voyager 1 sounds of interstellar space

How Voyager 1 recorded noises when there's no sound in interstellar space

Beyond the border of interstellar space, the distant Voyager 1 spacecraft called back to Earth earlier this year with noises from its new environment. It's true that the void of space does not carry sound — there's no gas or other substance to transmit the waves — but the signal Voyager detected can be played back at frequencies the human ear can understand.

NASA announced in September that Voyager 1 had left the heliosphere in August 2012. The heliosphere is a sheath of magnetic influence that emanates from the sun and expands through a stream of charged particles called the solar wind.

At the press conference, Don Gurnett, the principal investigator for Voyager 1 's plasma wave science instrument, demonstrated a series of sounds the instrument had picked up.

"Strictly speaking, the plasma wave instrument does not detect sound. Instead, it senses waves of electrons in the ionized gas or 'plasma' that Voyager travels through," NASA stated in a statement. These waves, however, do take place at frequencies that humans can detect.

"We can play the data through a loudspeaker and listen," Gurnett, a physics professor at the University of Iowa, said in the statement. "The pitch and frequency tell us about the density of gas surrounding the spacecraft." [ Hear What Voyager 1 Detected ]

Within the heliosphere, the sounds had a frequency of about 300 Hz. Once Voyager left the scene, the frequency jumped higher, to between 2 and 3 kHz, "corresponding to denser gas in the interstellar medium," according to the NASA release.

There have been at least two verified instances of these tones: October to November 2012, and April to May 2013. Both occurred after huge coronal mass ejections (material from the sun) bumped up plasma activity around Voyager 1. There was a lag before scientists discovered the recordings because the data is only played back every three to six months, NASA said, and more time is required to interpret the results.

Gurnett further speculated that "shock fronts" from beyond the solar system could be tearing through interstellar space and disturbing the plasma surrounding Voyager 1. He will be listening for any evidence of this activity in future recordings from humanity's furthest spacecraft, he said.

Follow Elizabeth Howell @howellspace , or Space.com @Spacedotcom . We're also on Facebook and Google+ . Original article on Space.com.

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Voyager 1 Presents the “Sounds” of Interstellar Space

By Dr. Tony Phillips, NASA Science November 8, 2013

A new ScienceCast video answers the question, what does interstellar space sound like?

Sci-Fi movies are sometimes criticized when explosions in the void make noise. As the old saying goes, “In space, no one can hear you scream.” Without air there is no sound.

But if that’s true, what was space physicist Don Gurnett talking about when he stated at a NASA press conference in September 2013 that he had heard “the sounds of interstellar space?”

It turns out that space can make music … if you know how to listen.

Gurnett is the James Van Allen professor of physics at the University of Iowa and the principal investigator for the Plasma Wave Science instrument on Voyager 1. At the press conference, he played some plasma wave data for the audience. The sounds, he explained, were solid evidence that Voyager 1 had left the heliosphere.

The heliosphere is a vast bubble of magnetism that surrounds the sun and planets. It is, essentially, the sun’s magnetic field inflated to enormous proportions by the solar wind. Inside the heliosphere is “home.” Outside lies interstellar space, the realm of the stars.

For decades, researchers have been on the edge of their seats, waiting for the Voyager probes to leave. Ironically, it took almost a year for NASA to realize the breakthrough had occurred. The reason is due to the slow cadence of transmissions from the distant spacecraft. Data stored on old-fashioned tape recorders are played back at three to six-month intervals. Then it takes more time to process the readings.

Gurnett recalls the thrill of discovery when some months-old data from the Plasma Wave Instrument reached his desk in the summer of 2013. The distant tones were conclusive: “Voyager 1 had made the crossing.”

Strictly speaking, the plasma wave instrument does not detect sound. Instead, it senses waves of electrons in the ionized gas or “plasma” that Voyager travels through. No human ear could hear these plasma waves. Nevertheless, because they occur at audio frequencies, between a few hundred and a few thousand hertz, “we can play the data through a loudspeaker and listen,” says Gurnett. “The pitch and frequency tell us about the density of gas surrounding the spacecraft.”

The frequency range shown from about 1.75 kiloHertz to 3.5 kiloHertz is a portion of the actual frequency range detected by PWS and is well within the audio frequency range. Importantly, the frequency is directly related to the number of electrons per unit volume in the vicinity of Voyager and corresponds to about 1 electron per 10 cubic centimeters or a cube about 1 inch on a side. The time scale for this presentation represents 225 days or a bit more than 7 months, while it only takes about 12 seconds to play the audio file. Hence, the time compression is about 1.6 million to one. It should be noted that this compression was done in such a way as to not change the frequencies.

In this animation, there are two events of interest. In the October-November 2012 time frame there is a tone near 2.1 kHz which gradually increases in frequency. Again, in the April-May 2013 time frame there is another event, somewhat more intense and at a higher frequency near 2.6 kHz. We conclude that these two events indicate an ongoing trend to higher frequencies. The second graphic frame which appears in the animation includes a dashed line showing this increase in frequency and suggests that the density of electrons is continually increasing over this time interval as Voyager moves outwards from the heliopause (which was crossed on 25 August 2012).

When Voyager 1 was inside the heliosphere, the tones were low, around 300 Hz, typical of plasma waves coursing through the rarified solar wind. Outside, the frequency jumped to a higher pitch, between 2 and 3 kHz, corresponding to denser gas in the interstellar medium. The transition music to Gurnett’s ears.

So far, Voyager 1 has recorded two outbursts of “interstellar plasma music”–one in Oct-Nov. 2012 and a second in April-May 2013. Both were excited by bursts of solar activity.

“We need solar events to trigger plasma oscillations,” says Gurnett.

The key players are CMEs, hot clouds of gas that blast into space when solar magnetic fields erupt. A typical CME takes 2 or 3 days to reach Earth, and a full year or more to reach Voyager. When a CME passes through the plasma, it excites oscillations akin to fingers strumming the strings on a guitar. Voyager’s Plasma Wave Instrument listens … and learns.

“We’re in a totally unexplored region of space,” says Gurnett. “I expect some surprises out there.”

In particular, Gurnett is hoping for plasma waves not excited by solar storms. He speculates that shock fronts from outside the solar system could be rippling through the interstellar medium. If so, they would excite new plasma waves that Voyager 1 will encounter as it plunges ever deeper into the realm of the stars.

The next “sounds” from out there could be surprising indeed.

Image: NASA/ JPL -Caltech

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2 comments on "voyager 1 presents the “sounds” of interstellar space".

It seems to me now would be a better chance to hear a signal transmission from ET, I hope someone is not just thinking the Noise is “Sounds of Interstellar Space” ! 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31, 37, 41, 43, 47, 53, 59, 61, 67, 71, 73, 79, 83, 89……

Please note that “We need solar events to trigger plasma oscillations,”.. Here in this case the plasma oscillations are manipulated to give the sound effect as it videographs (or rather audiographs) the voyager 1 travel beyond Pluto in the rarefied solar particles field where the magnetic bursts from the Sun gives this electronic impulses, magnified to be heard as sound. But be sure that ET cannot give signal transmission to be felt. The so called signal transmission by ET was found to be none other than Cosmic Microwave Backround, which is the Doppler attenuation of Big Bang gamma radiations suffered due to the galloping galaxies. After such a long period the voyager has not completely left solar gravity zone since there is a Kuiper cloud still there with streaming asteroids and comets racing towards the Sun. Once it leaves solar gravity completely it will go towards the nearest star no doubt, which will also have the same complexion like ours.Thank You.

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Listen to the Sounds of Interstellar Space, Recorded by Voyager 1

Voyager 1 was able to record the sounds of interstellar space. This helped the Voyager science team calculate the density of interstellar plasma. Read more about the announcement of Voyager crossing into interstellar space here.

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Faraway NASA probe detects the eerie hum of interstellar space

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As nasa's voyager 1 surveys interstellar space, its density measurements are making waves.

Until recently, every spacecraft in history had made all of its measurements inside our heliosphere , the magnetic bubble inflated by our Sun. But on Aug. 25, 2012, NASA's Voyager 1 changed that. As it crossed the heliosphere's boundary , it became the first human-made object to enter – and measure – interstellar space. Now eight years into its interstellar journey, a close listen of Voyager 1's data is yielding new insights into what that frontier is like.

If our heliosphere is a ship sailing interstellar waters, Voyager 1 is a life raft just dropped from the deck, determined to survey the currents. For now, any rough waters it feels are mostly from our heliosphere's wake. But farther out, it will sense the stirrings from sources deeper in the cosmos. Eventually, our heliosphere's presence will fade from its measurements completely.

"We have some ideas about how far Voyager will need to get to start seeing more pure interstellar waters, so to speak," said Stella Ocker, a Ph.D. student at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and the newest member of the Voyager team. "But we're not entirely sure when we'll reach that point."

Ocker's new study, published on Monday in Nature Astronomy , reports what may be the first continuous measurement of the density of material in interstellar space. "This detection offers us a new way to measure the density of interstellar space and opens up a new pathway for us to explore the structure of the very nearby interstellar medium," Ocker said.

When one pictures the stuff between the stars – astronomers call it the "interstellar medium," a spread-out soup of particles and radiation – one might reimagine a calm, silent, serene environment. That would be a mistake.

"I have used the phrase ‘the quiescent interstellar medium' – but you can find lots of places that are not particularly quiescent," said Jim Cordes, space physicist at Cornell and co-author of the paper.

Like the ocean, the interstellar medium is full of turbulent waves. The largest come from our galaxy's rotation, as space smears against itself and sets forth undulations tens of light-years across. Smaller (though still gigantic) waves rush from supernova blasts, stretching billions of miles from crest to crest. The smallest ripples are usually from our own Sun, as solar eruptions send shockwaves through space that permeate our heliosphere's lining.

These crashing waves reveal clues about the density of the interstellar medium – a value that affects our understanding of the shape of our heliosphere, how stars form, and even our own location in the galaxy. As these waves reverberate through space, they vibrate the electrons around them, which ring out at characteristic frequencies depending on how crammed together they are. The higher the pitch of that ringing, the higher the electron density. Voyager 1's Plasma Wave Subsystem – which includes two "bunny ear" antennas sticking out 30 feet (10 meters) behind the spacecraft – was designed to hear that ringing.

An illustration of NASA's Voyager spacecraft showing the antennas used by the Plasma Wave Subsystem and other instruments. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech Full Image Details

In November 2012, three months after exiting the heliosphere, Voyager 1 heard interstellar sounds for the first time. Six months later, another "whistle" appeared – this time louder and even higher pitched. The interstellar medium appeared to be getting thicker, and quickly.

NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft captured these sounds of interstellar space. Voyager 1's plasma wave instrument detected the vibrations of dense interstellar plasma, or ionized gas, from October to November 2012 and April to May 2013. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

These momentary whistles continue at irregular intervals in Voyager's data today. They're an excellent way to study the interstellar medium's density, but it does take some patience.

"They've only been seen about once a year, so relying on these kind of fortuitous events meant that our map of the density of interstellar space was kind of sparse," Ocker said.

Ocker set out to find a running measure of interstellar medium density to fill in the gaps – one that doesn't depend on the occasional shockwaves propagating out from the Sun. After filtering through Voyager 1's data, looking for weak but consistent signals, she found a promising candidate. It started to pick up in mid-2017, right around the time of another whistle.

"It's virtually a single tone," said Ocker. "And over time, we do hear it change – but the way the frequency moves around tells us how the density is changing."

Weak but nearly continuous plasma oscillation events – visible as a thin red line in this graphic/tk – connect stronger events in Voyager 1's Plasma Wave Subsystem data. Use the slider to switch between graphs showing only the strong signals (blue background) and the filtered data showing weaker signals. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Stella Ocker

Ocker calls the new signal a plasma wave emission, and it, too, appeared to track the density of interstellar space. When the abrupt whistles appeared in the data, the tone of the emission rises and falls with them. The signal also resembles one observed in Earth's upper atmosphere that's known to track with the electron density there.

"This is really exciting, because we are able to regularly sample the density over a very long stretch of space, the longest stretch of space that we have so far," said Ocker. "This provides us with the most complete map of the density and the interstellar medium as seen by Voyager."

Based on the signal, electron density around Voyager 1 started rising in 2013 and reached its current levels about mid-2015, a roughly 40-fold increase in density. The spacecraft appears to be in a similar density range, with some fluctuations, through the entire dataset they analyzed which ended in early 2020.

Ocker and her colleagues are currently trying to develop a physical model of how the plasma wave emission is produced that will be key to interpreting it. In the meantime, Voyager 1's Plasma Wave Subsystem keeps sending back data farther and farther from home, where every new discovery has the potential to make us reimagining our home in the cosmos.

The Voyager spacecraft were built by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which continues to operate both. JPL is a division of Caltech in Pasadena. The Voyager missions are a part of the NASA Heliophysics System Observatory, sponsored by the Heliophysics Division of the Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

For more information about the Voyager spacecraft, visit:

https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov

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Calla Cofield Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. 626-808-2469 [email protected] Written by Miles Hatfield 2021-101

June 14, 2024

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

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

By Meghan Bartels

Artist concept of Voyager 1.

NASA/JPL-Caltech

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

After Months of Glitches and Gradual Fixes, Voyager 1 Is Fully Operational Once Again

Currently 15 billion miles away from Earth, one of NASA’s longest-tenured spacecraft is back from the brink after a technical failure last year put its future in question

Christian Thorsberg

Daily Correspondent

After a technical malfunction late last year rendered all of its subsequent readings as useless , NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft—which has spent nearly a half-century in space—has been brought back online and is once again fully functioning.

“The spacecraft has resumed gathering information about interstellar space,” NASA said in a press release .

Launched in 1977 and drifting some 15 billion miles away from Earth, on the outer reaches of our solar system, the satellite is both one of the world’s oldest-tenured crafts and currently the most distant—making its recovery from what was once presumed a dismal prognosis nothing short of miraculous.

Last November, the satellite began transmitting unintelligible strings of data, as opposed to the binary code it is supposed to send, back to NASA’s scientists. Initial efforts to diagnose and fix the problem were tedious. New commands took nearly a full day, 22.5 hours, to reach Voyager 1, and responses took an equal amount of time.

“Finding solutions to challenges the probes encounter often entails consulting original, decades-old documents written by engineers who didn’t anticipate the issues that are arising today,” Miles Hatfield wrote in a December NASA press release . “As a result, it takes time for the team to understand how a new command will affect the spacecraft’s operations in order to avoid unintended consequences.”

Waiting 45 hours between individual troubleshooting efforts was tedious. But incremental gains were made, and after five months of steady trial and error, the team found that Voyager 1’s problem lay in its flight data subsystem (FDS), which packages earthbound data. They pinpointed one faulty chip in particular, and were able to engineer a work-around.

In April, they enjoyed a breakthrough: a health and status report that indicated the satellite was still capable of lucid communication.

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

The team didn’t need to wait long. In late May, two of the spacecraft’s four scientific instruments began sending usable scientific data once again: the “bunny-eared” plasma wave subsystem , which protrudes 30 feet off the spacecraft and measures electron density, and the magnetometer instrument , which measures and analyzes the magnetic fields of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

“NASA has previously estimated that the nuclear-powered generators on Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were likely to die around 2025,” the New York Times’    Orlando Mayorquín reports.

But, if they can survive until 2027, both spacecraft will reach their 50th anniversary.

Voyagers 1 and 2 are NASA’s only spacecraft to have explored outside of the sun’s heliosphere. Over the decades, they have explored the solar system’s gas giant planets and 48 moons . They also carry the Voyager Golden Records , intended to share sounds and images of Earth with alien civilizations.

“That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives,” astronomer Carl Sagan famously said in 1990 on the day Voyager 1 took the iconic “pale blue dot” image of Earth at a distance of 3.7 billion miles from the sun.

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Christian Thorsberg | READ MORE

Christian Thorsberg is an environmental writer and photographer from Chicago. His work, which often centers on freshwater issues, climate change and subsistence, has appeared in Circle of Blue , Sierra  magazine, Discover  magazine and Alaska Sporting Journal .

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Here’s how it sounds when you turn NASA spacecraft data into music

The process of data sonification can help scientists better identify patterns in complex data and create beautiful music for the public

If you want to know what interstellar space is like, it can be a mosh pit. Energetic shocks from our sun and countless other stars blend together, creating a soup of particles and radiation. You can listen to the galactic party — as music.

Since NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft became the first humanmade object to cross into interstellar space, researchers have poked and prodded at decades of its data beamed back to Earth from billions of miles away, gaining insight into the mysteries of our universe. Now, a particle physicist and professional flutist have transformed the waveform data of interstellar space — that dense soup of particles — into music fit more for a classical concert.

The new space jam, which premiered Thursday at the South by Southwest EDU conference in Austin, charts the moment Voyager 1 left the bubble around our sun and entered bustling interstellar space.

The melody, played by a solo flute, begins with smooth, connected notes (some using a legato) at a lower register to illustrate the data from inside our solar system. A gradual increase in loudness, or a crescendo, follows to indicate the spacecraft crossing the heliopause, or the boundary that leads into interstellar space. Then the melody becomes very high and changes shape, with more jumps to describe the busy interstellar space environment.

“Understanding that this is connected to what Voyager was measuring, I think, adds another dimension to what people are perceiving,” said Domenico Vicinanza, a music composer and physicist at Anglia Ruskin University, who created the piece. “It is different because the physics is different … something very, very dramatic changed. In this case, it’s the amount of charged particles.”

Each note represents one day of average readings of plasma waves, caused by the oscillation of charged particles in space. Toward the end, the notes become more sparse. The pauses represent the gaps in data as Voyager 1 hit some snags in beaming data back to Earth as it traveled farther and farther away into the cosmos.

The presentation of measurements as sound is known as data sonification, which has become increasingly popular in recent years. Listening to data can help scientists better identify trends and abnormalities in complex data, as our ears can be more sensitive to picking up patterns than our eyes. It can also help researchers more quickly process large quantities of data.

Others, like Vicinanza, use the sounds to create music to better communicate science to the public. He has previously created music from a geyser explosion (using data of Earth’s vibrations) and from signature pools of bubbling mud called mudpots (recorded with a microphone) in Yellowstone National Park.

Raw data used by researchers typically sounds a bit different than the melodic music that Vicinanza created. Voyager 1′s interstellar plasma data sounds like radio static mixed in with periodic whistling — eerie tones that Hollywood would probably utilize as alien noises. The whistling grew louder and higher pitched as Voyager 1 progressed, suggesting the interstellar medium was getting thicker quickly.

“One of the first things that struck me when I listened to these sounds was how much more dramatic the increase in density sounds when you hear it, rather than see it,” Stella Ocker, a NASA guest investigator on the Voyager Interstellar Mission, wrote in an email. “Our ears seem to be very sensitive to those changes in pitch.”

Ocker, who has published on Voyager’s interstellar measurements, said studying the electron density farther away from Earth is important because it can tell how it influences conditions within in our solar system and vice versa. Voyager’s density measurements map “our interstellar backyard,” helping researchers understand what it contains, how far it extends and how it affects our home.

When Ocker listened to Vicinanza’s piece, she said she loved how the composition captured what Voyager 1 experienced on both long and short time scales. It showed the overall increase in electron density as well as lower-level persistent variations. The performance also “really emphasizes that constant sense of motion, that Voyager is ever pressing onwards,” said Ocker, a Ph.D. candidate in astronomy at Cornell University.

The new Voyager piece builds on previous work by Vicinanza and his colleague Genevieve Williams, who turned 40 years of data from Voyager 1′s low-energy charged particle detector into an approximately three-minute orchestra piece .

In that audio piece, the violin plays the melody as Voyager 1 begins its journey. The piano and French horn enter as the spacecraft encounters Jupiter and Saturn. The flute, piccolo and glockenspiel signal it moving into interstellar space.

Turning data into sound has become more popular in the past decade, but such sonification goes back as far as the 17th century. Astronomer Johannes Kepler showed how musical notes can illustrate how planets accelerate and decelerate around the sun in elliptical orbits, rather than circular orbits. He converted the velocity of each planet as it went around the sun to different notes, explained Vicinanza. Higher speeds corresponded to higher pitches; slower velocities with lower pitches.

Vicinanza employs a similar technique in his pieces, at times essentially superimposing waveform data across musical bars as his starting point. His goal is to create the right mapping between data and rhythms that “can tell a story without sacrificing the scientific rigor .”

In some cases, nature’s patterns align with known musical approaches. For example, the new Voyager 1 musical piece actually presented traditional chord patterns common in Western music. The nature of the data consisted of a series of running eighth notes that almost never stop until the very end, which periodically led to a series of arpeggios .

It was outlining a “dominant tonic chord, the most basic chord progression we have in our culture,” said Alyssa Schwartz, an award-winning concert flutist who performed the piece from Voyager 1 data at South by Southwest.

But, sometimes, the data mapping can lead to absurd musical tasks for a human to perform. For instance, the latest Voyager 1 piece has 37 measures, and there is no place to rest or breathe until measure 32.

“I have learned that nature does not care about my need to breathe,” said Schwartz, the director of bands at Fairmont State University. (She had to find moments to surreptitiously take a breath.)

Schwartz said the music has pushed her technical development with challenging cross fingerings and broad, difficult jumps — patterns she hasn’t encountered anywhere else .

“What’s interesting in this kind of music is that the composer that I’m trying to relate is nature,” Schwartz said. “I can’t rely on my knowledge of music theory or music history to try to inform the decision.”

Voyager 1 discovers faint plasma 'hum' in interstellar space

Four and a half decades after launch and over 14 billion miles from Earth, Voyager 1 still makes new discoveries. The spacecraft has picked up the signature of interstellar space itself, a faint plasma "hum" scientists compared to gentle rain. 

Plasma has been part of Voyager 1's mission from its launch — the spacecraft discovered lightning strikes in Jupiter's atmosphere and studied how the solar wind tapered off in the outer solar system.

And since 2012, scientists have turned the spacecraft's instruments upon a completely unexplored part of distant space. That's when Voyager 1 crossed the heliopause , where the solar wind — the constant stream of charged particles that flows off the sun — is no longer strong enough to hold back the interstellar medium that surrounds our little neighborhood. Since 2012, as Voyager 1 has drifted ever farther from the sun, the spacecraft has measured the plasma around it.

Voyager at 40: 40 Photos from NASA's epic 'grand tour' mission

This part of the interstellar medium is, mostly, quiet. "It's very faint and monotone, because it is in a narrow frequency bandwidth," Stella Koch Ocker, a doctoral student at Cornell University who led the new research, said in a statement . "We're detecting the faint, persistent hum of interstellar gas."

But every few years, the solar wind pushes back. Voyager 1 picks up those events as shockwaves. "In the case of a solar outburst, it's like detecting a lightning burst in a thunderstorm," senior author James Cordes, an astronomer at Cornell, said in the same statement. "Then it's back to a gentle rain." 

For a time, scientists thought those shocks were the only way that Voyager 1 could measure the density of plasma out there.

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Related: What spacecraft will enter interstellar space next?

But now that scientists have heard this unexpected hum, they can track the interstellar medium between shocks, which can help them understand much more about a largely undiscovered expanse of space. Ocker believes there's much more low-level activity in the interstellar medium than scientists previously thought.

"Now we know we don't need a fortuitous event related to the sun to measure interstellar plasma," Shami Chatterjee, a Cornell astronomer, said in the same statement. "Regardless of what the sun is doing, Voyager is sending back detail. The craft is saying, 'Here's the density I'm swimming through right now. And here it is now. And here it is now. And here it is now.' Voyager is quite distant and will be doing this continuously."

Voyager 1 and its twin, Voyager 2, will sail away to the stars for time immemorial . But for scientists here on Earth, the spacecraft's days are numbered. Sometime within this decade, the spacecraft's plutonium power sources will finally run dry. 

In the meantime, scientists are savoring every last bit of data that trickles back. "It's the engineering gift to science that keeps on giving," Ocker said.

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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].

Rahul Rao is a graduate of New York University's SHERP and a freelance science writer, regularly covering physics, space, and infrastructure. His work has appeared in Gizmodo, Popular Science, Inverse, IEEE Spectrum, and Continuum. He enjoys riding trains for fun, and he has seen every surviving episode of Doctor Who. He holds a masters degree in science writing from New York University's Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program (SHERP) and earned a bachelors degree from Vanderbilt University, where he studied English and physics. 

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Sound Of Interstellar Space Captured For First Time Ever By Voyager 1 Spacecraft (VIDEO)

Thanks to NASA's far-flung Voyager 1 spacecraft, now exploring the final frontier beyond our solar system, humanity can tune into the sounds of interstellar space.

Scientists announced today (Sept. 12) that Voyager 1 left the solar system in August 2012 after 35 years of spaceflight, making it the first craft ever to reach interstellar space. No other manmade object has ever travelled so far away from its home planet.

To mark the occasion, NASA unveiled the first Voyager 1 recording of the sound of interstellar space , offering the probe's strange, otherwordly take on its new frontier. The sounds are produced by the vibration of dense plasma, or ionized gas; they were captured by the probe's plasma wave instrument, NASA officials wrote in a video description. [ Voyager 1's Journey to Interstellar Space: A Photo Tour ]

"When you hear this recording, please recognize that this is an historic event. It's the first time that we've ever made a recording of sounds in interstellar space," Don Gurnett, principle investigator for the Voyager plasma wave investigation, said in a press conference today.

Researchers used the plasma data to infer that Voyager 1 first came into contact with the interstellar medium, effectively taking humanity between the stars, on or around Aug. 25, 2012.

"There were two times the instrument heard these vibrations: October to November 2012 and April to May 2013," NASA officials wrote. "Scientists noticed that each occurrence involved a rising tone. The dashed line indicates that the rising tones follow the same slope. This means a continuously increasing density."

Voyager 1's plasma sensor broke in 1980, so scientists had to get creative, and a little lucky, to figure this out. A massive solar eruption in March 2012 arrived at the location of Voyager 1 about 13 months later, making the plasma around the probe vibrate, NASA officials said.

That vibration helped researchers understand the density of the plasma, determining that it was 40 times more dense than measurements taken in the outer layer of the heliosphere, the bubble of charged particles and magnetic fields that the sun puffs out around itself.

The observed density matched up very well with what researchers expected to find in interstellar space.

"Now that we have new, key data, we believe this is mankind's historic leap into interstellar space," Ed Stone, Voyager project scientist based at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif., said in a statement. "The Voyager team needed time to analyze those observations and make sense of them. But we can now answer the question we've all been asking — 'Are we there yet?' Yes, we are."

Voyager 1 launched on Sept. 5, 1977, about two weeks after its twin Voyager 2. The two spacecraft made it through their "grand tour" of the solar system, taking close-up looks at the Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune systems. Their original mission ended in 1989, but the probes soldiered on, streaking through the unexplored regions at the outer reaches of the solar system.

The Voyager team still communicates with the two spacecraft every day, but the probes' extreme distances pose a challenge. At the speed of light, it takes about 17 hours for a message to reach Earth from Voyager 1, which is currently about 12 billion miles (19 billion kilometers) from the sun.

Follow Miriam Kramer @mirikramer and Google+ . Follow us @Spacedotcom , Facebook and Google+ . Original article on SPACE.com.

• Voyager 1 Records 'Sounds' From Interstellar Space | Video
• Voyager Welcomed To Interstellar Space | Video
• How the Voyager Space Probes Work (Infographic)
• Solar System Explored: Today's Deep-Space Spacecraft (Gallery)

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Voyager Reaches Interstellar Space

After decades of exploration, Voyager 1 reaches a historic milestone for mankind, interstellar space.

Transcript:

(Music) Voyager 1 has left the bubble around the sun and entered interstellar space the space between stars.

It's amazing that Voyager has operated 36 years.

(sound of launch)

Launched in 1977, travelled passed the gas giant planets in our solar system and now off into interstellar space. It's a great journey.

We have an instrument on Voyager, which can measure the density of the ions, the plasma, which is out there.

In March of 2012 it turns out there was a massive eruption from the sun, which eventually reached Voyager 1 in April of 2013.

When that blast wave reached Voyager, it caused the plasma around Voyager to vibrate or oscillate in a certain particular tone.

Literally, they're the sounds of interstellar space.

(Sound of interstellar space)

And by measuring that sound wave, we could measure the density of the plasma and we're amazed to find out that we were in interstellar space.

This is a historic milestone in the great journeys of exploration that have been undertaken by humankind.

The Very Large Baseline Array took a radio image of Voyager 1 spacecraft slightly over 11-billion miles from the Earth.

And it's a very small radio dot amongst a sea of darkness.

It is quite remarkable when you think about it, that far off now at ever increasing differences, there's this little vehicle, two of them, which were built here many years ago and launched 36 years ago.

Now, on a journey that will basically last for billions of years.

home-www-videos-voyager-20130912-voyager20130912-1280

(mov) (80.44 MB)

home-www-videos-voyager-20130912-voyager20130912-1280-1

(m4v) (29.42 MB)

(webm) (32.68 MB)

Voyager 1 Is Back! Legendary Probe Makes Contact From Interstellar Space

A friendly voice we've been longing to hear is drifting back to us from interstellar space, 24 billion kilometers away (15 billion miles).

Voyager 1 – the most distant human-made object to Earth – is, once again, sounding like itself on the deep space radio network, after half a year of spewing gobbledegook .

Scientists at NASA are elated.

"We're back, baby!" reads an X post from NASA on June 15.

"Our Voyager 1 spacecraft is conducting normal science operations for the first time since November 2023. All four instruments – which study plasma waves, magnetic fields, and particles – are returning usable science data."

It's the first time in many months that the 46-year-old probe can share all that it's probing on the near-freezing borderlands of our Solar System, outside the influence of our Sun.

In November of 2023, Voyager 1 suddenly started sending back random readouts that didn't make any sense to scientists.

The issue seemed to stem from a small, corrupted chip in the probe's onboard memory system, possibly caused by old age, or maybe triggered by energetic particles in interstellar space.

Because the technology on board Voyager 1 is so outdated, engineers at NASA had to consult manuals from the 1970s to try and get around the problem.

On May 19, the team at NASA succeeded in getting two of the four science instruments on board Voyager 1 to return readable data back to Earth.

"Kinda like when your power goes out and you have to go around your whole house resetting all your electronics… That's basically what my team and I are doing now," explained an official account for Voyager 1 on X.

Now, all four science instruments on board the deep space probe can return usable data to our planet once again.

Voyager 1 and its sibling, Voyager 2, are exploring a region of space never directly encountered by a human-made object before, so missing out on any data is quite the letdown.

These probes are the only way scientists can directly study the interstellar medium, and their measurements have already revealed important details about how our Solar System is shaped and how far the Sun's 'solar bubble' extends.

While the Voyager space probes are often said to have 'left our Solar System,' they have only exited the heliopause and are yet to make it to the hypothesized Oort cloud , which is thought to be the outermost zone of our gravitationally bound system.

Sadly, both Voyagers will never make it to the icy edge in working order , as their generators on board steadily continue to lose power. At its current speed, experts at NASA predict Voyager 1 will take three centuries to reach the Oort cloud. To get to the other side of the cloud would take another 30,000 years.

Engineers predict Voyager 1 will have at least one instrument still going by 2025, and it could continue talking on NASA's Deep Space Network through 2036. It all depends on how much power the probe has left by that time.

In the last few years, Voyager 1 has shown signs of aging. Apart from this most recent event, in 2022 , a broken computer onboard began corrupting outgoing messages. The problem was ultimately fixed, but it took several days. Even traveling at the speed of light , radio messages from the probe take approximately 22.5 hours to return to Earth.

A team at NASA is now working on maintenance to do with Voyager 1's digital tape recorder. This memory system only records 48 seconds of high rate data three times a week from the plasma wave instrument on board.

This means that when Voyager 1 loses its ability to communicate properly, all its other information is lost.

Who knows what we missed the last six months?

File : Voyager Captures Sounds of Interstellar Space.webm

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NASA’s Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth

NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft is depicted in this artist’s concept traveling through interstellar space, or the space between stars, which it entered in 2012.

After some inventive sleuthing, the mission team can — for the first time in five months — check the health and status of the most distant human-made object in existence.

For the first time since November , NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft is returning usable data about the health and status of its onboard engineering systems. The next step is to enable the spacecraft to begin returning science data again. The probe and its twin, Voyager 2, are the only spacecraft to ever fly in interstellar space (the space between stars).

Voyager 1 stopped sending readable science and engineering data back to Earth on Nov. 14, 2023, even though mission controllers could tell the spacecraft was still receiving their commands and otherwise operating normally. In March, the Voyager engineering team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California confirmed that the issue was tied to one of the spacecraft’s three onboard computers, called the flight data subsystem (FDS). The FDS is responsible for packaging the science and engineering data before it’s sent to Earth.

After receiving data about the health and status of Voyager 1 for the first time in five months, members of the Voyager flight team celebrate in a conference room at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory on April 20.

The team discovered that a single chip responsible for storing a portion of the FDS memory — including some of the FDS computer’s software code — isn’t working. The loss of that code rendered the science and engineering data unusable. Unable to repair the chip, the team decided to place the affected code elsewhere in the FDS memory. But no single location is large enough to hold the section of code in its entirety.

So they devised a plan to divide the affected code into sections and store those sections in different places in the FDS. To make this plan work, they also needed to adjust those code sections to ensure, for example, that they all still function as a whole. Any references to the location of that code in other parts of the FDS memory needed to be updated as well.

The team started by singling out the code responsible for packaging the spacecraft’s engineering data. They sent it to its new location in the FDS memory on April 18. A radio signal takes about 22 ½ hours to reach Voyager 1, which is over 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, and another 22 ½ hours for a signal to come back to Earth. When the mission flight team heard back from the spacecraft on April 20, they saw that the modification worked: For the first time in five months, they have been able to check the health and status of the spacecraft.

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During the coming weeks, the team will relocate and adjust the other affected portions of the FDS software. These include the portions that will start returning science data.

Voyager 2 continues to operate normally. Launched over 46 years ago , the twin Voyager spacecraft are the longest-running and most distant spacecraft in history. Before the start of their interstellar exploration, both probes flew by Saturn and Jupiter, and Voyager 2 flew by Uranus and Neptune.

Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages JPL for NASA.

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Calla Cofield

Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

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June 15, 2024

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NASA's Voyager 1, the most distant spacecraft from Earth, is doing science again after problem

by Adithi Ramakrishnan

NASA's Voyager 1, the most distant spacecraft from Earth, is sending science data again.

Voyager 1's four instruments are back in business after a computer problem in November, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory said this week. The team first received meaningful information again from Voyager 1 in April, and recently commanded it to start studying its environment again.

Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 is drifting through interstellar space, or the space between star systems. Before reaching this region, the spacecraft discovered a thin ring around Jupiter and several of Saturn's moons. Its instruments are designed to collect information about plasma waves, magnetic fields and particles.

Voyager 1 is over 15 billion miles (24.14 billion kilometers) from Earth. Its twin Voyager 2—also in interstellar space —is more than 12 billion miles (19.31 billion kilometers) away.

© 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

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