I had the honor and pleasure to take a class from the venerable professor, JPL director, and Voyager project scientist Ed Stone at Caltech in 2018. He excitedly told us a "secret" on November 1st that Voyager 2 had reached interstellar space, and he showed us the actual data proving it. But we had to keep it a secret until the press release that Monday, November 5. It was a special moment to see his passion for the project almost 50 years in, and felt incredibly special to hear it directly from him. RIP professor.
Not to detract from the amazing success that is Voyager - I also still remember attending a lecture given by a JPL engineer that worked on one of the instruments - but I feel like the "Voyager has reached interstellar space" thing has been milked to death by PR. There was a period where I feel like there was one such announcement published in media each month with very unsatisfactory explanation (if any) how it differs from the last one.
Because this is getting downvoted, and to check if my memory serves me well:
Here's an excerpt from a 2013 article in Scientific American that appears on the first page of results when searching for "voyager left the solar system" [1]:
> Voyager 1 was starting to get a reputation as the spacecraft that cried wolf, after scientists repeatedly claimed it was leaving the solar system, only to change their minds and say it wasn’t quite there yet.
It continues to irritate me that There aren't any other functioning deep space probes besides New Horizons (launched in 2006, and which flies at a slower speed than Voyagers). One new operating deep space probe in nearly 50 years is just embarrassing. I mean yay space telescopes and everything, but we seem to have given up anything that isn't a state-of-the-art prestige project. I was hopeful about projects like Breakthrough starshot but that seems to have stalled: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Starshot
If we launched a second New Horizons when the last one passed Pluto, the second one would already have passed Pluto as well.
Crazy to think how much time has passed since that flyby.
Also, one of the program managers was on The Moth podcast describing the panic when new Horizons rebooted days before the flyby.
NASA's New Horizons spacecraft launched on January 19, 2006, and performed its historic flyby of Pluto on July 14, 2015. This journey took 3,463 days (approximately 9.5 years).
What else are you looking to see from such deep space? Nothing we launch will ever reach anything anything interesting in probably the life of humanity. Just to get to Pluto in our life times meant going so fast that it could only fly by. Maybe flying around in the Oort cloud might, unlikely though, be interesting.
Veeger is currently less that 200 AU, and it's dying. For us to build a craft that could stay alive long enough to make it to 550AU and still be functioning would take an incredible leap in technology. This plan also has a fatal flaw in that you can only ever hope to look at one thing. You can't just slew that craft to be able to line up the next target.
Observing the heliopause at different locations would be interesting. The two Voyagers and New Horizon are all headed more or less through the bow. We still have a lot of uncertainty about what shape the tail of the heliosphere is, not to mention many other details.
It's the same notion that has us going "back to the moon" right now. The US did something impressive and interesting several times. In the absence of anything else impressive and interesting now, we're trying to pull the same trick again. As if we're going to arrive on the Moon's surface and suddenly discover it isn't a barren sphere with a rocky surface, no atmosphere & tiny amounts of water on it.
There's a reason why Apollo was cancelled. Putting people on the moon is interesting in the context that it was accomplished. Putting people on the moon today is like that friend who won't stop talking about how we was on the football team in senior year and they went to the state championship.
This might explain the Fermi paradox. If life isn't as common as we think it might be and say there are only a few other intelligent alien civilizations in the milky way then if they are a bit farther away like 70000 light years then what are the odds that they sent some sort of hello signal off into the universe which would take 70000 years at the speed of light to reach us and in the exact time it reached earth we had the technology to receive their signal. We have only had the capability to detect signals for not even 200 years.
Next think about what effort we have done to send a galactic hello. We don't have any deep space probes sent off in the universe constantly sending a hello message. So if all we did was fire a hello message away from earth for 24 hours what are the odds that some alien life picked it up verses they had that day off and missed our signal.
I think this is a much more plausible explanation to the Fermi paradox. If we want to do our part to prove it wrong we need to begin sending a universe hello from earth transmission and run it for not years, not decades, not centuries but from now and for the rest of humanity. Hopefully some other alien civilization has realized the same and they too begin sending a continuous transmission we might get lucky and pick up.
Totally agree with you. What a shame. But when I look at the national debt that seems even more out of reach, I do tend to consider that maybe the stars should wait till we have our s..tuff together here on earth. Privately funded, no issues, go for it at warp speed!
I've read that there were very rare conditions to launch Voyagers which gave them tremendous advantage with gravitational maneuvers. It happens very rarely, I don't remember the exact periods but maybe it happens once per hundreds of years.
I would love to better understand how a device launched the year before I was born could be so flexible in its configuration and operation. I can't update the code running on a microcontroller on my desk in front of me without it triggering a reboot.
When they talk about rerouting power and performing a "big bang" reconfiguration with a 23 hour lag on equipment that was underpowered when the 8088 came out... it kind of melts my brain.
Apparently it still has ten years worth of fuel left!
> Engineers are confident that shutting down the LECP will give Voyager 1 about a year of breathing room. They are using the time to finalize a more ambitious energy-saving fix for both Voyagers they call “the Big Bang,” which is designed to further extend Voyager operations. The idea is to swap out a group of powered devices all at once — hence the nickname — turning some things off and replacing them with lower-power alternatives to keep the spacecraft warm enough to continue gathering science data.
> The team will implement the Big Bang on Voyager 2 first, which has a little more power to spare and is closer to Earth, making it the safer test subject. Tests are planned for May and June 2026. If they go well, the team will attempt the same fix on Voyager 1 no sooner than July. If it works, there is even a chance that Voyager 1’s LECP could be switched back on.
Voyager 1 has only a year left otherwise? Also, what low-powered alternatives are there? Is there that much redundancy? I'd love to know what their idea and plan are?
Also,
> For Voyager 1, the LECP was next on that list. The team shut off the LECP on Voyager 2 in March 2025.
Why? Voyager 2 has more power to spare, per the prior quote.
Curious, has Voyager 1 brought in any data in recent years that is scientifically meaningful? Not to put down the efforts of keeping it alive, I love that. Just wonder how much of its task is "done".
I hope the voyagers can last longer. We are trapped on Earth, but it is just fascinating (and relieving) thinking of them expanding the boundary of human's space adventure.
If anybody wants further context, here's an excellent paper on the status of the Voyager mission as of 2016, written by one of the engineers at JPL. It has an overview of what all the instruments on Voyager do and everything the team had done to keep the mission going as of that point. https://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/~pbarfuss/VIMChallenges.pdf I also highly recommend the documentary "It's Quieter in the Twilight" which is about the entire Voyager team and their efforts to keep the program operational.
Is there an exhaustive list of all the systems and experiments that are still running on these probes? I'm really curious about what data it's collecting and sending back to us.
118 comments
Here's an excerpt from a 2013 article in Scientific American that appears on the first page of results when searching for "voyager left the solar system" [1]:
> Voyager 1 was starting to get a reputation as the spacecraft that cried wolf, after scientists repeatedly claimed it was leaving the solar system, only to change their minds and say it wasn’t quite there yet.
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/voyager-1-leaves-...
Crazy to think how much time has passed since that flyby.
Also, one of the program managers was on The Moth podcast describing the panic when new Horizons rebooted days before the flyby.
NASA's New Horizons spacecraft launched on January 19, 2006, and performed its historic flyby of Pluto on July 14, 2015. This journey took 3,463 days (approximately 9.5 years).
3,932 days July 14, 2015–April 19, 2026
You can use the sun as a gravitational lens: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_gravitational_lens
You need to be about 550 au out.
There's a reason why Apollo was cancelled. Putting people on the moon is interesting in the context that it was accomplished. Putting people on the moon today is like that friend who won't stop talking about how we was on the football team in senior year and they went to the state championship.
> What else are you looking to see from such deep space?
Deep space itself - that's what the Voyagers are measuring.
Next think about what effort we have done to send a galactic hello. We don't have any deep space probes sent off in the universe constantly sending a hello message. So if all we did was fire a hello message away from earth for 24 hours what are the odds that some alien life picked it up verses they had that day off and missed our signal.
I think this is a much more plausible explanation to the Fermi paradox. If we want to do our part to prove it wrong we need to begin sending a universe hello from earth transmission and run it for not years, not decades, not centuries but from now and for the rest of humanity. Hopefully some other alien civilization has realized the same and they too begin sending a continuous transmission we might get lucky and pick up.
Even if we launch a new deep space probe as best we can they're gonna be real slow?
When they talk about rerouting power and performing a "big bang" reconfiguration with a 23 hour lag on equipment that was underpowered when the 8088 came out... it kind of melts my brain.
Apparently it still has ten years worth of fuel left!
> Engineers are confident that shutting down the LECP will give Voyager 1 about a year of breathing room. They are using the time to finalize a more ambitious energy-saving fix for both Voyagers they call “the Big Bang,” which is designed to further extend Voyager operations. The idea is to swap out a group of powered devices all at once — hence the nickname — turning some things off and replacing them with lower-power alternatives to keep the spacecraft warm enough to continue gathering science data.
> The team will implement the Big Bang on Voyager 2 first, which has a little more power to spare and is closer to Earth, making it the safer test subject. Tests are planned for May and June 2026. If they go well, the team will attempt the same fix on Voyager 1 no sooner than July. If it works, there is even a chance that Voyager 1’s LECP could be switched back on.
Voyager 1 has only a year left otherwise? Also, what low-powered alternatives are there? Is there that much redundancy? I'd love to know what their idea and plan are?
Also,
> For Voyager 1, the LECP was next on that list. The team shut off the LECP on Voyager 2 in March 2025.
Why? Voyager 2 has more power to spare, per the prior quote.
> the sequence of commands to shut down the instrument will take 23 or so hours to reach the spacecraft
Closing in on one light day!
> During a routine, planned roll maneuver on Feb. 27
It's amazing not only are the electrical components still operational, but some mechanical ones as well.
> They are still working great, sending back data from a region of space no other human-made craft has ever explored
Unlike the non human-made craft in the region?