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At this moment, two spacecraft that were launched from Earth in 1977 hurtle through space at more than 30,000 mph (48,280 km/h). They are both several billion miles away, farther from Earth than any other man-made object. On Aug. 25, 2012, one of them crossed into interstellar space, making the first spacecraft to leave the solar system

Voyager 1 and 2 carry coded messages to potential alien civilizations. They have already taught scientists a great deal about the heliosheath , the outermost layer of the solar system. But none of this is even what they were designed for.

The Voyager spacecrafts were built to fly past the outer planets ( Jupiter , Saturn , Neptune and Uranus ) and study them closely, the first time in human history they'd been observed up close. The spacecraft succeeded magnificently, advancing planetary science by vast leaps. It was only after they’d accomplished their primary mission that they continued on to become Earth’s most far-ranging explorers.

Yet it was a matter of extremely good luck and timing that the missions were possible at all -- and an equal stroke of bad luck that almost scuttled the Voyager project before it ever left the ground. These ambitious missions were the product of new advances in the science and math of orbital trajectories, but they were almost cast by the wayside in favor of the expensive space shuttle program. Virtually every unmanned space mission undertaken today relies on knowledge and experience gained by the Voyagers.

We’ll take a close look at the ungainly Voyager space probes and all the technical equipment they carry on board. We’ll trace their trajectory from the development stages to their ultimate fate light years away from Earth. There will be stops at the largest planets in our solar system along the way. And if you’re wondering what's on the golden records each Voyager carries as messages for alien life forms, we’ll give them a spin. Will any aliens ever find them?

Voyager 1 and 2: The Grand Tour

Voyager equipment, to neptune and beyond, voyager golden record.

The 1970s were a transitional period for the U.S. space effort. The Apollo program was coming to a close, and NASA was trying to figure out what form manned spaceflight would take. The Mariner missions expanded our knowledge of the inner planets by sending space probes to fly past (and in some cases orbit) Mars , Venus and Mercury . There were tentative plans to send a Mariner mission to visit some of the outer planets, but using chemical rocket propulsion, such a trip would take 15 years or more.

At the same time, important advances were being made in the science of gravity-assisted orbital trajectories . While the math and physics involved are pretty complicated, the basic idea is that a spacecraft can use the gravity of a nearby planet to give it a large boost in velocity as long as the spacecraft follows the proper orbit. The higher the mass of the planet, the stronger the gravitational force, and the bigger the boost. That meant that once a space probe reached Jupiter (the most massive planet in our solar system ), it could use Jupiter’s gravity like a slingshot and head out to explore the more distant planets.

In 1965, an engineer named Gary Flandro noticed that in the mid-1970s, the outer planets would be aligned in such a way as to make it possible for a spacecraft to visit them all using a series of gravity-assisted boosts [source: Evans ]. This particular alignment wasn't just a once-in-a-lifetime event -- it wouldn't occur again for another 176 years. It was an amazing coincidence that the technical ability to accomplish such a mission was developed a few years before the planets lined up to allow it.

Initially, the ambitious project, known as the Grand Tour, would have sent a series of probes to visit all the outer planets. In 1972, however, budget projections for the project were approaching $900 million, and NASA was planning development of the space shuttle [source: Evans ]. With the immense shuttle development costs looming, the Grand Tour was cancelled and replaced with a more modest mission profile. This would be an extension of the Mariner program, referred to as the Mariner Jupiter-Saturn mission (MJS) . Based on the Mariner platform and improved with knowledge gained from Pioneer 10’s 1973 fly-by of Jupiter, the new probes eventually took the name Voyager. Design was completed in 1977. Optimistic NASA engineers thought they might be able to use gravity-assisted trajectories to reach Uranus and Neptune if the initial mission to visit Jupiter and Saturn (and some of their moons) was completed successfully. The idea of the Grand Tour flickered back to life.

The final Voyager mission plan looked like this: Two spacecraft (Voyager 1 and Voyager 2) would be launched a few weeks apart. Voyager 1 would fly past Jupiter and several of Jupiter’s moons from a relatively close distance, scanning and taking photos. Voyager 2 would also fly past Jupiter, but at a more conservative distance. If all went well, both probes would be catapulted toward Saturn by Jupiter’s gravity. Voyager 1 would then investigate Saturn, specifically the rings, as well as the moon Titan. At that point, Voyager 1’s trajectory would take it out of the solar system’s ecliptic (the plane of the planets’ orbits), away from all other planets, and eventually out of the solar system itself.

Meanwhile, Voyager 2 would visit Saturn and several of Saturn’s moons. If it was still functioning properly when that was completed, it would be boosted by Saturn’s gravity to visit Uranus and Neptune before also leaving the ecliptic and exiting the solar system. This was considered a long shot, but amazingly, everything worked as planned.

Next, what kind of hardware did the Voyagers carry into space?

Voyager 2 launched from Cape Canaveral, Fla., on board a Titan-Centaur rocket on Aug. 20, 1977. Voyager 1 launched on Sept. 5, 1977. Why is the numbering reversed? Once en route to the outer planets, Voyager 1 passed by Voyager 2 and reached Jupiter first. NASA thought the public would be confused if Voyager 2 started reporting back first, so the numbering doesn't follow the launch order.

Both Voyager spacecraft are identical. They don't have a sleek, aerodynamic design because there's no aerodynamic friction in space to worry about. Weighing 1,592 pounds (722 kilograms), they're made up of a main bus, a high-gain antenna, three booms that held scientific instruments and the power supply, and two other antennae.

The main bus is the body of the Voyager. It's a 10-sided box 5.9 feet (1.8 meters) across, and it contains some scientific instruments, electronics and a fuel tank for the rocket thrusters. The thrusters are used to reorient the craft as it moves through space.

Mounted on top of the main bus, the high-gain antenna is 12 feet (3.7 meters) across and looks like a satellite dish. This antenna is how the Voyagers receive commands from Earth and send the data they gather back. No matter where a Voyager spacecraft flies, the high-gain antenna always points toward Earth.

One of the booms extending off of the main bus carries Voyager’s radioisotope thermoelectric power supply . Pellets of plutonium dioxide release heat through natural decay. This heat is converted into electricity using a series of thermocouples. Although the power output isn't very strong, it powers the electronics and instruments on board the Voyagers for a very long time. Power isn't expected to deplete completely until 2020. The power supply was placed on a boom to keep the radiation from interfering with the other scientific instruments.

The other two booms carry a series of instruments. These include:

• Magnetometer
• Cosmic ray detector
• Plasma detector
• Photopolarimeter
• Infrared interferometer
• Spectrometer
• Ultraviolet spectrometer
• Low energy charged particle detector
• Plasma wave detector

[source: Evans, Dethloff & Schorn ]

Perhaps the most significant instruments on board the Voyagers, as far as the public is concerned, are the cameras. Also mounted on the instrument boom, the cameras have a resolution of 800x800, with both wide-angle and narrow-field versions. The cameras returned unprecedented photos of the outer planets and gave us views of our solar system that we had never before witnessed (including the famous departure shot showing both Earth and Earth’s moon in the same frame). The boom carrying the cameras could be moved independently from the rest of the craft.

The Voyager’s computer system was very impressive as well. Knowing the craft would be on its own much of the time, with the lag between command and response from Earth growing longer the farther the craft went into space, engineers developed a self-repairing computer system . The computer has multiple modules that compare the data they receive and the output instructions they decide on. If one module differs from the others, it's assumed to be faulty and is eliminated from the system, replaced by one of the backup modules. It was tested shortly after launch, when a delay in boom deployment was misread as a malfunction. The problem was corrected successfully.

In the next section, we’ll find out what we learned from the Voyager missions.

While the Voyagers themselves did all the data gathering, there were important mission elements on the ground as well. The Voyagers’ signals became increasingly difficult to detect as they flew out into the outer solar system, so NASA improved a worldwide network of radio receiving stations to better detect them. A series of 230-foot (70-meter) radio dishes pull in the Voyager data and send signals out to it, maintaining almost continuous communication [source: Evans ].

Although the lifetime mission cost for Voyager exceeded $750 million, by 1989 the spacecrafts had returned enough scientific data to fill 6,000 editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica [source: Evans ]. The science modules on board were chosen from proposals submitted by research teams across the United States. The information about Jupiter , Saturn , Uranus and Neptune (and many of their moons) that we learned from the Voyager missions wasn't just vast in quantity, but also in influence. It shaped science textbooks in schools across the U.S., informed public perceptions of the solar system and laid the foundation for the modern space program. Much of what we know about the outer planets came from Voyager. That’s not to mention the thousands of photographs taken from vantage points humans had never experienced before. Those brilliant images of Jupiter and Saturn fired the public’s imagination and fueled enthusiasm for future space exploration.

From Voyager, we learned more about the weather on Jupiter; the rings around Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus; volcanic activity on Jupiter's moon Io; the masses and densities of Saturn’s moons; the atmospheric pressure on Titan, Saturn's largest moon; the magnetic field of Uranus; and a persistent weather system on Neptune as large as Earth , known as the Great Dark Spot . By the time Voyager 2 reached Neptune, it was 1989. More than 10 years had passed since launch, and many of the scientists working on the original mission had moved on. Voyager had passed by Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus in 1979, 1981 and 1986, respectively.

So where are they now? The two Voyagers aren't together. Voyager 1 is moving north (relative to the orientation of Earth out of the solar system), while Voyager 2 is moving south. In 2007, they both entered the heliosheath, the outermost section of the solar system. There, the solar wind meets interstellar magnetic fields and forms a boundary with a shock wave. The Voyagers traversed the shock wave and sent data back, giving astronomers their first idea of the shape and location of the heliosheath. On Sept. 21, 2013, Voyager scientists reported that Voyager 1 left the solar system on Aug. 25, 2012.

Although some instruments on the Voyagers are no longer working, they do continue to send back important information. Imagine a car that has been on the road continuously since 1977, and you'll get some idea of how amazing these spacecraft are. At their current distance, it takes radio signals traveling at the speed of light more than 14 hours to reach Earth. The craft are running low on fuel for their orienting thrusters and will have to power down some instruments in the coming years as their plutonium runs out as well. By 2020, they will be dark and silent.

Yet they will continue on their current trajectory, moving over 30,000 mph (48,280 km/h), arcing out into the Milky Way for tens of thousands of years. With no atmosphere in space, they will never corrode, and there is little for them to crash into in interstellar space. It will take them about 40,000 years before they even come within light years of another star . The Voyagers may be traveling for hundreds of thousands or even millions of years.

What if the Voyagers meet an intelligent alien civilization some day? We’ve left a message for them.

When NASA realized that the Voyagers would eventually travel beyond the edge of our solar system , they decided it might be a good idea to include some kind of message to any intelligent aliens who might some day find them. A committee headed by astronomer Carl Sagan put these messages together. They're contained on gold-plated copper discs, which are engraved much like a vinyl record album. A portion of the disc contains audio information, including a variety of music, greetings spoken in 55 different languages (including some that are very obscure or long extinct) and a selection of nature sounds. The discs also include 122 images, encoded as vibrations on the disc with instructions for decoding.

On each disc’s cover plate are several symbols that depict the method of playing back the record (a stylus and mounting platter are included as well). The image decoding instructions are revealed, describing the “image start” signal, the aspect ratio of the images, and a reproduction of the first image, so the aliens would know if they got it right. A star map clearly showing the location of Earth completes the picture.

If the aliens wonder how long the Voyager they find has been traveling, they can examine the piece of uranium-238 attached to the main bus near the record. Examining the isotope ratios (assuming they know the half-life of uranium-238), they could then deduce how long the sample had been in space.

What music will the aliens hear when they play the record? Mostly traditional music from a variety of cultures, such as Native Americans chants, Scottish bagpipes and African ritual music. It is also something of a “greatest hits” collection of classical music. The most contemporary songs are “Johnny B. Goode” by Chuck Berry and a jazz number by Louis Armstrong.

The images on the record are varied, and include maps of Earth, images of the other planets in our solar system, pictures of various animals and several images of humans. Carl Sagan wrote a book about the record, called "Murmurs of Earth." A companion CD-ROM was released decades later.

The Voyager discs are similar to a plaque that was placed aboard Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11, although the creators of the Voyager discs spent a lot of time making sure the aliens could decode it. Many Earth scientists could not decode the information on the Pioneer plaque. At the time, some voiced concerns that any hostile aliens finding the Voyager disc would have a map leading them directly to Earth. However, the Voyagers will spend tens of thousands of years in interstellar space before they are anywhere near another star, so the matter isn’t really an immediate concern. If the discs are ever found, it may be so far in the future that humans no longer exist.

For more interesting articles about space exploration, try the next page.

In "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" (the first Star Trek film), much of the plot revolved around a strange electronic life form known as V’Ger. By the end of the film, it is revealed that V’Ger is one of the Voyager space probes (Voyager 6, which never existed in the real world) that has either gained sentience on its own or been given sentience by an alien race. It wants to eradicate all of humanity, but instead evolves into yet another form of life.

Within the fictional Star Trek universe, there is some dispute as to V’Ger’s place in Trek history. Some suggest that V’Ger created the Borg, a cold, logical alien race that would become the primary villains in "Star Trek: The Next Generation." Others think the Borg encountered V’Ger, but that the cyborg aliens existed before the chance meeting.

Voyager Space FAQ

What is the temperature of interstellar space, how far away is voyager 2, how far away is voyager 1, do the voyagers have a camera, what is the difference between voyager 1 and 2, lots more information, related articles.

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More Great Links

• Voyager Web site
• Evans, Ben. "NASA's Voyager Missions: Exploring the Outer Solar System and Beyond." Springer; 1st ed 2004. 2nd printing edition (April 15, 2008).
• Dethloff, Henry C & Schorn, Ronald A. "Voyager's Grand Tour: To the Outer Planets and Beyond." Smithsonian (March 17, 2003).
• NASA. “Voyager 2 Proves Solar System Is Squashed.” http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/

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The voyage to interstellar space.

Susannah Darling

Katy Mersmann

The magnetometer, the cosmic ray subsystem, the plasma instrument.

By all means, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 shouldn’t even be here. Now in interstellar space, they are pushing the limits of spacecraft and exploration, journeying through the cosmic neighborhood, giving us our first direct look into the space beyond our star.

But when they launched in 1977, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 had a different mission: to explore the outer solar system and gather observations directly at the source, from outer planets we had only seen with remote studies. But now, four decades after launch, they’ve journeyed farther than any other spacecraft from Earth; into the cold, quiet world of interstellar space.

Originally designed to measure the properties of the giant planets, the instruments on both spacecraft have spent the past few decades painting a picture of the propagation of solar events from our Sun. And the Voyagers’ new mission focuses not only on effects on space from within our heliosphere — the giant bubble around the Sun filled up by the constant outflow of solar particles called the solar wind — but from outside of it. Though they once helped us look closer at the planets and their relationship to the Sun, they now give us clues about the nature of interstellar space as the spacecraft continue their journey.

The environment they explore is colder, subtler and more tenuous than ever before, and yet the Voyagers continue on, exploring and measuring the interstellar medium, a smorgasbord of gas, plasma and particles from stars and gas regions not originating from our system. Three of the spacecraft’s 10 instruments are the major players that study how space inside the heliosphere differs from interstellar space. Looking at this data together allows scientist to piece together our best-yet picture of the edge of the heliosphere and the interstellar medium. Here are the stories they tell.

On the Sun Spot , we have been exploring the various instruments on Voyager 2 one at a time, and analyzing how scientists read the individual sets of data sent to Earth from the far-reaching spacecraft. But one instrument we have not yet talked about is Voyager 2’s Magnetometer, or MAG for short.

During the Voyagers’ first planetary mission, the MAG was designed to investigate the magnetospheres of planets and their moons, determining the physical mechanics and processes of the interactions of those magnetic fields and the solar wind. After that mission ended, the Voyager spacecraft studied the magnetic field of the heliosphere and beyond, observing the magnetic reach of the Sun and the changes that occur within that reach during solar activity.

Getting the magnetic data as we travel further into space requires an interesting trick. Voyager spins itself around, in a calibration maneuver that allows Voyager to differentiate between the spacecraft’s own magnetic field — that goes along for the ride as it spins — and the magnetic fields of the space it’s traveling through.

The initial peek into the magnetic field beyond the Sun’s influence happened when Voyager 1 crossed the heliopause in 2012. Scientists saw that within the heliosphere, the strength of the magnetic field was quite variable, changing and jumping as Voyager 1 moved through the heliosphere. These changes are due to solar activity. But once Voyager 1 crossed into interstellar space, that variability was silenced. Although the strength of the field was similar to what it was inside the heliosphere, it no longer had the variability associated with the Sun’s outbursts.

This graph shows the magnitude, or the strength, of the magnetic field around the heliopause from January 2012 out to May 2014. Before encountering the heliopause, marked by the orange line, the magnetic strength fluctuates quite a bit. After a bumpy ride through the heliopause in 2012, the magnetic strength stops fluctuating and begins to stabilize in 2013, once the spacecraft is far enough out into the interstellar medium.

In November 2018, Voyager 2 also crossed the heliopause and similarly experienced quite the bumpy ride out of the heliopause. Scientists are excited to see how its journey differs from its twin spacecraft.

Scientists are still working through the MAG data from Voyager 2, and are excited to see how Voyager 2’s journey differed from Voyager 1.

Much like the MAG, the Cosmic Ray Subsystem — called CRS — was originally designed to measure planetary systems. The CRS focused on the compositions of energetic particles in the magnetospheres of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Scientists used it to study the charged particles within the solar system and their distribution between the planets. Since it passed the planets, however, the CRS has been studying the heliosphere’s charged particles and — now — the particles in the interstellar medium. 

The CRS measures the count rate, or how many particles detected per second. It does this by using two telescopes: the High Energy Telescope, which measures high energy particles (70MeV) identifiable as interstellar particles, and the Low Energy Telescope, which measures low-energy particles (5MeV) that originate from our Sun. You can think of these particles like a bowling ball hitting a bowling pin versus a bullet hitting the same pin — both will make a measurable impact on the detector, but they’re moving at vastly different speeds. By measuring the amounts of the two kinds of particles, Voyager can provide a sense of the space environment it’s traveling through.

These graphs show the count rate — how many particles per second are interacting with the CRS on average each day — of the galactic ray particles measured by the High Energy Telescope (top graph) and the heliospheric particles measured by the Low Energy Telescope (bottom graph). The line in red shows the data from Voyager 1, time shifted forward 6.32 years from 2012 to match up with the data from Voyager around November 2018, shown in blue.

CRS data from Voyager 2 on Nov. 5, 2018, showed the interstellar particle count rate of the High Energy Telescope increasing to count rates similar to what Voyager 1 saw then leveling out. Similarly, the Low Energy Telescope shows a severe decrease in heliospheric originating particles. This was a key indication that Voyager 2 had moved into interstellar space. Scientists can keep watching these counts to see if the composition of interstellar space particles changes along the journey.

The Plasma Science instrument, or PLS, was made to measure plasma and ionized particles around the outer planets and to measure the solar wind’s influence on those planets. The PLS is made up of four Faraday cups, an instrument that measures the plasma as it passes through the cups and calculates the plasma’s speed, direction and density.

The plasma instrument on Voyager 1 was damaged during a fly-by of Saturn and had to be shut off long before Voyager 1 exited the heliosphere, making it unable to measure the interstellar medium’s plasma properties. With Voyager 2’s crossing, scientists will get the first-ever plasma measurements of the interstellar medium.

Scientists predicted that interstellar plasma measured by Voyager 2 would be higher in density but lower in temperature and speed than plasma inside the heliosphere. And in November 2018, the instrument saw just that for the first time. This suggests that the plasma in this region is getting colder and slower, and, like cars slowing down on a freeway, is beginning to pile up around the heliopause and into the interstellar medium.

And now, thanks to Voyager 2’s PLS, we have a never-before-seen perspective on our heliosphere: The plasma velocity from Earth to the heliopause.

These three graphs tell an amazing story, summarizing a journey of 42 years in one plot. The top section of this graph shows the plasma velocity, how fast the plasma across the heliosphere is moving, against the distance out from Earth. The distance is in astronomical units; one astronomical unit is the average distance between the Sun and Earth, about 93 million miles. For context, Saturn is 10 AU from Earth, while Pluto is about 40 AU away.

The heliopause crossing happened at 120 AU, when the velocity of plasma coming out from the Sun drops to zero (seen on the top graph), and the outward flow of the plasma is diverted — seen in the increase in the two bottom graphs, which show the upwards and downward speeds (the normal velocity, middle graph) and the sideways speed of the solar wind (the tangential velocity, bottom graph) of the solar wind plasma, respectively. This means as the solar wind begins to interact with the interstellar medium, it is pushed out and away, like a wave hitting the side of a cliff.  

Looking at each instrument in isolation, however, does not tell the full story of what interstellar space at the heliopause looks like. Together, these instruments tell a story of the transition from the turbulent, active space within our Sun’s influence to the relatively calm waters on the edge of interstellar space.

The MAG shows that the magnetic field strength decreases sharply in the interstellar medium. The CRS data shows an increase in interstellar cosmic rays, and a decrease in heliospheric particles. And finally, the PLS shows that there’s no longer any detectable solar wind.

Now that the Voyagers are outside of the heliosphere, their new perspective will provide new information about the formation and state of our Sun and how it interacts with interstellar space, along with insight into how other stars interact with the interstellar medium.

Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are providing our first look at the space we would have to pass through if humanity ever were to travel beyond our home star — a glimpse of our neighborhood in space.  

Related links:

• Video: “NASA Science Live: Going Interstellar”
• Explore Voyager 2 data on “The Sun Spot” blog

By  Susannah Darling NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center , Greenbelt, Md.

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How fast are the Voyager spacecrafts travelling?

NASA's Voyage probes are speeding their way around the Solar System.

Keiron Allen

Asked by: Anonymous

Launched in 1977, NASA’s two Voyager probes surveyed Jupiter and Saturn, with Voyager 2 also visiting Uranus and Neptune before heading out of the Solar System. Voyager 1 has since become the fastest and most distant man-made object in the Universe, travelling at around 61,500km/h at a distance of 17.6 billion km from the Earth. Perhaps most incredible of all, NASA is still in communication with it, despite radio signals taking 16 hours to reach it.

Subscribe to BBC Focus magazine for fascinating new Q&As every month and follow @sciencefocusQA on Twitter for your daily dose of fun science facts.

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Ask Smithsonian 2017

A Smithsonian magazine special report

How Far Can Voyager I Go?

The spacecraft will run out of power around 2025, but where will it travel to first?

Ken Croswell

To casual stargazers, space seems to have no boundaries.  Yet fans of NASA’s farthest-flung spacecraft can’t stop talking about how the probe is on the verge of piercing a border surrounding the planets and plunging into the realm beyond.

Since Voyager 1 blasted off in 1977, it has skirted past the kaleidoscopic clouds of Jupiter and the icy rings of Saturn. The spacecraft is now 124 times farther from the Sun than we are, and in the time it takes you to read this paragraph will venture outward 100 miles more. Its most recent observations raise questions about our solar system’s true reach.

Although we often consider Pluto the end of the solar system, Voyager 1 is more than three times farther than that and yet still within the Sun’s domain. Our mighty star currently shines on the probe with the brightness of more than a dozen full moons. The Sun makes its sphere of influence known with more than just visible light, spewing out a wind of particles that envelops the planets in a protective bubble called the heliosphere.

No one knows exactly how big this bubble is, which explains all the recent excitement. Back in 2004, Voyager 1 started seeing signs that the end was near, prompting some observers to talk about “the solar system’s edge.” The solar wind should slow abruptly as it presses against the space beyond, and Voyager saw just such a change. A twin probe, Voyager 2, saw the same thing in 2007. Last year, Voyager 1 witnessed another exit sign. The number of cosmic rays from interstellar space went up, perhaps because the Sun’s magnetic field can no longer deflect as many high-speed charged particles. But not until Voyager feels the magnetic field lines flip will astronomers know that the craft has escaped the heliosphere. “It could happen in the next several months, or it could be several more years,” says chief Voyager scientist Ed Stone of Caltech.

If Voyager 1 does manage to leave the heliosphere before it runs out of power around 2025, the spacecraft will probe the Local Cloud, a wisp of interstellar flotsam absorbing traces of light from nearby stars. The cloud is a cosmic wanderer, not a permanent feature, but it plays a role in the helio­sphere’s size: It compresses the heliosphere, albeit just a little because the cloud is diffuse. In the past, dense clouds might have so squeezed the heliosphere that even Earth sat outside the shield, exposed to cosmic rays that may have helped or hindered the origin of life. Our home planet is surely part of the solar system, so any limit that excludes Earth can hardly mark the system’s outer bounds.

A better measure of that final frontier would be the extent of the Sun’s gravitational grip, which reaches much farther still. A trillion frigid objects orbit the Sun beyond Pluto and the helio­sphere, in the Oort cloud of comets. Although no one knows for sure, the comets may reach halfway to Alpha Centauri, the closest star system at 4.3 light-years away. In that case, despite its swift speed, Voyager 1 is like a California-bound traveler who has walked just a few miles from the Atlantic seaboard. At the end of our lifetimes, the solar system’s ultimate boundary will remain far off.

“The sky’s the limit” may be just another way of saying there are no limits, but space does have borders. We just don’t know exactly where they are.

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May 30, 2024

Voyager 1’s Revival Offers Inspiration for Everyone on Earth

Instruments may fail, but humanity’s most distant sentinel will keep exploring, and inspiring us all

By Saswato R. Das

Artist's rendering of a Voyager spacecraft in deep space.

Dotted Zebra/Alamy Stock Photo

Amid April’s litany of bad news—war in Gaza, protests on American campuses, an impasse in Ukraine—a little uplift came for science buffs.

NASA has reestablished touch with Voyager 1 , the most distant thing built by our species, now hurtling through interstellar space far beyond the orbit of Pluto. The extraordinarily durable spacecraft had stopped transmitting data in November, but NASA engineers managed a very clever work-around, and it is sending data again. Now more than 15 billion miles away, Voyager 1 is the farthest human object, and continues to speed away from us at approximately 38,000 miles per hour.

Like an old car that continues to run, or an uncle blessed with an uncommonly long life, the robotic spacecraft is a super ager that goes on and on—and, in doing so, has captivated space buffs everywhere.

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Launched on September 5, 1977, the one-ton Voyager 1 was meant to chart the outer solar system, in particular the gas giant planets Jupiter and Saturn, and Saturn’s moon, Titan. Its twin, Voyager 2 , launched the same year, followed a different trajectory with a slightly different mission to explore the outer planets before heading to the solar system’s edge.

Those were NASA’s glory days. A few years earlier, NASA had successfully landed men on the moon—and won the space race for the U.S. NASA’s engineers were the envy of the world.

To get to Jupiter and Saturn, both Voyagers had to traverse the asteroid belt, which is full of rocks and debris orbiting the sun. They had to survive cosmic rays, intense radiation from Jupiter and other perils of space. But the two spacecraft made it without a hitch.

President Jimmy Carter held office when Voyager 1 was launched from Cape Canaveral; Elvis Presley had died just three weeks before; gas was about 60 cents a gallon; and, like now, the Middle East was in crisis, with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat trying to find peace.

Voyager 1 sent back spectacular photos of Jupiter and its giant red spot. It showed how dynamic the Jovian atmosphere was, with clouds and storms. It also took pictures of Jupiter’s moon Io, with its volcanoes, and Saturn’s moon Titan , which astronomers think has an atmosphere similar to the primordial Earth’s. The spacecraft discovered a thin ring around Jupiter and two new Jovian moons, which were named Thebe and Metis. On reaching Saturn, it discovered five new moons as well as a new ring.

And then Voyager 1 continued on its journey and sent images back from the edge of the solar system. Many of us remember the Pale Blue Dot , a haunting picture of the Earth it took on Feb 14, 1990, when it was a distance of 3.7 billion miles from the sun. The astronomer Carl Sagan wrote:

“There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.”

By then Voyager 1 had long outlived its planetary mission but kept faithfully calling home as it traveled beyond the solar system into the realm of the stars. By 2012 Voyager 1 had reached the heliosphere , the farthest edge of the solar system. There, it penetrated the heliopause, where the solar wind ends, stopped by particles coming from the interstellar medium, the vast space between the stars. (Astronomers know that the space between the stars is not totally empty but permeated by a rarefied gas .)

From Voyager 1, scientists learned that the heliopause is quite dynamic and first measured the magnetic field of the Milky Way beyond the solar system. And its instruments kept sending data as it traveled through the interstellar medium.

On hearing that Voyager 1 had gone dark, I had checked in with Louis Lanzerotti , a former Bell Labs planetary scientist who did the calibrations for the Voyager 1 spacecraft and was a principal investigator on many experiments. He told me that a NASA manager in the 1970s had doubted that the spacecraft’s mechanical scan platform, which pointed instruments at targets, and very thin solid state detectors, which took those edge of the solar system readings, on the spacecraft would survive. They not only survived but worked flawlessly for all this time, Lanzerotti said, providing excellent data for decades. He was overjoyed on hearing the news that Voyager 1 was still alive.

Voyager 1 instruments have power until 2025 . After that, they will shut off, one by one. But there is nothing to stop the spacecraft as it speeds away from us in the vast emptiness of space.

Thousands of years from now, maybe when the human race has left this planet, Voyager 1, the tiny little spacecraft that could, will still continue its inexorable journey to the stars.

This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

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

Voyager 1, already the most distant human-made object in the cosmos, reaches 100 astronomical units from the sun on Tuesday, August 15 at 5:13 p.m. Eastern time (2:13 p.m. Pacific time).

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Scientists' predictions for the long-term future of the Voyager Golden Records will blow your mind

Buckle up, everyone, and let's take a ride on a universe-size time machine.

The future is a slippery thing, but sometimes physics can help. And while human destiny will remain ever unknown, the fate of two of our artifacts can be calculated in staggering detail.

Those artifacts are the engraved "Golden Records" strapped to NASA's twin Voyager spacecraft , which have passed into interstellar space. Although the spacecraft will likely fall silent in a few years, the records will remain. Nick Oberg, a doctoral candidate at the Kapteyn Astronomical Institute in the Netherlands, and a colleague wanted to calculate which (if any) stars the two Voyager spacecraft may encounter in the long future of our galaxy.

But the models let them forecast much, much farther into the future. Oberg presented their work at the 237th meeting of the American Astronomical Society , held virtually due to the coronavirus pandemic, on Jan. 12, where he spun a tale of the long future of the twin Voyagers and their Golden Records.

Related: Pale Blue Dot at 30: Voyager 1's iconic photo of Earth from space reveals our place in the universe

NASA launched Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 in 1977 to trek across the solar system. On each was a 12-inch (30 centimeters) large gold-plated copper disk. The brainchild of famed astronomer Carl Sagan, the Golden Records were engraved with music and photographs meant to represent Earth and its humans to any intelligent beings the spacecraft meet on their long journeys. Both spacecraft visited Jupiter and Saturn, then the twins parted ways: Voyager 1 studied Saturn's moon Titan while Voyager 2 swung past Uranus and Neptune. 

In 2012, Voyager 1 passed through the heliopause that marks the edge of the sun's solar wind and entered interstellar space; in 2018, Voyager 2 did so as well. Now, the two spacecraft are chugging through the vast outer reaches of the solar system. They continue to send signals back to Earth, updating humans about their adventures far beyond the planets, although those bulletins may cease in a few years, as the spacecraft are both running low on power .

But their journeys are far from over.

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Oberg and his colleague combined tracking the Voyagers' trajectories forward with studying the environments the spacecraft will fly through to estimate the odds of the Golden Records surviving their adventures while remaining legible. The result is a forecast that stretches beyond not just humanity's likely extinction, but also beyond the collision of the Milky Way with the neighboring Andromeda galaxy — beyond even the extinction of most stars.

Related: The Golden Record in pictures: Voyager probes' message to space explained

Milky Way sightseein

Unsurprisingly, the duo's research ambitions didn't start out quite so vast. The new research was inspired by the release of the second batch of data from the European Space Agency's spacecraft Gaia , which specializes in mapping more than a billion stars super precisely.

"Our original goal was to determine with a very high precision which stars the Voyagers might one day closely encounter using the at the time newly released Gaia catalog of stars," Oberg said during his presentation. So he and his co-author began by tracing the Voyagers' journeys to date and projecting their trajectories out into the future.

But don't get excited for any upcoming milestones. Not until about 20,000 years from now will the Voyagers pass through the Oort cloud — the shell of comets and icy rubble that orbits the sun at a distance of up to 100,000 astronomical units, or 100,000 times the average Earth-sun distance — finally waving goodbye to its solar system of origin.

"At that point for the first time the craft will begin to feel the gravitational pull of other stars more strongly than that of our own sun," Oberg said.

It's another 10,000 years before the spacecraft actually come near an alien star, specifically a red dwarf star called Ross 248. That flyby will occur about 30,000 years from now, Oberg said, although it might be a stretch to say that the spacecraft will pass by that star. "It's actually more like Ross 248 shooting past the nearly stationary Voyagers," he said.

By 500 million years from now, the solar system and the Voyagers alike will complete a full orbit through the Milky Way. There's no way to predict what will have happened on Earth's surface by then, but it's a timespan on the scale of the formation and destruction of Pangaea and other supercontinents, Oberg said.

Throughout this galactic orbit, the Voyager spacecraft will oscillate up and down, with Voyager 1 doing so more dramatically than its twin. According to these models, Voyager 1 will travel so far above the main disk of the galaxy that it will see stars at just half the density as we do.

Odds of destruction

The same difference in vertical motion will also shape the differing odds each spacecraft's Golden Record has of survival.

The records were designed to last, meant to survive perhaps a billion years in space : beneath the golden sheen is a protective aluminum casing and, below that, the engraved copper disks themselves. But to truly understand how long these objects may survive, you have to know what conditions they'll experience, and that means knowing where they will be.

Specifically, Oberg and his colleague needed to know how much time the spacecraft would spend swathed in the Milky Way's vast clouds of interstellar dust , which he called "one of the few phenomena that could actually act to damage the spacecraft."

It's a grim scenario, dust pounding into the Voyagers at a speed of a few miles or kilometers per second. "The grains will act as a steady rain that slowly chips away at the skin of the spacecraft," Oberg said. "A dust grain only one-thousandth of a millimeter across will still leave a small vaporized crater when it impacts."

Voyager 1's vertical oscillations mean that spacecraft will spend more time above and below the plane of the galaxy, where the clouds are thickest. Oberg and his colleague simulated thousands of times over the paths of the two spacecraft and their encounters with the dust clouds, modeling the damage the Golden Records would incur along the way.

That work also requires taking into consideration the possibility that a cloud's gravity might tug at one of the Voyagers' trajectories, Oberg said. "The clouds have so much mass concentrated in one place that they actually may act to bend the trajectory of the spacecraft and fling them into new orbits — sometimes much farther out, sometimes even deeper toward the galactic core."

Both Golden Records have good odds of remaining legible, since their engraved sides are tucked away against the spacecraft bodies. The outer surface of Voyager 1's record is more likely to erode away, but the information on Voyager 2's record is more likely to become illegible, Oberg said.

"The main reason for this is because the orbit that Voyager 2 is flung into is more chaotic, and it's significantly more difficult to predict with any certainty of exactly what sort of environment it's going to be flying through," he said.

But despite the onslaught and potential detours, "Both Golden Records are highly likely to survive at least partially intact for a span of over 5 billion years," Oberg said.

Related: Photos from NASA's Voyager 1 and 2 probes

After the Milky Way's end

After those 5 billion years, modeling is tricky. That's when the Milky Way is due to collide with its massive neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy , and things get messy. "The orderly spiral shape will be severely warped, and possibly destroyed entirely," Oberg said. The Voyagers will be caught up in the merger, with the details difficult to predict so far in advance.

Meanwhile, the vicarious sightseeing continues. Oberg and his colleague calculated that in this 5-billion-year model-friendly period, each of the Voyagers likely visits a star besides our sun within about 150 times the distance between Earth and the sun, or three times the distance between the sun and Pluto at the dwarf planet's most distant point.

Precisely which star that might be, however, is tricky — it may not even be a star we know today.

"While neither Voyager is likely to get particularly close to any star before the galaxies collide, the craft are likely to at least pass through the outskirts of some [star] system," Oberg said. "The very strange part is that that actually might be a system that does not yet exist, of a star that has yet to be born."

Such are the perils of working on a scale of billions of years.

From here, the Voyagers' fate depends on the conditions of the galactic merger , Oberg said.

The collision itself might kick a spacecraft out of the newly monstrous galaxy — a one in five chance, he said — although it would remain stuck in the neighborhood. If that occurs, the biggest threat to the Golden Records would become collisions with high-energy cosmic rays and the odd molecule of hot gas, Oberg said; these impacts would be rarer than the dust that characterized their damage inside the Milky Way.

Inside the combined galaxy, the Voyagers' fate would depend on how much dust is left behind by the merger; Oberg said that may well be minimal as star formation and explosion both slow, reducing the amount of dust flung into the galaxy.

Depending on their luck with this dust, the Voyagers may be able to ride out trillions of trillions of trillions of years, long enough to cruise through a truly alien cosmos, Oberg said.

"Such a distant time is far beyond the point where stars have exhausted their fuel and star formation has ceased in its entirety in the universe," he said. "The Voyagers will be drifting through what would be, to us, a completely unrecognizable galaxy, free of so-called main-sequence stars , populated almost exclusively by black holes and stellar remnants such as a white dwarfs and neutron stars."

It's a dark future, Oberg added. "The only source of significant illumination in this epoch will be supernovas that results from the once-in-a-trillion-year collision between these stellar remnants that still populate the galaxy," he said. "Our work, found on these records, thus may bear witness to these isolated flashes in the dark."

Email Meghan Bartels at [email protected] or follow her on Twitter @meghanbartels. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

China has made it to Mars .

The nation's first fully homegrown Mars mission, Tianwen-1 , arrived in orbit around the Red Planet today (Feb. 10), according to Chinese media reports.

The milestone makes China the sixth entity to get a probe to Mars, joining the United States, the Soviet Union, the European Space Agency, India and the United Arab Emirates, whose Hope orbiter made it to the Red Planet just yesterday (Feb. 9).

And today's achievement sets the stage for something even more epic a few months from now — the touchdown of Tianwen-1's lander-rover pair on a large plain in Mars' northern hemisphere called Utopia Planitia , which is expected to take place this May. (China doesn't typically publicize details of its space missions in advance, so we don't know for sure exactly when that landing will occur.)

Related: Here's what China's Tianwen-1 Mars mission will do See more: China's Tianwen-1 Mars mission in photos

Book of Mars: $22.99 at Magazines Direct

Within 148 pages, explore the mysteries of Mars. With the latest generation of rovers, landers and orbiters heading to the Red Planet, we're discovering even more of this world's secrets than ever before. Find out about its landscape and formation, discover the truth about water on Mars and the search for life, and explore the possibility that the fourth rock from the sun may one day be our next home.

An ambitious mission

China took its first crack at Mars back in November 2011, with an orbiter called Yinghuo-1 that launched with Russia's Phobos-Grunt sample-return mission . But Phobos-Grunt never made it out of Earth orbit, and Yinghuo-1 crashed and burned with the Russian probe and another tagalong, the Planetary Society's Living Interplanetary Flight Experiment.

Tianwen-1 ( which means "Questioning the Heavens" ) is a big step up from Yinghuo-1, however. For starters, this current mission is an entirely China-led affair; it was developed by the China National Space Administration (with some international collaboration) and launched atop a Chinese Long March 5 rocket on July 23, 2020.

Tianwen-1 is also far more ambitious than the earlier orbiter, which weighed a scant 254 lbs. (115 kilograms). Tianwen-1 tipped the scales at about 11,000 lbs. (5,000 kg) at launch, and it consists of an orbiter and a lander-rover duo.

These craft will take Mars' measure in a variety of ways. The orbiter, for example, will study the planet from above using a high-resolution camera, a spectrometer, a magnetometer and an ice-mapping radar instrument, among other scientific gear.

The orbiter will also relay communications from the rover, which sports an impressive scientific suite of its own. Among the rover's gear are cameras, climate and geology instruments and ground-penetrating radar, which will hunt for pockets of water beneath Mars' red dirt. 

Occupy Mars: History of robotic Red Planet missions (infographic)

"On Earth, these pockets can host thriving microbial communities, so detecting them on Mars would be an important step in our search for life on other worlds," the Planetary Society wrote in a description of the Tianwen-1 mission .

The lander, meanwhile, will serve as a platform for the rover, deploying a ramp that the wheeled vehicle will roll down onto the Martian surface. The setup is similar to the one China has used on the moon with its Chang'e 3 and Chang'e 4 rovers, the latter of which is still going strong on Earth's rocky satellite.

If the Tianwen-1 rover and lander touch down safely this May and get to work, China will become just the second nation, after the United States, to operate a spacecraft successfully on the Red Planet's surface for an appreciable amount of time. (The Soviet Union pulled off the first-ever soft touchdown on the Red Planet with its Mars 3 mission in 1971, but that lander died less than two minutes after hitting the red dirt.)

The Tianwen-1 orbiter is scheduled to operate for at least one Mars year (about 687 Earth days), and the rover's targeted lifetime is 90 Mars days, or sols (about 93 Earth days).

Bigger things to come?

Tianwen-1 will be just China's opening act at Mars, if all goes according to plan: The nation aims to haul pristine samples of Martian material back to Earth by 2030, where they can be examined in detail for potential signs of life and clues about Mars' long-ago transition from a relatively warm and wet planet to the cold desert world it is today.

NASA has similar ambitions, and the first stage of its Mars sample-return campaign is already underway. The agency's Perseverance rover will touch down inside the Red Planet's Jezero Crater next Thursday (Feb. 18), kicking off a surface mission whose top-level tasks include searching for signs of ancient Mars life and collecting and caching several dozen samples.

Perseverance's samples will be hauled home by a joint NASA-European Space Agency campaign, perhaps as early as 2031 .

So we have a lot to look forward to in the coming days and weeks, and many reasons to keep our fingers crossed for multiple successful Red Planet touchdowns.

"More countries exploring Mars and our solar system means more discoveries and opportunities for global collaboration," the Planetary Society wrote in its Tianwen-1 description. "Space exploration brings out the best in us all, and when nations work together everyone wins."

Mike Wall is the author of " Out There " (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or 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].

Meghan is a senior writer at Space.com and has more than five years' experience as a science journalist based in New York City. She joined Space.com in July 2018, with previous writing published in outlets including Newsweek and Audubon. Meghan earned an MA in science journalism from New York University and a BA in classics from Georgetown University, and in her free time she enjoys reading and visiting museums. Follow her on Twitter at @meghanbartels.

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Stephen Clark, Ars Technica

How NASA Repaired Voyager 1 From 15 Billion Miles Away

Engineers have partially restored a 1970s-era computer on NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft after five months of long-distance troubleshooting , building confidence that humanity's first interstellar probe can eventually resume normal operations.

Several dozen scientists and engineers gathered Saturday in a conference room at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, or connected virtually, to wait for a new signal from Voyager 1. The ground team sent a command up to Voyager 1 on Thursday to recode part of the memory of the spacecraft's Flight Data Subsystem (FDS) , one of the probe's three computers.

“In the minutes leading up to when we were going to see a signal, you could have heard a pin drop in the room,” said Linda Spilker, project scientist for NASA's two Voyager spacecraft at JPL. “It was quiet. People were looking very serious. They were looking at their computer screens. Each of the subsystem (engineers) had pages up that they were looking at, to watch as they would be populated.”

Finally, a Breakthrough

Launched nearly 47 years ago, Voyager 1 is flying on an outbound trajectory more than 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, and it takes 22.5 hours for a radio signal to cover that distance at the speed of light. This means it takes nearly two days for engineers to uplink a command to Voyager 1 and get a response.

In November, Voyager 1 suddenly stopped transmitting its usual stream of data containing information about the spacecraft's health and measurements from its scientific instruments. Instead, the spacecraft's datastream was entirely unintelligible. Because the telemetry was unreadable, experts on the ground could not easily tell what went wrong. They hypothesized the source of the problem might be in the memory bank of the FDS.

There was a breakthrough last month when engineers sent up a novel command to “poke” Voyager 1's FDS to send back a readout of its memory. This readout allowed engineers to pinpoint the location of the problem in the FDS memory . The FDS is responsible for packaging engineering and scientific data for transmission to Earth.

After a few weeks, NASA was ready to uplink a solution to get the FDS to resume packing engineering data. This datastream includes information on the status of the spacecraft—things like power levels and temperature measurements. This command went up to Voyager 1 through one of NASA's large Deep Space Network antennae on Thursday.

Then, the wait for a response. Spilker, who started working on Voyager right out of college in 1977, was in the room when Voyager 1's signal reached Earth on Saturday.

“When the time came to get the signal, we could clearly see all of a sudden, boom, we had data, and there were tears and smiles and high fives,” she told Ars. “Everyone was very happy and very excited to see that, hey, we're back in communication again with Voyager 1. We're going to see the status of the spacecraft, the health of the spacecraft, for the first time in five months.”

By Joseph Cox

By Matt Burgess

By Marah Eakin

Throughout the five months of troubleshooting, Voyager's ground team continued to receive signals indicating the spacecraft was still alive. But until Saturday, they lacked insight into specific details about the status of Voyager 1.

“It’s pretty much just the way we left it,” Spilker said. “We're still in the initial phases of analyzing all of the channels and looking at their trends. Some of the temperatures went down a little bit with this period of time that's gone on, but we're pretty much seeing everything we had hoped for. And that's always good news.”

Relocating Code

Through their investigation, Voyager's ground team discovered that a single chip responsible for storing a portion of the FDS memory had stopped working, probably due to either a cosmic ray hit or a failure of aging hardware. This affected some of the computer's software code.

“That took out a section of memory,” Spilker said. “What they have to do is relocate that code into a different portion of the memory, and then make sure that anything that uses those codes, those subroutines, know to go to the new location of memory, for access and to run it.”

Only about 3 percent of the FDS memory was corrupted by the bad chip, so engineers needed to transplant that code into another part of the memory bank. But no single location is large enough to hold the section of code in its entirety, NASA said.

So the Voyager team divided the code into sections for storage in different places in the FDS. This wasn't just a copy-and-paste job. Engineers needed to modify some of the code to make sure it will all work together. “Any references to the location of that code in other parts of the FDS memory needed to be updated as well,” NASA said in a statement.

Newer NASA missions have hardware and software simulators on the ground, where engineers can test new procedures to make sure they do no harm when they uplink commands to the real spacecraft. Due to its age, Voyager doesn't have any ground simulators, and much of the mission's original design documentation remains in paper form and hasn't been digitized.

“It was really eyes-only to look at the code,” Spilker said. “So we had to triple check. Everybody was looking through and making sure we had all of the links coming together.”

This was just the first step in restoring Voyager 1 to full functionality. “We were pretty sure it would work, but until it actually happened, we didn't know 100 percent for sure,” Spilker said.

“The reason we didn’t do everything in one step is that there was a very limited amount of memory we could find quickly, so we prioritized one data mode (the engineering data mode), and relocated only the code to restore that mode,” said Jeff Mellstrom, a JPL engineer who leads the Voyager 1 “tiger team” tasked with overcoming this problem.

“The next step, to relocate the remaining three actively used science data modes, is essentially the same,” Mellstrom said in a written response to Ars. “The main difference is the available memory constraint is now even tighter. We have ideas where we could relocate the code, but we haven’t yet fully assessed the options or made a decision. These are the first steps we will start this week.”

It could take “a few weeks” to go through the sections of code responsible for packaging Voyager 1's science data in the FDS, Spilker said.

That will be the key payoff, Spilker said. Voyager 1 and its twin spacecraft, Voyager 2, are the only operating probes flying in the interstellar medium, the diffuse gas between the stars. Their prime missions are long over. Voyager 1 flew by Jupiter and Saturn in 1979 and 1980, then got a gravitational boost toward the outer edge of the Solar System. Voyager 2 took a slower trajectory and encountered Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.

For the past couple of decades, NASA has devoted Voyager's instruments to studying cosmic rays, the magnetic field, and the plasma environment in interstellar space. They're not taking pictures anymore. Both probes have traveled beyond the heliopause, where the flow of particles emanating from the Sun runs into the interstellar medium.

But any scientific data collected by Voyager 1 since November 14 has been lost. The spacecraft does not have the ability to store science data onboard. Voyager 2 has remained operational during the outage of Voyager 1.

Scientists are eager to get their hands on Voyager 1's science data again. “With the results we got on Saturday, we have new confidence that we can put together the pieces we need to now get back the science data,” Spilker said.

“One thing I'm particularly excited about—there's this feature in the Voyager 1 data. We nicknamed it Pressure Front 2,” Spilker said. “Pressure Front 2 is a jump in both the density of the plasma around the spacecraft and the magnetic field. It's lasted for three-and-a-half years.”

“We'd like to see, is this still there?” she continued. “It's different from what we've seen in the past, and we're trying to figure out, is it some influence coming from the Sun, or is it actually something coming from interstellar space that's creating this feature? So we'd like to see it again, get more data, and be able to study it more carefully.”

This story originally appeared on Ars Technica .

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Star Trek: Voyager - How Did The Ship Get Home?

• Captain Janeway's alliances with the Borg paved the way for Voyager's journey home, challenging Starfleet principles along the way.
• Admiral Janeway's daring temporal intervention provided Voyager with advanced technology to traverse the Borg transwarp hub.
• Utilizing transwarp technology, Admiral Janeway sacrificed herself to cripple the Borg Collective and bring Voyager safely home.

Star Trek: Voyager remains one of Star Trek's most gripping narratives. It follows a lonely Federation star ship, cast 70,000 light years away from Earth by an enigmatic alien force, trying to find its way home. For seven seasons, Captain Kathryn Janeway and her crew grapple with uncharted territories, unknown species, and moral quandaries that test their resolve and their Starfleet principles.

When the alien known as the Caretaker brought Voyager to the Delta Quadrant, he started a chain reaction that would change the face of the galaxy. From Janeway's first fateful decision to save an innocent planet from enslavement and destruction, it was clear that the choices Voyager faced would be unlike anything that Star Trek had previously known . But, as the crew inched their way toward home, the repercussions of their choices would spread further. Eventually, they reached the point of crippling the most terrifying of galactic foes: the Borg.

Star Trek: 5 Worst Things Done By The Borg

The Borg are an unrelenting alien hive mind that seek to assimilate the galaxy, and they have done horrible things in that endeavor.

The Turning Point: Janeway's Dilemma with the Borg

Throughout Voyager's journey home, their repeated encounters with the Borg marked some of the crew's most critical and challenging moments. Captain Janeway's decision to ally with the Borg against Species 8472 was particularly fraught with moral and ethical complications. The Borg epitomized everything Starfleet opposed: assimilation, loss of individuality, and authoritarian control. Despite this, faced with the threat posed by Species 8472, Janeway made the controversial choice to collaborate with the Borg. She provided them with a weapon to combat the hostile aliens in exchange for Voyager's safe passage through Borg space.

This alliance highlighted Janeway's difficult position. Throughout Voyager's journey, she struggled to balance Starfleet's ideals with the stark realities of her crew's situation. Sometimes, it meant pushing those ideals to their limits. In the case of the Borg, Janeway's choices laid the groundwork for future interactions with the Borg and ultimately created the conditions that enabled Voyager's return to Earth.

The Temporal Prime Directive and Sacrifices

In an alternate future, a scarred and weary Admiral Janeway made a decision that would change reality. Having returned her crew home at great cost and loss of life, Janeway, now an expert on the Borg, hatches a plan to fix the mistakes of her past. The cost of her decisions had proved too much for her, and she could no longer bear to live in the reality those choices had wrought. So she hatched a daring plan, and in the episode "Endgame" (season 7, episode 5), she traveled back in time to aid her younger self in finding a quicker route home.

In Star Trek , Starfleet's Temporal Prime Directive prohibits interference with the natural progression of time, a rule designed to prevent catastrophic alterations to the timeline . However, Admiral Janeway's emotional scars from losing friends and crew over the years drove her to take drastic measures. She provided advanced technology and critical information to her past self, enabling Voyager to traverse a Borg-infested transwarp hub and return home much sooner than they would have otherwise.

The Role of Transwarp Technology in Voyager's Return

In "Endgame," Admiral Janeway's plan to bring Voyager home hinges on the use of transwarp technology . The Borg transwarp hub, a vast structure in the black depths of space, functions as a gateway, allowing Borg ships to travel immense distances instantaneously. Admiral Janeway sacrificed herself by allowing the Borg Queen to assimilate her. Unknown to the Queen, though, Janeway had infected herself with a futuristic pathogen designed to subdue the Borg long enough to let Voyager escape.

A series of chain reactions leads to the entire transwarp structure being destroyed. This led to the death of millions of drones and irreparable damage to the Borg Collective ...as well as Admiral Janeway's death. However, her actions proved successful in bringing Voyager home. The episode ends with Voyager emerging close to Earth, bypassing the dark future that had driven Admiral Janeway to her extreme act.

Star Trek: Voyager is as much about the physical journey home as it is an emotional and ethical odyssey into the complex decisions of command. In a sense, Admiral Janeway undid the choice she first made when she came to the Delta Quadrant. Her first decision had been to put other lives, and the principles of Starfleet, ahead of her crew. But years down the line, she simply couldn't live with that. In the end, she and her younger self colluded to ensure her crew's survival against impossible odds, though their success came at a massive cost of life .

How Voyager Got Home: Key Events

• Alliances with the Borg: Captain Janeway allied with the Borg a number of times, paving the way for the conditions that would take Voyager home.
• Admiral Janeway's Temporal Intervention: In an alternate future, Admiral Janeway traveled back in time to provide her past self with advanced technology and critical information, enabling a quicker route home through a Borg transwarp hub.
• Utilizing Transwarp Technology: Admiral Janeway's plan involved using the Borg transwarp hub to travel vast distances instantly, destabilizing and destroying the hub in the process, which crippled the Borg Collective.
• Admiral Janeway's Sacrifice: Admiral Janeway allowed herself to be assimilated by the Borg Queen, spreading a pathogen that incapacitated the Borg, ensuring Voyager's safe passage home at the cost of her own life.

Star Trek: Voyager

Release Date January 16, 1995

Genres Sci-Fi

Creator Rick Berman, Michael Piller, Jeri Taylor

How Far is a Light Year?

How far is a light-year ? It might seem like a weird question because isn’t a ‘year’ a unit of time, and ‘far’ a unit of distance? While that is correct, a ‘light-year’ is actually a measure of distance. A light-year is the distance light can travel in one year.

Light is the fastest thing in our Universe traveling through interstellar space at 186,000 miles/second (300,000 km/sec). In one year, light can travel 5.88 trillion miles (9.46 trillion km).

A light year is a basic unit astronomers use to measure the vast distances in space.

To give you a great example of how far a light year actually is, it will take Voyager 1 (NASA’s longest-lived spacecraft) over 17,000 years to reach 1 light year in distance traveling at a speed of 61,000 kph.

Related Post: 13 Amazing Facts About Space

Why Do We Use Light-Years?

Because space is so vast, the measurements we use here on Earth are not very helpful and would result in enormous numbers.

When talking about locations in our own galaxy we would have numbers with over 18 zeros. Instead, astronomers use light-time measurements to measure vast distances in space. A light-time measurement is how far light can travel in a given increment of time.

• Light-minute: 11,160,000 miles
• Light-hour: 671 million miles
• Light-year: 5.88 trillion miles

Understanding Light-Years

To help wrap our heads around how to use light-years, let’s look at how far things are away from the Earth starting with our closest neighbor, the Moon.

The Moon is 1.3 light-seconds from the Earth.

Earth is about 8 light-minutes (~92 million miles) away from the Sun. This means light from the Sun takes 8 minutes to reach us.

Jupiter is approximately 35 light minutes from the Earth. This means if you shone a light from Earth it would take about a half hour for it to hit Jupiter.

Pluto is not the edge of our solar system, in fact, past Pluto, there is the Kieper Belt , and past this is the Oort Cloud . The Oort cloud is a spherical layer of icy objects surrounding our entire solar system.

If you could travel at the speed of light, it would take you 1.87 years to reach the edge of the Oort cloud. This means that our solar system is about 4 light-years across from edge to edge of the Oort Cloud.

The distance between the Sun and Interstellar Space. NASA/JPL-Caltech .

The nearest known exoplanet orbits the star Proxima Centauri , which is four light years away (~24 trillion miles). If a modern-day jet were to fly to this exoplanet it would not arrive for 5 million years.

One of the most distant exoplanets is 3,000 light-years (17.6 quadrillion miles) away from us in the Milky Way. If you were to travel at 60 miles an hour, you would not reach this exoplanet for 28 billion years.

Our Milky Way galaxy is approximately 100,000 light-years across (~588 quadrillion miles). Moving further into our Universe, our nearest neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy is 2.537 million light-years (14.7 quintillion miles) away from us.

The Andromeda Galaxy is 2.537 million light-years away from us.

Light, a Window into the Past

While we cannot actually travel through time, we can see into the past. How? We see objects because they either emit light or light has bounced off their surface and is traveling back to us.

Even though light is the fastest thing in our Universe, it takes time to reach us. This means that for any object we are seeing it how it was in the past. How far in the past? However long it took the light to reach us.

For day-to-day objects like a book or your dog, it takes a mere fraction of a fraction of a second for the light bouncing off the object to reach your eye. The further away an object is, the further into its past you are looking.

For instance, light from the Sun takes about 8 minutes to reach Earth, this means we are always seeing the Sun how it looked 8 minutes ago if you were on its surface.

The differences between Lunar Distance, an Astronomical Unit, and a Light Year. Illustration by Star Walk .

Traveling back through our solar system, Jupiter is approximately 30 light-minutes from Earth, so we see Jupiter how it looked 30 minutes ago if you were on its surface. Extending out into the Universe to our neighbor the Andromeda galaxy, we see it how it was 2.537 million years ago.

If there is another civilization out in the Universe watching Earth, they would not see us here today, they would see Earth in the past. A civilization that lives 65 million light-years away would see dinosaurs roaming the Earth.

Helpful Resources:

• How big is the Solar System? (Universe Today)
• What is an Astronomical Unit? (EarthSky)
• How close is Proxima Centauri? (NASA Imagine The Universe)

The way we travel now

What sorts of journeys do today’s travelers dream about? Where would they like to go? What do they hope to do when they get there? How much are they willing to spend on it all? And what should industry stakeholders do to adapt to the traveler psychology of the moment?

About the authors

To gauge what’s on the minds of current-day travelers, we surveyed more than 5,000 of them in February and March of this year. 1 Unless otherwise noted, the source for all data and projections is McKinsey State of Travel Survey, 5,061 participants, February 27 to March 11, 2024. Our universe of respondents included travelers from five major, representative source markets: China, Germany, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, and the United States. All respondents took at least one leisure trip in the past two years. We asked them more than 50 questions about their motivations, behavior, and expectations.

Results from this survey, supplemented with findings from focus groups and other additional research, suggest six vital trends that are shaping traveler sentiment now.

Travel has become a top priority, especially for younger generations

Sixty-six percent of the travelers we surveyed say they’re more interested in travel now than they were before the COVID-19 pandemic. This pattern holds across all surveyed age groups and nationalities. Respondents also indicate that they’re planning more trips in 2024 than they did in 2023.

Travel isn’t merely an interest these days. It’s become a priority—even amid uncertain economic conditions that can make budgeting a challenge. Travel continues to be one of the fastest-growing consumer spending areas, rising 6 percent over a recent 12-month period in the United States, even when adjusted for inflation. Only 15 percent of our survey respondents say they’re trying to save money by reducing the number of trips they go on. And in the February 2024 McKinsey ConsumerWise Global Sentiment Survey of more than 4,000 participants, 33 percent of consumers said they planned to splurge on travel, ranking it the third-most-popular splurge category—trailing only eating at home and eating out at restaurants. 2 Christina Adams, Kari Alldredge, Lily Highman, and Sajal Kohli, “An update on US consumer sentiment: Consumers see a brighter future ahead,” McKinsey, February 29, 2024.

Younger generations appear to propel much of the rising interest in travel (Exhibit 1). In 2023, millennials and Gen Zers took, on average, nearly five trips, versus less than four for Gen Xers and baby boomers. Millennials and Gen Zers also say they devote, on average, 29 percent of their incomes to travel, compared with 26 percent for Gen Zers and 25 percent for baby boomers.

Younger travelers are the most keen to venture abroad

Younger travelers are particularly excited about international travel. Gen Zers and millennials who responded to our survey are planning a nearly equal number of international and domestic trips in 2024, no matter their country of origin, whereas older generations are planning to take roughly twice as many domestic trips (Exhibit 2).

Younger travelers’ thirst for novelty might be motivating their urge to cross borders. Gen Zers say their number-one consideration when selecting a destination is their desire to experience someplace new. For Gen Xers, visiting a new place comes in at number eight, behind factors such as cost, ease of getting around, and quality of accommodation.

There might be a mindset shift under way, with international travel feeling more within reach for younger travelers—in terms of both cost and convenience. Younger travelers have become adept at spotting international destinations that feature more affordable prices or comparatively weak currencies. Low-cost airlines have proliferated, carrying 35 percent of the world’s booked seats over a recent 12-month period. 3 “Low-cost carriers in the aviation industry: What are they?,” OAG Aviation Worldwide, September 13, 2023. Meanwhile, translation software is lowering language barriers, mobile connectivity overseas is becoming cheaper and more hassle free, and recent visa initiatives in various regions have made passport-related obstacles easier to overcome.

It remains to be seen whether this mindset shift will endure as younger generations get older. But early evidence from millennials suggests that they’ve retained their interest in international travel even as they’ve begun to age and form families. It could be that this is a lasting attitude adjustment, influenced as much by the changing dynamics of travel as it is by youth.

Baby boomers are willing to spend if they see value

Baby boomers are selective about their travel choices and travel spending. Enjoying time with family and friends is their number-one motivation for taking a trip. Experiencing a new destination is less important to them—by as much as 15 percentage points—than to any other demographic.

Although older travelers appreciate the convenience that technology can offer, they prefer human contact in many contexts (Exhibit 3). For example, 44 percent of baby boomers—versus only 30 percent of other respondents—say they value having a travel agent book an entire travel experience for them. And only 42 percent of baby boomers have used a mobile app to book transportation, versus 71 percent of other respondents.

While this generation typically has more accumulated savings than other generations, they remain thoughtful about how they choose to spend. Their top two cited reasons for not traveling more are “travel is becoming too expensive” and “not having enough money to travel.” They make up demographic most willing to visit a destination out of season, with 62 percent saying they’re open to off-peak travel to bring costs down.

Baby boomers might be willing to spend strategically, in ways that make travel more convenient and less burdensome. For example, whereas 37 percent of Gen Zers are willing to take a cheaper flight to lower their travel costs—even if it means flying at inconvenient times or with a stopover—only 22 percent of baby boomers say they’ll do the same. But these older travelers don’t splurge indiscriminately: only 7 percent describe their attitude toward spending as “I go out all the way when I travel.” They’re much more willing to forgo experiences to save money, identifying this as the first area where they cut spending. Gen Zers, on the other hand, will cut all other expense categories before they trim experiences.

Whatever baby boomers’ stated feelings and preferences, they still account for a substantial share of travel spending. And they still spend more than younger generations—three times more per traveler than Gen Zers in 2023, for example.

The adventure starts before the trip begins

Travelers are delighting in crafting their own trips. Only 17 percent of survey respondents say they used a travel agent to book a trip in the past year. When asked why, respondents’ top-cited reason is that they want full control over their itineraries. Their second-most-cited reason? They simply enjoy the planning process. In fact, studies have shown that the anticipation of a journey can lead to higher levels of happiness than the journey itself. 4 Jeroen Nawijn et al., “Vacationers happier, but most not happier after a holiday,” Applied Research in Quality of Life , March 2010, Volume 5, Number 1.

When seeking inspiration during the planning process, respondents are most likely to turn to friends and family—either directly or on social media (Exhibit 4). Advice from other travelers is also sought after. Fewer and fewer travelers rely on travel guidebooks for inspiration.

Today’s travelers tend to view the planning process, in part, as a treasure hunt. Seventy-seven percent of respondents describe the research phase as an effort to ensure that they’re finding good deals or saving money. And all demographics describe “value for money” as the most important factor when choosing a booking channel.

Unexpected traveler archetypes are emerging

When we analyzed our survey results, we identified seven clusters of travelers who express shared attitudes and motivations toward travel. While the distribution of these archetypes varies across source markets, respondents within each archetype exhibit strong similarities:

Seven clusters of travelers express shared attitudes and motivations toward travel. Each archetype’s distribution varies across source markets, but the travelers within them exhibit strong similarities.

• Sun and beach travelers (23 percent of respondents). These vacationers travel rarely and spend frugally, preferring sun and beach destinations that are easy to get to. They like to relax and visit with family. They’re relatively more likely to place significant value on nonstop flights (72 percent, versus 54 percent overall) and are less interested in authentic and immersive experiences (only 13 percent say these are main reasons why they travel).
• Culture and authenticity seekers (18 percent). These are active and high-budget travelers who typically spend more than $150 per day on holiday, love to sightsee, are willing to spend on experiences, and don’t want to settle for typical bucket-list destinations. Only 6 percent prioritize familiarity when choosing where to go—the lowest percentage of any traveler segment. This segment is also least likely (at 17 percent) to say they would shorten a holiday to save money.
• Strategic spenders (14 percent). These travelers are open to selectively splurging on authentic, carefully curated experiences. But they keep a watchful eye on total spending. They’re willing to sacrifice some conveniences, such as nonstop flights, in the interest of cost savings.
• Trend-conscious jet-setters (14 percent). Travelers in this high-budget group (they spend more than $150 per day when traveling) turn first to friends and family (79 percent) and then to social media (62 percent) when scouting destinations. Seventy-six percent say the popularity of a destination is an important factor, compared with 63 percent overall. And 75 percent say they focus on hotel brands when selecting accommodations.
• Cost-conscious travelers (11 percent). This travel segment is made up of predominantly older travelers who travel rarely and frequently return to the same destinations and activities. They’re relatively more likely to care about the familiarity of a destination (54 percent, versus 35 percent overall) and the cost of the trip (76 percent, versus 65 percent overall).
• Premium travelers (12 percent). This segment expects high-quality trappings when they travel, and only 20 percent say that cost is an important factor. These frequent travelers are especially selective about accommodation—they, on average, are more likely than travelers overall to care about brand, prestige, exclusivity, design, decor, amenities, and sustainability. Similarly to trend-conscious jet-setters, this traveler segment is, on average, more likely than travelers overall (at 27 percent, versus 18 percent) to be swayed by celebrities and influencers when choosing travel destinations.
• Adventure seekers (8 percent). This younger segment enjoys active holidays that present opportunities to encounter like-minded travelers. Nineteen percent say they’re motivated by adventure and physical activities, and 15 percent say meeting new people is a major reason why they travel. They aren’t after large-group events; instead, they prefer small-group adventures. This segment prizes remoteness, privacy, and sustainability.

What travelers want depends on where they’re from

When asked what trips survey respondents are planning next, 69 percent of Chinese respondents say they plan to visit a famous site—a marked difference from the 20 percent of North American and European travelers who say the same. Chinese travelers are particularly motivated by sightseeing: 50 percent cite visiting attractions as their main reason for traveling, versus an average of 33 percent for those from other countries.

Emirati travelers, like their Chinese counterparts, favor iconic destinations, with 43 percent saying they plan to visit a famous site. They also have a penchant for shopping and outdoor activities. Fifty-six percent of respondents from the United Arab Emirates describe the range of available shopping options as an important factor when selecting a destination—a far higher proportion than the 35 percent of other respondents. And respondents from the United Arab Emirates report going on a greater number of active vacations (involving, for instance, hiking or biking) than any other nationality.

Travelers from Europe and North America are especially keen to escape their daily routines. Respondents from Germany (45 percent), the United States (40 percent), and the United Kingdom (38 percent) place importance on “getting away from it all.” Only 17 percent of respondents from China and the Middle East feel the same way. European travelers are particularly fond of beach getaways: respondents from the United Kingdom and Germany cite “soaking in the sun” at twice the rate of American respondents as a main reason they travel.

Travel is a collective story, with destinations as the backdrop

Younger generations are prioritizing experiences over possessions. Fifty-two percent of Gen Zers in our survey say they splurge on experiences, compared with only 29 percent of baby boomers (Exhibit 5). Gen Z travelers will try to save money on flights, local transportation, shopping, and food before they’ll look to trim their spending on experiences. Even terminology used by younger generations to describe travel is experience oriented: “Never stop exploring” is tagged to nearly 30 million posts on Instagram.

The value of experiences is often realized in the stories people tell about them. Books and films have spurred tourists to flock to specific destinations (for instance, when droves of Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything across Italy, India and Indonesia [Viking Penguin, 2006] readers visited Bali). And travel has always been a word-of-mouth business, in which travelers’ stories—crafted from their experiences—can inspire other travelers to follow in their footsteps.

Social media is the latest link in this chain: a technology-driven, collective storytelling platform. Ninety-two percent of younger travelers in our survey say their last trip was motivated in some way by social media. Their major sources of social inspiration, however, aren’t necessarily influencers or celebrities (30 percent) but rather friends and family (42 percent). Consumers’ real-life social networks are filled with extremely effective microinfluencers.

Posting vacation selfies is a popular way to share the story of a journey. But a growing number of social media users are searching for ways to present their travel narratives in a more detailed and more enduring fashion, and new apps and platforms are emerging to help them do so. The microblogging app Polarsteps, which more than nine million people have downloaded, helps travelers plan, track, and then share their travels—allowing journeys to be captured in hardcover books that document routes, travel statistics, and musings.

Giving today’s travelers what they need and want

From our survey findings, important takeaways emerge that can help tourism industry players engage with today’s travelers.

Know customer segments inside and out

Serving up a one-size-fits-all experience is no longer sufficient. Using data to segment customers by behavior can help tourism players identify opportunities to tailor their approaches more narrowly.

Cutting-edge data strategies aren’t always necessary to get started. Look-alike analysis and hypothesis-driven testing can go a long way. Even without having data about a specific family’s previous travel patterns, for example, an airline might be able to hypothesize that a family of four traveling from New York to Denver on a long weekend in February is going skiing—and therefore might be interested in a discounted offer that lets them check an additional piece of luggage.

The same philosophy applies to personalization, which doesn’t necessarily need to be focused on a single individual. Merely having a clearer sense of the specific segments that a provider is targeting can help it craft a more compelling offer. Instead of simply creating an offer geared toward families, for instance, providers might build an offer tailored to families who are likely to visit in the spring and will be primarily interested in outdoor activities. And instead of relying on standard tourist activities, providers might find ways to cater to more specific traveler interests—for example, facilitating a home-cooked meal with locals instead of serving up a fine-dining experience.

Help travelers share their journeys

Today’s travelers want to share their travel stories. And friends and family back home are more likely to be influenced by these stories than by anything else they see or hear. Providers should consider ways to tap into this underexploited marketing channel.

Hotels can install a photo booth that enables guests to share pictures from their journeys. Guests can be given small souvenirs to take home to their friends and family. Hotels might also send guests photos on the anniversary of a trip to help jog happy memories and prompt a future booking.

Given the right incentives, customers can act as a distributed team of marketers. Reposting guests’ social media photos and videos, for example, or spurring engagement with contests and shareable promo codes can encourage travelers to become evangelists across an array of different channels.

Recognize younger generations’ unquenchable thirst for travel

Younger travelers’ remarkable desire for experiences isn’t always in line with their budgets—or with providers’ standard offerings. A new generation of customers is ripe to be cultivated if providers can effectively meet their needs:

• Travel companies can better match lower-budget accommodations with younger travelers’ preferences by incorporating modern design into rooms and facilities, curating on-site social events, and locating properties in trendy neighborhoods.
• More affordable alternatives to classic tourist activities (for example, outdoor fitness classes instead of spas or street food crawls instead of fine dining) can be integrated into targeted packages.
• Familiar destinations can be reinvented for younger travelers by focusing on experiences (for instance, a street art tour of Paris) instead of more traditional attractions (such as the Eiffel Tower).

Cater to older travelers by using a human touch and featuring family-oriented activities

Older generations remain a major source of travel spending. Providers can look for ways to keep these travelers coming back by meeting their unique needs:

• While older travelers are growing more comfortable with technology, they continue to favor human interaction. Stakeholders can cater to this preference by maintaining in-person visitor centers and other touchpoints that emphasize a human touch.
• Older travelers are generally fond of returning to familiar destinations. Providers can look to maximize repeat business by keeping track of guest information that aids personalization (such as favorite meals or wedding anniversary dates). Identifying historical behavior patterns (for example, parents repeatedly visiting children in the same city) can help providers make targeted offers that could maximize spending (for example, a museum subscription in that city).
• The off-seasonal travel patterns that older travelers often exhibit might open opportunities for providers to create appealing experiences scheduled for lower-occupancy periods—for example, an autumn wellness retreat at a popular summer destination.
• Older travelers’ propensity to visit family and friends opens the door to offerings that appeal to a range of generations, such as small-group trips pairing activities for grandparents and grandchildren.

Travelers are more interested in travel—and more willing to spend on it—than ever before. But the familiar, one-size-fits-all tourism offerings of the past have grown outdated. Today’s travelers want to indulge in creative experiences that are tailored to their priorities and personal narratives. The good news for providers: new technology and new approaches, coupled with tried-and-true strengths such as managerial stamina and careful attention to service, are making it easier than ever to shape personalized offerings that can satisfy a traveler’s unique needs.

Caroline Tufft is a senior partner in McKinsey’s London office, Margaux Constantin is a partner in the Dubai office, Matteo Pacca is a senior partner in the Paris office, Ryan Mann is a partner in the Chicago office, Ivan Gladstone is an associate partner in the Riyadh office, and Jasperina de Vries is an associate partner in the Amsterdam office.

The authors wish to thank Abdulhadi Alghamdi, Alessandra Powell, Alex Dichter, Cedric Tsai, Diane Vu, Elisa Wallwitz, Lily Miller, Maggie Coffey, Nadya Snezhkova, Nick Meronyk, Paulina Baum, Peimin Suo, Rebecca Stone, Sarah Fellay, Sarah Sahel, Sophia Wang, Steffen Fuchs, Steffen Köpke, Steve Saxon, and Urs Binggeli for their contributions to this article.

This article was edited by Seth Stevenson, a senior editor in the New York office.

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