statement on Tuesday, Sept. 10.

The science of Voyager 1 is critical to space science as it tells us more about interstellar space, meaning the region of the cosmos outside of the reach of the sun 's gravity or particles.

But the spacecraft's aging nuclear power source is much diminished, and doesn't have much power to play with. So engineers at JPL embarked on a rescue plan to help the spacecraft's pointing capabilities without risking its remaining functional science instruments.

Voyager 1 and its twin, Voyager 2, launched on their initial missions in 1977 to study the distant solar system . They collectively flew by four largest outer solar system planets by 1989 and continue, with tweaks for their age, to send science from afar even after both exited the solar system in the early 2010s.

As with humans, aging brought changes to the Voyager systems. The fuel tube for their thrusters have been prone to clogging for more than 20 years; that happens as a rubber diaphragm in each spacecraft fuel tank degrades, creating a silicon dioxide byproduct that clogs the line.

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Luckily, each Voyager has three thruster branches available for use: two attitude branches originally designed for orientation, and one trajectory correction branch made for pathway changes in space. To be clear, engineers have been overcoming the unexpected for decades by creatively repurposing parts of Voyager. This new thruster situation, however, brought additional challenges.

On Voyager 1, a fuel tube in the first attitude propulsion branch began to clog in 2002, necessitating a switch to the second branch, NASA officials wrote in the same statement . When the second branch began acting up in 2018, Voyager 1's orientation maneuvers all switched to the trajectory correction maneuver branch.

But with use, this single branch of the trajectory correction system has been clogging severely, to an even worse extent than either attitude propulsion branch did before.

JPL therefore decided to switch back to the attitude propulsion system, but they had to do so with less power available than in 2002. Voyager 1 is running on essential systems only, and even some of its heaters have turned off.

Between that necessary loss of some heaters — and the diminished radiant heat from fewer systems running on the spacecraft — Voyager 1's dormant attitude propulsion thruster branch was so cold that even turning it on could cause damage.

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Scrutinizing Voyager 1 carefully from afar, JPL engineers determined switching one of the heaters on for an hour would be enough. The command worked and on Aug. 27, one of the attitude thruster branches successfully reoriented Voyager 1 towards Earth for the first time in six years.

Voyager 1 required another form of creative troubleshooting recently; engineers in June resolved a data transmission problem plaguing the spacecraft for months.

Engineers at JPL plan to keep the Voyager twin spacecraft running until at least the 50th anniversary of the mission in 2027, Dodd told reporters in June at a meeting of the space science community's outer planet assessment group, according to SpaceNews .

The group more generally deals with exploration activities in the outer reaches of the solar system; it can provide advice to NASA, but the agency does not necessarily follow recommendations, according to NASA .

Originally posted on Space.com .

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OTD In Space - September 18: Voyager 1 Takes First Photo Of Earth-Moon System

Posted: September 19, 2024 | Last updated: September 19, 2024

On Sept. 18, 1977, NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft took a photo of Earth and the moon. It was the first time both the Earth and the moon were captured in a single frame. At the time, Voyager 1 was more than 7 million miles away from Earth. It had launched about two weeks earlier on a mission to explore the outer planets. Voyager 1 passed through the asteroid belt and visited Jupiter and Saturn. Then it took a sharp turn and started heading straight out of the plane of the solar system. Before Voyager 1 went into interstellar space, Carl Sagan convinced NASA to turn its cameras around one last time to take a family portrait of all the planets in the solar system. This family portrait shows Earth as a tiny speck in a ray of sunshine. It is now famously known as the "Pale Blue Dot."

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OTD In Space - September 18: Voyager 1 Takes First Photo Of Earth-Moon System

On Sept. 18, 1977, NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft took a photo of Earth and the moon. It was the first time both the Earth and the moon were captured in a single frame. At the time, Voyager 1 was more than 7 million miles away from Earth. It had launched about two weeks earlier on a mission to explore the outer planets. Voyager 1 passed through the asteroid belt and visited Jupiter and Saturn. Then it took a sharp turn and started heading straight out of the plane of the solar system. Before Voyager 1 went into interstellar space, Carl Sagan convinced NASA to turn its cameras around one last time to take a family portrait of all the planets in the solar system. This family portrait shows Earth as a tiny speck in a ray of sunshine. It is now famously known as the "Pale Blue Dot."

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The spacecraft uses its thrusters to stay pointed at Earth, but after 47 years in space some of the fuel tubes have become clogged.

Engineers working on NASA’s Voyager 1 probe have successfully mitigated an issue with the spacecraft’s thrusters, which keep the distant explorer pointed at Earth so that it can receive commands, send engineering data, and provide the unique science data it is gathering.

After 47 years, a fuel tube inside the thrusters has become clogged with silicon dioxide, a byproduct that appears with age from a rubber diaphragm in the spacecraft’s fuel tank. The clogging reduces how efficiently the thrusters can generate force. After weeks of careful planning, the team switched the spacecraft to a different set of thrusters.

The thrusters are fueled by liquid hydrazine, which is turned into gases and released in tens-of-milliseconds-long puffs to gently tilt the spacecraft’s antenna toward Earth. If the clogged thruster were healthy it would need to conduct about 40 of these short pulses per day.

Both Voyager probes feature three sets, or branches, of thrusters: two sets of attitude propulsion thrusters and one set of trajectory correction maneuver thrusters. During the mission’s planetary flybys, both types of thrusters were used for different purposes. But as Voyager 1 travels on an unchanging path out of the solar system, its thruster needs are simpler, and either thruster branch can be used to point the spacecraft at Earth.

In 2002 the mission’s engineering team, based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, noticed some fuel tubes in the attitude propulsion thruster branch being used for pointing were clogging, so the team switched to the second branch. When that branch showed signs of clogging in 2018 , the team switched to the trajectory correction maneuver thrusters and have been using that branch since then.

Now those trajectory correction thruster tubes are even more clogged than the original branches were when the team swapped them in 2018 . The clogged tubes are located inside the thrusters and direct fuel to the catalyst beds, where it is turned into gases. (These are different than the fuel tubes that send hydrazine to the thrusters.) Where the tube opening was originally only 0.01 inches (0.25 millimeters) in diameter, the clogging has reduced it to 0.0015 inches (0.035 mm), or about half the width of a human hair. As a result, the team needed to switch back to one of the attitude propulsion thruster branches.

Warming Up the Thrusters

Switching to different thrusters would have been a relatively simple operation for the mission in 1980 or even 2002. But the spacecraft’s age has introduced new challenges, primarily related to power supply and temperature. The mission has turned off all non-essential onboard systems, including some heaters, on both spacecraft to conserve their gradually shrinking electrical power supply , which is generated by decaying plutonium .

While those steps have worked to reduce power, they have also led to the spacecraft growing colder, an effect compounded by the loss of other non-essential systems that produced heat. Consequently, the attitude propulsion thruster branches have grown cold, and turning them on in that state could damage them, making the thrusters unusable.

The team determined that the best option would be to warm the thrusters before the switch by turning on what had been deemed non-essential heaters. However, as with so many challenges the Voyager team has faced, this presented a puzzle: The spacecraft’s power supply is so low that turning on non-essential heaters would require the mission to turn off something else to provide the heaters adequate electricity, and everything that’s currently operating is considered essential.

Studying the issue, they ruled out turning off one of the still-operating science instruments for a limited time because there’s a risk that the instrument would not come back online. After additional study and planning, the engineering team determined they could safely turn off one of the spacecraft’s main heaters for up to an hour, freeing up enough power to turn on the thruster heaters.

It worked. On Aug. 27, they confirmed that the needed thruster branch was back in action, helping point Voyager 1 toward Earth.

“All the decisions we will have to make going forward are going to require a lot more analysis and caution than they once did,” said Suzanne Dodd, Voyager’s project manager at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory which manages Voyager for NASA.

The spacecraft are exploring interstellar space, the region outside the bubble of particles and magnetic fields created by the Sun, where no other spacecraft are likely to visit for a long time. The mission science team is working to keep the Voyagers going for as long as possible, so they can continue to reveal what the interstellar environment is like.

News Media Contact

Calla Cofield Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. 626-808-2469 [email protected]

Related Terms

• Heliophysics
• Heliosphere
• The Solar System
• Voyager Program

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