when did the voyager mission start and end

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The Voyager missions

Highlights Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 launched in 1977 and made a grand tour of the solar system's outer planets. They are the only functioning spacecraft in interstellar space, and they are still sending back measurements of the interstellar medium. Each spacecraft carries a copy of the golden record, a missive from Earth to any alien lifeforms that may find the probes in the future.

What are the Voyager missions?

The Voyager program consists of two spacecraft: Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. Voyager 2 was actually launched first, in August 1977, but Voyager 1 was sent on a faster trajectory when it launched about two weeks later. They are the only two functioning spacecraft currently in interstellar space, beyond the environment controlled by the sun.

Voyager 2’s path took it past Jupiter in 1979, Saturn in 1981, Uranus in 1985, and Neptune in 1989. It is the only spacecraft to have visited Uranus or Neptune, and has provided much of the information that we use to characterize them now.

Because of its higher speed and more direct trajectory, Voyager 1 overtook Voyager 2 just a few months after they launched. It visited Jupiter in 1979 and Saturn in 1980. It overtook Pioneer 10 — the only other spacecraft in interstellar space thus far — in 1998 and is now the most distant artificial object from Earth.

How the Voyagers work

The two spacecraft are identical, each with a radio dish 3.7 meters (12 feet) across to transmit data back to Earth and a set of 16 thrusters to control their orientations and point their dishes toward Earth. The thrusters run on hydrazine fuel, but the electronic components of each spacecraft are powered by thermoelectric generators that run on plutonium. Each carries 11 scientific instruments, about half of which were designed just for observing planets and have now been shut off. The instruments that are now off include several cameras and spectrometers to examine the planets, as well as two radio-based experiments. Voyager 2 now has five functioning instruments: a magnetometer, a spectrometer designed to investigate plasmas, an instrument to measure low-energy charged particles and one for cosmic rays, and one that measures plasma waves. Voyager 1 only has four of those, as its plasma spectrometer is broken.

Jupiter findings

Over the course of their grand tours of the solar system, the Voyagers took tens of thousands of images and measurements that significantly changed our understanding of the outer planets.

At Jupiter, they gave us our first detailed ideas of how the planet’s atmosphere moves and evolves, showing that the Great Red Spot was a counter-clockwise rotating storm that interacted with other, smaller storms. They were also the first missions to spot a faint, dusty ring around Jupiter. Finally, they observed some of Jupiter’s moons, discovering Io’s volcanism, finding the linear features on Europa that were among the first hints that it might have an ocean beneath its surface, and granting Ganymede the title of largest moon in the solar system, a superlative that was previously thought to belong to Saturn’s moon Titan.

Saturn findings

Next, each spacecraft flew past Saturn, where they measured the composition and structure of Saturn’s atmosphere , and Voyager 1 also peered into Titan’s thick haze. Its observations led to the idea that Titan might have liquid hydrocarbons on its surface, a hypothesis that has since been verified by other missions. When the two missions observed Saturn’s rings, they found the gaps and waves that are well-known today. Voyager 1 also spotted three previously-unknown moons orbiting Saturn: Atlas, Prometheus, and Pandora.

Uranus and Neptune findings

After this, Voyager 1 headed out of the solar system, while Voyager 2 headed toward Uranus . There, it found 11 previously-unknown moons and two previously-unknown rings. Many of the phenomena it observed on Uranus remained unexplained, such as its unusual magnetic field and an unexpected lack of major temperature changes at different latitudes.

Voyager 2’s final stop, 12 years after it left Earth, was Neptune. When it arrived , it continued its streak of finding new moons with another haul of 6 small satellites, as well as finding rings around Neptune. As it did at Uranus, it observed the planet’s composition and magnetic field. It also found volcanic vents on Neptune’s huge moon Triton before it joined Voyager 1 on the way to interstellar space.

Interstellar space

Interstellar space begins at the heliopause, where the solar wind – a flow of charged particles released by the sun – is too weak to continue pushing against the interstellar medium, and the pressure from the two balances out. Voyager 1 officially entered interstellar space in August 2012, and Voyager 2 joined it  in November 2018.

These exits were instrumental in enabling astronomers to determine where exactly the edge of interstellar space is, something that’s difficult to measure from within the solar system. They showed that interstellar space begins just over 18 billion kilometers (about 11 billion miles) from the sun. The spacecraft continue to send back data on the structure of the interstellar medium.

After its planetary encounters, Voyager 1 took the iconic “Pale Blue Dot” image , showing Earth from about 6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles) away. As of 2021 , Voyager 1 is about 155 astronomical units (14.4 billion miles) from Earth, and Voyager 2 is nearly 129 astronomical units (12 billion miles) away.

The golden records

Each Voyager spacecraft has a golden phonograph record affixed to its side, intended as time capsules from Earth to any extraterrestrial life that might find the probes sometime in the distant future. They are inscribed with a message from Jimmy Carter, the U.S. President at the time of launch, which reads: “This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours.”

The covers of the records have several images inscribed, including visual instructions on how to play them, a map of our solar system’s location with respect to a set of 14 pulsars, and a drawing of a hydrogen atom. They are plated with uranium – its rate of decay will allow any future discoverers of either of the records to calculate when they were created.

The records’ contents were selected by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan. Each contains 115 images, including scientific diagrams of the solar system and its planets, the flora and fauna of Earth, and examples of human culture. There are natural sounds, including breaking surf and birdsong, spoken greetings in 55 languages, an hour of brainwave recordings, and an eclectic selection of music ranging from Beethoven to Chuck Berry to a variety of folk music.

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Mission timeline: Voyager’s landmark moments

From its launch in 1977 to becoming the first man-made object to leave the Solar System, the Voyager probes have made some incredible discoveries along their journey through space.

20 August 1977

Voyager 2 launches from Cape Canaveral in Florida, on a longer and slower trajectory than its counterpart. Voyager 1 lifts off a couple of weeks later on 5 September, overtaking Voyager 2 in the asteroid belt.

18 September 1977

As Voyager 1 leaves Earth, it photographs its home planet from 11.7 million km away. It's the first time Earth and the Moon have been seen in a single frame shot from a spacecraft.

6 January 1979

5 March 1979

Voyager 1 snaps the first photo of the mission's first planetary encounter, a portrait of Jupiter from 57.6km away.

Voyager 1 makes its closest pass of Jupiter; Voyager 2 makes its flyby on 9 July. Together, they reveal new moons, rings and the gargantuan extent of the Jovian magnetosphere.

9 March 1979

Volcanism is discovered on the Galilean moon Io, from a photo only taken to navigate the spacecraft. It's the first time volcanism has been seen beyond Earth.

11 November 1980

Voyager 1 takes a close look at Saturn’s moon Titan, discovering that it’s not as large as expected. The crown of largest moon in the Solar System passes to Jupiter’s Ganymede.

12 November 1980

Voyager 1 sails past Saturn, with Voyager 2 following on 25 August 1981. They confirm that the planet’s famous rings are neither solid nor liquid, but thin aggregations of water-ice fragments.

24 January 1986

First encounter with Uranus. Voyager 2 discovers a bland planet with an unusual composition, leading to a new classification: ice giant.

25 August 1989

Voyager 2 becomes the first probe to visit Neptune, which also turns out to be an ice giant. The spacecraft discovers that Neptune has partial rings and the strongest winds in the Solar System.

14 February 1990

Voyager 1’s camera is turned on one last time to take a family portrait of our Solar System. Among the images is the now iconic Pale Blue Dot.

17 February 1998

Voyager 1 overtakes Pioneer 10 to become the most distant human-made object in space, 10.4 billion kilometres from Earth.

25 August 2012

Voyager 1 becomes the first craft to enter interstellar space. NASA is only able to determine this 13 months later, after a coronal mass ejection from the Sun catches up with it.

5 November 2018

Voyager 2 joins its fellow spacecraft to become only the second man-made object to ' leave the Solar System '. It will be nearly 40,000 years before it comes close to another star

All images © NASA

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February 1, 2015

How the Voyager Spacecraft Changed the World: An Interview with Scientist Jim Bell

In his new book Bell, who has sent probes to explore distant planets, tells how two craft carrying messages for extraterrestrials have journeyed farther from Earth than any other

By Clara Moskowitz

The cover of the Voyager Golden Record.

NASA/JPL-Caltech

The two Voyager spacecraft launched in 1977 are now the farthest man-made objects from Earth, at more than 19.5 billion and 16 billion kilometers away, respectively. In 2012 Voyager 1 became the first spacecraft to leave the solar system and enter interstellar space—and its sister spacecraft is not far behind.

Both probes were the first to visit the solar system’s giants, Jupiter and Saturn, and Voyager 2 flew by the other outer planets; they changed our understanding of those worlds profoundly. The Voyagers also carry “golden records” packed with recordings of sounds, songs and pictures to communicate a sense of life on Earth to any extraterrestrials that might encounter them.

Arizona State University planetary scientist Jim Bell recounts the story of the Voyagers in his new book The Interstellar Age: Inside the Forty-Year Voyager Mission (Dutton, 2015). Bell spoke to Scientific American about the impact of the spacecraft and how scientists decided what human facts and achievements to put on the golden records.

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[ An edited transcript of the conversation follows .]

These days we’ve become almost jaded about sending spacecraft to the solar system, but what was the mood among the scientists when they were getting ready to launch the Voyagers? They had this real sense of history, of the potential for this mission to be historic. We knew so little about the giant planets and their moons. We still didn’t know what these places would turn out to be like. We had just done some of the first flybys and orbits of Mars. It was clear that to get to know a place you’ve got to go there.

When the Voyagers reached the outer planets, what effect did their images and data have? They were revolutionary. The Voyagers discovered many moons around the planets we never knew were there. And even the ones we knew were there were literally just points of light in telescopes before that. All of sudden they changed to geologic objects, to worlds that had weather and volcanoes and tectonics. It was just night and day.

And then for the giant planets themselves, the real revelation was that there are two kinds of giant planets in our solar system, and it turns out now in other systems as well. There are the large gas giants, and then the Uranuses and Neptunes, which are smaller, dominated by volatiles—a different kind of beast. We didn’t know that at the time.

How long can the Voyagers keep running? They have a plutonium power supply that is down to about a half from when they were launched, so the prediction is that the spacecraft could continue to have enough power to transmit until the early to mid-2020s. If they go into the mode of shutting down some of the more power-hungry systems as the power drops, they might be able to stretch that.

There’s nothing to photograph out there. But the squiggly-line science—the fields and particles, cosmic rays—those instruments are lower power, simple to operate. It’s conceivable that it could easily be another decade of having these outposts of human civilization out there.

As they continue on into interstellar space, what will they encounter? Both of them will serendipitously pass by some nearby stars in 30,000, 100,000 or 200,000 years. There’s nothing that’s going to slow them down or stop them. They’re not going to change direction unless they happen to pass by something—a star we don’t know about or a rogue planet.

In the absence of sun or wind or anything that’s going to wear them down they could easily outlast us—our entire civilization, outlast our planet. The Earth will eventually be swallowed by the sun and the Voyagers could still be out there. That’s what’s so exciting about having the golden records on them.

How did the golden records come about? This was really driven by Carl Sagan. He was a visionary, big-picture thinker about space, and when they realized that the mission was being developed, that they would be able to accelerate the spacecraft beyond the sphere of the sun, I think Sagan realized this opportunity.

They made a conscious effort to be positive and uplifting, to show pictures and music and readings that were the best part of humanity. They debated a little bit about whether to talk about war, to include a mushroom cloud, and Sagan was very adamant that these represent some of the best parts of humanity. We don’t want it to be seen as threatening. I agree with that philosophy. Science and technology are the best parts of us.

And you put a message in a bottle not for the person on the other side but you do it for yourself, reminding ourselves how far we’ve come as a species and the amazing things we can do for good and for knowledge. It’s a good thing for all of us.

Did anyone think aliens would actually ever find these? I think in general not. They are so small, there are such vast distances between stars, and they’re not going to fly close to any stars or planets. The odds are ridiculously small that they would be found by alien civilization.

I speculate that it’s really going to be us that finds them—as our technology advances, as we travel out into the solar system and the universe we could easily catch up to the Voyagers and it will be us who reads these.

How active is the Voyager science team today? There are people like Ed Stone [Voyager project scientist at California Institute of Technology] still working on the project, and his students, like Jamie Sue Rankin, who was born after the Voyagers launched. She’s a young researcher getting her PhD with Ed using the data. And there are others out there as well. It’s not as large of a community as it used to be, but it’s still a fairly sizable commodity.

I make the point in the book that there’s this misconception among the general public that there are these robots exploring the solar system. But it’s really human exploration, because it’s people controlling these machines, people who wish they were there instead of the machine and who try to experience the place, visually and through chemical instruments, as much as possible. So really Voyager is a voyage of human exploration.

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What did we learn from the Voyager mission?

Jim Green, director of planetary science at NASA, discusses the lasting influence of the epic Voyager programme to study the outer Solar System.

James Green

The Voyager mission not only transformed our knowledge of Jupiter, Saturn and their dozens of moons, it also gave us our first close-up look at the strange and wondrous planets Uranus and Neptune.

Voyager will be remembered as one of the greatest achievements in exploration. As you read this, the two Voyager probes are still operating and travelling where no spacecraft – or anything else touched by human hands – has ever gone before.

In August 2012, Voyager 1 left our planetary system and entered the mysterious region between the stars: interstellar space. Voyager 2 joined its pioneering twin in the outer limits of the Sun’s sphere of influence in 2018.

In the decades since the two craft were launched into space, Voyager 1 has travelled more than 20 billion km, while Voyager 2 has hit the 17 billion km mark.

It's worth pausing to reflect on the vision that inspired Voyager, its greatest achievements and its enduring legacy – how the two probes and their findings inspired those that followed and how they continue to influence NASA missions today.

In my quieter moments, I think about a time, billions of years from now, when our Sun has become a red giant. By then, Earth will no longer be habitable and, in order to survive, humans will have ‘left the nest’ for another home, following a path forged by the Voyager missions.

It's humbling and inspiring to think that, even then, the Voyagers will still be Earth’s ambassadors – each one a time capsule from an era when audacious explorers on our Pale Blue Dot reached out to the stars beyond our Solar System.

Curiosity is in our DNA. As humans, we’re compelled to explore, to find out what lies beyond the next hill.

Not only has the science produced by the Voyager mission been captivating, the probes themselves captured the world’s imagination by each carrying a greeting for extraterrestrial civilisations, in the form of the Golden Records.

While Pioneers 10 and 11 each carried small metal plaques detailing their origin and date of launch, the Voyagers’ Golden Records were considerably more ambitious.

The twin phonograph records brim with images and sounds that provide a snapshot of the diversity of life and culture on Earth to anyone that might discover them. As Carl Sagan noted, “The launching of this ‘bottle’ in the cosmic ocean says something very hopeful about life on this planet.”

Why were there two Voyager spacecraft?

The Voyager mission was as ambitious as it gets. Collectively, the Voyagers visited more planets, discovered more moons and imaged more places than any other spacecraft in NASA history.

One of the questions I’m often asked is: why were there two Voyagers? Voyager was an early NASA mission, at a time when flight systems were known to suffer many anomalies that would put them in safe mode, a condition that typically shuts down all science instruments and looks for commands from Earth.

Since the Voyager missions were flybys, anomalies that would require a lot of time to diagnose and correct could result in us missing an encounter and all the science that might derive from it.

By having two spacecraft we could increase the odds of the mission’s success. The same strategy was employed with the Mars exploration rovers, Spirit and Opportunity; having two rovers not only provides a redundancy and gives us a bigger margin for error.

It quickly became clear that this ‘one-two punch’ strategy was the best one to adopt. Voyager 1’s scan platform, the swivel that moves its cameras and instruments from side to side, became stuck for several weeks in 1978.

The same platform became stuck on Voyager 2’s as the spacecraft was pulling away from its closest approach with Saturn. Fortunately Voyager 2 produced fantastic results at Saturn despite the technical problems, but the anomalies reinforced the value of redundancy and having a second craft as a back-up.

As the first mission to take in the four giant planets in the outer Solar System, Voyager produced a bonanza of new science.

Among the mission’s accomplishments was the discovery of previously unknown moons and rings, the finding of active volcanoes on Io , Neptune’s Great Dark Spot and powerful winds and erupting geysers on Triton.

The discoveries didn’t stop with the probes’ last planetary flybys though. In 2012 Voyager 1 became the first spacecraft to leave the heliosphere, delivering the first measurements of the full intensity of cosmic rays and the galactic magnetic field from interstellar space.Voyager 2 provided the first measurements of the solar wind termination shock.

How Voyager influenced current Solar System exploration

NASA’s Planetary Science Division follows a paradigm for its exploration of the Solar System: flyby, orbit, land, rove and return samples.

The Voyagers were – and in some ways continue to be – the scouting party and the instigators of this paradigm. They forged the way with flybys that have enabled us to take the next steps.

Indeed, the Voyager spacecraft allowed us to survey what’s out there and decide on our priorities for further study. As flyby missions, the Voyagers reinforced the planetary science paradigm, which has been, and continues to be, tremendously successful.

Critical to the success of the Voyagers’ tours of the outer planets was the principle of gravity assist – using the mass of a planet or another object in space to alter the speed and trajectory of a spacecraft. Voyager 2 nailed the gravity assist to tour Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

Since then, a number of missions have employed gravity assists to save fuel and dramatically reduce the amount of time it takes to reach destinations in the outer Solar System.

Voyager paved the way for a number of NASA missions: the Galileo and Juno missions to Jupiter, the Cassini mission to Saturn.

New Horizons flew by Pluto with a boost from Jupiter’s gravity. OSIRIS-REX , bound for asteroid 101955 Bennu, got a gravity assist from Earth to slingshot it more rapidly to its destination.

On the other hand, mission planners for Messenger used gravity assist not to speed the spacecraft up, but to slow it down, so it could successfully enter Mercury’s orbit.

Messenger received assists at Earth and Venus, and three separate assists from Mercury itself before being placed into Mercury’s orbit.

Cassini received two gravity assists at Venus and one each at Earth and Jupiter en route to Saturn. Cassini has mastered the art of gravity assists and uses close flybys of Saturn's largest moon Titan to continually reshape its orbit.

This has allowed Cassini to obtain new views of many of the Saturnian moons that would be otherwise inaccessible, and produced significant scientific results.

In order to observe Neptune’s moon Triton, Voyager 2 performed a very close flyby of Neptune that saw it pass about 5,000km above the planet’s north polar cloud tops.

This was the closest trajectory that any spacecraft had followed around one of the outer planets and initiated the development of precision trajectories for future flybys that would be even closer.

One such flyby took Cassini through the plumes bursting up from Enceladus , bringing the probe within 15km of the moon’s icy surface.

While the Voyagers had limited programmable memory, it proved to be a critical resource that was used extensively and reprogrammed on a number of occasions.Consequently, all subsequent planetary missions were given large programmable memories.

The Voyagers set the agenda for future planetary exploration.Though they taught us much about the ice giants and their moons, the relatively primitive instruments of those missions, and the relatively low volume of data returned raised more questions than answers.

The Voyagers piqued our curiosity about the internal structures and compositions of the giant planets. We have much to learn about their polar regions and the origin of their magnetic fields.

The Voyager mission was a case of the more we know, the more we appreciate what we need to learn. As such, Voyager paved the way for a number of NASA missions: both the Galileo and Juno missions to Jupiter, and the Cassini mission to Saturn with, appropriately, a gravity assist from Jupiter.

The Europa Clipper mission is an orbiter that also builds on the experience gained from Voyager. Clipper is scheduled to launch in the early 2020s and a subsequent lander mission would be a logical successor that could explore the surface but also seek evidence of life beyond Earth.

While the Voyagers' 'grand tours' didn’t include Pluto, the New Horizons mission ‘completed the set’ with a flyby of Pluto in July of 2015 – aided once again by a gravity assist from Jupiter.

Returning to the ice giants

The ice giants Uranus and Neptune have remained unexplored since Voyager 2, but that could change in the years to come. The current Planetary Science Decadal Survey, which covers 2013–2022, lists a return to Uranus or Neptune as a top priority.

A recent NASA-led pre-decadal survey explored a variety of potential mission concepts including orbiters, flybys and probes that would dive into Uranus’s atmosphere to study its composition, possibly in the late 2020s.

Voyagers’ discoveries also inspired a future mission to Jupiter’s fascinating volcanic moon Io, with an Io Observer listed as one of the priorities in NASA’s New Frontiers line of missions in 2003.

Very little is known about the magnetic fields and magnetospheres of Uranus and Neptune, aside from what was learned through the Voyager encounters more than two decades ago.

But questions remain about their magnetosphere-ionosphere coupling processes and their link to the aurorae and moons.

Also puzzling are Neptune’s heat flow, which is around 10 times larger than expected, and Uranus’s, which is about three times greater than anticipated. But the causes are unknown.

At Neptune, Voyager found nitrogen geysers erupting into the stratosphere from Triton’s ultra-cold surface.

We also still have much to learn about the final frontier of the Solar System, so visiting the heliopause with a more capable mission is on my bucket list.

Looking back on the Voyager mission, we can reflect on what drives us to understand our origins and what our future may hold. Curiosity is in our DNA. As humans, we’re compelled to explore, to find out what lies beyond the next hill.

The Voyager probes not only transformed our view of science and the Universe, they also changed us as people. Who isn’t awestruck and humbled by the iconic image of our home planet, that Pale Blue Dot, seen by Voyager 1 from a distance of six billion km?

We were compelled to repeat that experiment with Cassini as we viewed Earth through Saturn’s rings.

Voyager also taught us the art of patience. The time it took for the probes to complete their investigations required that the NASA scientists involved with the mission make a long-term investment in the project.

Any gratification that came from it would be severely delayed, but, as history show has shown, it would be worth the wait.

As a graduate student, I was transfixed by the Voyager flybys. Now, as NASA’s director of planetary science, I yearn

to return to the outer Solar System, to go back to Uranus and Neptune and discover even more about the ice giants.

There are still legacies of the Voyager mission out there waiting to be fulfilled.

James Green is director of planetary science at NASA.

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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.

Get the Latest News from the Final Frontier

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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Voyager 1 and Voyager 2

Where are they now.

Both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 have reached "interstellar space" and each continue their unique journey deeper into the cosmos. In NASA's Eyes on the Solar System app, you can see the actual spacecraft trajectories of the Voyagers updated every five minutes.

Mission Status

Instrument status.

Voyager 1 Present Position

Voyager 2 present position, voyager's grand tour: 1977 - today.

Veteran Republican congressman’s reign in Riverside County under siege

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For decades, Rep. Ken Calvert, 71, presided comfortably over this corner of the Inland Empire. The lifelong Riverside County Republican largely coasted to reelection in a safely conservative district, eventually becoming one of the most senior members of the California House delegation.

But that evaporated in 2022, when Calvert was nearly toppled by a fresh-faced Democratic insurgent.

Will Rollins’ candidacy in California’s 41st District was made viable by redistricting changes the year prior that swapped Republican havens like Temecula and Murrieta for a swath of the Coachella Valley that included overwhelmingly liberal Palm Springs, home to one of the largest concentrations of LGBTQ+ voters in the country.

The 2022 race didn’t draw much attention at first. That quickly changed in the months prior to the election when the former federal prosecutor, now 39, showed he might have an actual shot at unseating the entrenched Republican stalwart. Rollins was briefly ahead on election night, though Calvert ultimately bested him by more than 11,000 votes.

Two years later, Rollins and Calvert are set for a 2024 rematch in what is now one of the most closely-watched races in the country.

The seat will likely play a crucial role in deciding which party dominates the U.S. House of Representatives next year, with partisan control of the House set to be determined by a handful of competitive seats in New York and California.

One story line drew particular attention during the last election, particularly in national media.

In a twist that one advocate described as “poetic justice,” Rollins was a young gay candidate battling an older Republican who had voted against LGBTQ rights in the past in a district that now included Palm Springs, the first city in the nation to elect an all-LGBTQ city council . (Calvert has said his views have since evolved, and the congressman voted in favor of a 2022 bill that affirmed same-sex marriage. )

‘A real twist’: GOP congressman with anti-LGBTQ past tries to win over gay Palm Springs voters

Rep. Ken Calvert, who has opposed gay rights and once attacked an opponent for being gay, is facing a challenge from a gay Democrat in a newly competitive district.

July 14, 2022

All of those dynamics remain at play, and the addition of the Coachella Valley is precisely what made the district competitive.

But the Inland Empire suburbs still account for the vast majority of its voters, and it’s there, in the bedroom communities and increasingly diverse cul-de-sacs, that the battle for Calvert’s seat is really being fought.

Both sides say this year’s race will likely be dominated by kitchen-table issues including the daily cost of living, crime and housing, rather than the divisive culture wars that permeate the national political narrative, and that results will come down to what happens in the western Riverside suburbs.

“Corona, Lake Elsinore, Menifee, Eastvale, Canyon Lake, Norco — those are the cities that are going to decide the outcome of this election,” Rollins said, sitting at an oversize table in a Corona fire station. The local firefighters he’d been meeting with had just rushed out on an emergency call and the smell of their chorizo and eggs lingered, along with several hastily abandoned breakfast plates.

Those western Riverside enclaves are also the cities where Rollins is least well-known and Calvert — the son of a former Corona mayor — has long been a fixture.

“That’s why I’m here today in Corona,” Rollins said, noting that he’d been at the Corona Chamber of Commerce earlier that morning and tries to be in his Corona field office five days a week, about an hour-and-a-half commute from his Palm Springs home.

Though he is slightly graying at the temples, the 39-year-old candidate looks disarmingly boyish and could pass at first glance for an eager college student volunteer. Like Calvert, Rollins and his campaign team underscore the importance of turnout in the western part of the district, which has historically been far lower than in the Palm Springs area.

Those familiar with it describe the district as having two distinct hubs: a corner of the Inland Empire, which includes suburbs like Corona and Menifee and accounts for nearly 80% of voters, and a portion of the Coachella Valley, which includes communities like Rancho Mirage and Palm Desert, along with Palm Springs.

“I know this district inside and out, I was born here. I went to school here. I did business here, and have been representing this district,” Calvert said by phone on a recent Friday from his Corona real estate office in a Spanish-style building a stone’s throw from the 91 Freeway.

About 50 miles southeast of downtown Los Angeles at the western edge of the Inland Empire, Corona is the biggest city in the district and Calvert’s hometown.

Once dubbed “the lemon capital of the world,” it was a town dominated — and perfumed by — citrus for the better part of a century.

But orchards eventually gave way to new homes, neighborhoods and industry, and the Sunkist plant shut down in the early 1980s — the same decade the Riverside County city’s population began to explode , with aspiring suburbanites from Los Angeles and Orange counties driven inland for their slice of the American dream.

Amid a seemingly intractable state housing crisis, Corona and other inland cities in the district, such as Menifee and Lake Elsinore, have continued to boom. Spacious single-family homes can still be had for a fraction of what they would cost in coastal cities, though emigres to the Inland Empire often face lengthy commutes.

The families who arrived during the first waves of Corona’s population boom leaned more conservative, said Wes Speake, a Corona City Council member and president of the Corona Historic Preservation Society. Registered Democrats now slightly outnumber Republicans in the city, though folks still tend to be more fiscally conservative regardless of party affiliation, Speake said.

Speake — a Republican who has endorsed Calvert — attributes Corona’s shift to the center-left to a number of factors, including an “exponential” increase in diversity over the last two decades, younger and more liberal arrivals from Los Angeles and Orange counties, and Republicans changing their registration to no party preference.

More broadly speaking, the 41st District stands out as a rare piece of truly purple topography in a national landscape dominated by red and blue congressional districts.

Former President Trump won the district by just 1% in 2020, down five points from 2016, according to data from California Target Book. As of late May, Republicans held a razor-thin registration advantage, overtaking registered Democrats by a few thousand voters. But that advantage has see-sawed in the past, with Democrats holding an equally narrow upper hand during the 2022 election. Independents account for roughly 1 in 5 voters.

Trump endorsed Calvert in 2022, and the congressman has endorsed Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. Rollins, a former assistant U.S. attorney in the National Security Division at the Department of Justice, has blasted Calvert for his continued support of Trump, even after Trump became the first former president to be convicted of felony crimes last month, with Rollins saying on the social media site X that the district deserves “a representative who cares more about the 750,000 of us in Riverside County than one convicted felon in New York.”

It remains unclear how Trump’s guilty verdict might affect Republicans congressional candidates in competitive districts like Calvert’s, or whether the conviction could nudge swing voters away from supporters of the former president.

“Riverside of 2024 is not Riverside of 1994,” said Sky Allen, executive director of Inland Empire United, a progressive political group that has endorsed Rollins. “The community looks different, our needs are different. And also, there’s a lot of people in our community that were never really represented by someone that holds conservative values.“

Allen cited the increased racial and ethnic diversity, more LGBTQ+ and immigrant families and more organizing from nonprofits like hers as factors shaping the district. In coordination with the super PAC Battleground California, Allen’s organization will be administering an independent expenditure in support of Rollins, with the bulk of its efforts concentrated on canvassing in the district.

Calvert and Rollins diverge on a number of pivotal issues. Calvert has said decisions on abortion should be left to the states and has an A+ rating on SBA Pro-Life America’s “National Pro-Life Scorecard,” whereas Rollins has been outspoken on protecting abortion rights and is backed by Planned Parenthood California’s political action committee. Rollins has advocated more gun-safety restrictions, whereas Calvert has voted against more stringent restrictions and received high marks from the National Rifle Assn.

Both candidates have criticized the country’s broken immigration system and advocated securing the country’s borders, but Rollins’ positioning also focuses on creating a path to citizenship for recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and other “qualified immigrants.”

Rollins’ unexpectedly narrow loss in 2022 left some prognosticators wondering whether more Democratic Party involvement in 2022 could have flipped the seat blue. Those what-ifs won’t be a question in 2024, regardless of what happens in November.

The Democratic establishment is putting its full backing behind Rollins. He’s one of the top candidates on the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s “red to blue” list, a program that provides organizational and fundraising support, and he has also been the beneficiary of high-profile fundraising efforts, with Orange County Rep. Katie Porter blasting emails to her supporters on his behalf and House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries swinging through Southern California to headline a fundraiser.

The Republican party is putting similar institutional might behind Calvert, with significant investments in the district ranging from field support to TV.

Calvert retains the advantages of incumbency and ample name recognition, but Rollins has been a particularly prolific fundraiser. The Democratic challenger had roughly $500,000 more in his war chest than Calvert as of the end of March, according to federal filings. Money will be critical to either candidate getting their message out, especially with the western portion of the district overlapping with the extremely expensive Los Angeles media market.

“If you’re looking at the trend line, this new district is definitely moving toward Democrats after redistricting,” said Erin Covey, a House analyst at the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, citing the addition of Palm Springs and the fact that parts of the historically conservative Inland Empire have also shifted slightly to the left.

Calvert benefited from a newly-drawn Inland Empire district in 1992 when he was first elected to Congress, squeaking by just a few hundred votes. His fate now likely hinges on a narrow margin once again.

More to Read

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How Kevin McCarthy is influencing this congressional race — without being on the ballot

May 20, 2024

Six California House races that could help determine control of Congress

April 26, 2024

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Julia Wick is a political reporter at the Los Angeles Times. She and her colleagues won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in breaking news for reporting on a leaked audio recording that upended Los Angeles politics. She was also part of the team that was a 2022 Pulitzer Prize finalist for work covering a fatal shooting on the set of the film “Rust.” Before joining the Times, Wick was the editor in chief of LAist.

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News | April 27, 2023

Nasa's voyager will do more science with new power strategy.

Editor's note: Language was added in the second paragraph on May 1 to underscore that the mission will continue even after a science instrument is retired.

The plan will keep Voyager 2's science instruments turned on a few years longer than previously anticipated, enabling yet more revelations from interstellar space.

Launched in 1977, the Voyager 2 spacecraft is more than 12 billion miles (20 billion kilometers) from Earth, using five science instruments to study interstellar space. To help keep those instruments operating despite a diminishing power supply, the aging spacecraft has begun using a small reservoir of backup power set aside as part of an onboard safety mechanism. The move will enable the mission to postpone shutting down a science instrument until 2026, rather than this year.

Switching off a science instrument will not end the mission. After shutting off the one instrument in 2026, the probe will continue to operate four science instruments until the declining power supply requires another to be turned off. If Voyager 2 remains healthy, the engineering team anticipates the mission could potentially continue for years to come.

Voyager 2 and its twin Voyager 1 are the only spacecraft ever to operate outside the heliosphere, the protective bubble of particles and magnetic fields generated by the Sun. The probes are helping scientists answer questions about the shape of the heliosphere and its role in protecting Earth from the energetic particles and other radiation found in the interstellar environment.

“The science data that the Voyagers are returning gets more valuable the farther away from the Sun they go, so we are definitely interested in keeping as many science instruments operating as long as possible,” said Linda Spilker, Voyager's project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which manages the mission for NASA.

Power to the Probes

Both Voyager probes power themselves with radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs), which convert heat from decaying plutonium into electricity. The continual decay process means the generator produces slightly less power each year. So far, the declining power supply hasn't impacted the mission's science output, but to compensate for the loss, engineers have turned off heaters and other systems that are not essential to keeping the spacecraft flying.

Each of NASA's Voyager probes are equipped with three radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs), including the one shown here. The RTGs provide power for the spacecraft by converting the heat generated by the decay of plutonium-238 into electricity. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

With those options now exhausted on Voyager 2, one of the spacecraft's five science instruments was next on their list. (Voyager 1 is operating one less science instrument than its twin because an instrument failed early in the mission. As a result, the decision about whether to turn off an instrument on Voyager 1 won't come until sometime next year.)

In search of a way to avoid shutting down a Voyager 2 science instrument, the team took a closer look at a safety mechanism designed to protect the instruments in case the spacecraft's voltage – the flow of electricity – changes significantly. Because a fluctuation in voltage could damage the instruments, Voyager is equipped with a voltage regulator that triggers a backup circuit in such an event. The circuit can access a small amount of power from the RTG that's set aside for this purpose. Instead of reserving that power, the mission will now be using it to keep the science instruments operating.

Although the spacecraft's voltage will not be tightly regulated as a result, even after more than 45 years in flight, the electrical systems on both probes remain relatively stable, minimizing the need for a safety net. The engineering team is also able to monitor the voltage and respond if it fluctuates too much. If the new approach works well for Voyager 2, the team may implement it on Voyager 1 as well.

“Variable voltages pose a risk to the instruments, but we've determined that it's a small risk, and the alternative offers a big reward of being able to keep the science instruments turned on longer,” said Suzanne Dodd, Voyager's project manager at JPL. “We've been monitoring the spacecraft for a few weeks, and it seems like this new approach is working.”

The Voyager mission was originally scheduled to last only four years, sending both probes past Saturn and Jupiter. NASA extended the mission so that Voyager 2 could visit Neptune and Uranus; it is still the only spacecraft ever to have encountered the ice giants. In 1990, NASA extended the mission again, this time with the goal of sending the probes outside the heliosphere. Voyager 1 reached the boundary in 2012, while Voyager 2 (traveling slower and in a different direction than its twin) reached it in 2018.

More About the Mission

A division of Caltech in Pasadena, JPL built and operates the Voyager spacecraft. 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://www.nasa.gov/voyager

News Media Contact

Calla Cofield Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. 626-808-2469 [email protected] 2023-059