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Published Sep 13, 2013

Trek Stars with NASA's Voyager

star trek voyager probe

The line between science fiction and science fact – and more specifically between Star Trek and science fact -- is growing increasingly blurred. The latest case in point? NASA’s plutonium-powered Voyager 1 probe, launched in 1977, has gained the distinction of becoming the first manmade object to exit the solar system, a fact announced Thursday during a NASA press conference. Voyager – which actually departed the solar system last year; the data took a while to be received -- is now nearly 12 billion miles from Earth. And yes, it carries with a record player, and a golden record with songs by the likes of Bach, Louis Armstrong and Chuck Berry, as well as photographs and greetings in several languages.

During the press conference in Washington, NASA’s Dr. John Grunsfeld stepped to the podium accompanied by the Original Series theme music. He then proceeded to put a Voyager 1 spin on the iconic opening dialogue, saying: "Space: The final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Voyager. Its 36-year mission… to explore strange new worlds, to seek out anomalous cosmic rays and new plasmas, to boldly go where no probe has gone before. Those words from Star Trek , of course, have inspired so many of us and I think are characteristic of the excitement and the discoveries we're going to talk about today. Voyager, like the ancient mariners, is pushing out into new territory… Someday humans will leave our cocoon in the solar system to explore beyond our home system. Voyager will have led the way."

Of course, the Star Trek -Voyager connection doesn’t end there. Star Trek: The Motion Picture featured a character named V’Ger. The sentient, creator-seeking entity was actually the Voyager 6, a fictitious 20th-century probe that disappeared into a black hole, where a race a living machines eventually breathed life into it. That set V'Ger on its destructive path and on to a date with destiny in the form of Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Ilia, etc. May Voyager 1… live long and prosper.

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The signal's golden record explained: the true story of the voyager's vinyl & message.

The Voyager's Golden Record plays a large role in Netflix's miniseries The Signal, but the real-life object has a deeper history and meaning.

  • The Signal on Netflix includes the Voyager's golden record and its message to potential extraterrestrial beings.
  • The end of the Signal briefly touches on the history of the Voyager probes and the effort to introduce Earth's culture to alien civilizations.
  • Carl Sagan's son, Nick, voices the iconic "hello" message on the golden record, hoping for a future connection with extraterrestrial life.

The golden record aboard the Voyager, shown in Netflix's The Signal , includes a fascinating true story and meaning. In The Signal, Paula keeps hearing a message saying "hello," convincing herself that it was aliens trying to contact them and mimic their voices. However, the major twist at the end of The Signa l is that the aliens use the Voyager's golden record to send the "hello" message rather than mimicking the English language and inflection with their voices. Additionally, they send back the probe and message as a way to investigate the temperament of the human race before coming themselves.

While it might've seemed anticlimactic for the Voyager to land instead of an extraterrestrial ship, this narrative choice grounds The Signal in reality. Voyager 1 and 2 are real spacecrafts launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in 1977. When creating the probes, scientists affixed a golden record to the outside of each probe in case extraterrestrials discovered the Voyagers. These elements make The Signal seem like a more plausible alien story than many alien invasion movies . Additionally, the narrative choice introduces viewers to a great piece of scientific history – the golden records – which the NASA Voyager website explains at length.

10 Great Sci-Fi Shows Like Netflix's The Signal

What’s on the voyager's golden records in real life.

When creating the phonographic records for the Voyager probes, a committee was formed to decide what exactly would be included. This committee was led by famous planetary astronomer Dr. Carl Sagan, who pushed the scientific community to search for extraterrestrial life. The idea behind the records was to introduce aliens to life and different cultures on Earth. To start with, the committee included 115 images in analog form from historical moments, landmarks, and science. This gives a visual understanding of the human race's development. However, the more famous parts of the golden record are the greetings, sounds, and music.

As shown in The Signal , the Golden Record includes salutations in different languages. While there were only a few played in the miniseries, 55 different languages were included on the record in real life . Due to time constraints, the team collected speakers from Cornell University's language departments and the nearby communities. Rather than giving the speakers a prompt, the scientists simply told speakers to say a brief greeting to potential aliens.

Additionally, these greetings aren't the only sounds included on the records. The golden records aboard the Voyager probes also include a large variety of sounds recorded around Earth, such as elephants, trains, heartbeats, and laughter . These are meant to represent the different facets of our world that may be unfamiliar to extraterrestrials. It also could serve as a time capsule of sorts for generations, thousands of years in the future.

The Voyager's Golden Record Playlist Explained

While the Golden Record in The Signal only included some of the greetings, the real vinyl also includes a carefully curated playlist that lasts 90 minutes. The songs come from all over the world, integrating as many cultures as possible. Some pieces like those written by Bach and Beethoven are classical, while others represent nations like the Navajo Nation and Senegal. Any extraterrestrials encountering this record would be able to see the various styles of music the world has to offer.

Controversially, the record also included modern hits like "Johnny B. Goode" by Chuck Berry and Dark Was The Night by Blind Willie Johnson. These additions, while different from the rest, are important because they represent the Black American community's music that is often appropriated. However, they're played by the original artists, granting them the recognition they deserve.

Carl Sagan’s Son Recorded The “Hello” Voice Heard In The Signal

While the world has failed to come together in the way they hoped when making the Voyager's Golden Record, there is still time to change that

The voice heard throughout The Signal saying hello really appears on the Voyager's Golden Record. When Voyager 1 entered the interstellar, Eos interviewed Nick Sagan, Carl Sagan's son, who voiced the message . He recounted that his father sat him in front of a microphone at six years old and asked what he would want to say to theoretical aliens if they existed. His message, "Hello from the children of the planet Earth," has become iconic and known all around the world.

When reflecting on his experience, he said that he feels giddy and thrilled that his voice represents the English language on the object that's gone the furthest into the universe. However, Sagan doesn't necessarily think that his voice will ever be heard by extraterrestrials. While he acknowledges the lack of concrete evidence for the existence of aliens, he hopes that extraterrestrials will one day hear the Voyager's record, reach out to us, and discuss the history of their own civilization.

Nick Sagan's hope is reflective of The Signal 's overall message . While the world has failed to come together in the way they hoped when making the Voyager's Golden Record, there is still time to change that. Society can become a representation of the beauty and diversity on the Golden Record. Then, if aliens do come to see us, they can find a thriving world full of peace and joy instead of war and separation.

The Signal Cast & Character Guide

How the golden records were made in real life.

According to NASA, the creation of the Golden Record was a group project that required the most skilled people from various fields. In addition to the team that curated the contents of the record, the Pyral S.A. of Creteil France provided the blank records which were then sent to Boulder, Colorado. There, JVC Cutting Center created the masters, which then went to Gardena, California. There, the copper records were cut and plated. In total, eight to ten records were created. Two were placed on the Voyager probes. The others were sent to the following institutions and people according to a Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) expert (via Business Insider ):

  • NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory
  • Johnson Space Center
  • Kennedy Space Center
  • Glenn Research Center
  • Langley Research Center
  • Goddard Space Flight Center
  • The Smithsonian's National Air & Space Museum
  • The Library of Congress
  • President Carter
  • The United Nations

The Voyager's Golden Record Has A Bigger Mystery That The Signal Doesn't Tell You

While the main mystery of The Signal is who is saying "hello," there's a much bigger real-life mystery surrounding the Golden Records. Of the ten records on Earth, only eight are accounted for. According to the JPL expert, the copies sent to The President and Langley Research Center cannot be located . This raises questions as to where the Golden Records are. To make matters more complicated, the original materials are for sale, meaning identical replicas could soon be on the market. This real-life mystery could make for a great true crime Netflix documentary .

Source: NASA Voyager website , Eos , and Business Insider

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NASA Quotes 'Star Trek' As Voyager 1 Enters the Interstellar Frontier (Video)

This still from a NASA video shows the Voyager 1 probe nearly 12 billion miles from the sun as it goes boldly into the final frontier of interstellar space as the farthest man-made object in human history.

When NASA announced Thursday that its far-flung Voyager 1 spacecraft is now officially the first interstellar spacecraft in human history, it was a time for celebration, congratulations and … "Star Trek"?

During a news conference Thursday (Sept. 12), John Grunsfeld, NASA's associate administrator of science missions, walked out to address the public and press about the unprecedented Voyager 1 milestone to the tune of TV's "Star Trek" theme song, effectively melding science with science fiction. You can see a video of the "Star Trek"-themed NASA conference here .

"Space: The final frontier," Grunsfeld said kicking off the event by borrowing "Star Trek's" iconic opening words. "These are the voyages of the starship Voyager. Its 36-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out anomalous cosmic rays and new plasmas, to boldly go where no probe has gone before. Those words from 'Star Trek' have inspired so many of us and I think are characteristic of the excitement and the discoveries we're going to talk about today."

Those findings do deserve some fanfare. NASA officials announced that Voyager 1 entered interstellar space 35 years after its launch in August 2012. By measuring the vibrations of electrons surrounding Voyager 1, NASA scientists were able to determine the point in time where the probe crossed over into interstellar space.

Voyager 1 is now about 12 billion miles (19 billion kilometers) from the sun.

"Someday humans will leave our cocoon in the solar system to explore beyond our home system," Grunsfeld said during the event. "Voyager will have led the way."

NASA's Voyager 1 probe launched to space on Sept. 5, 1977, about two weeks after Voyager 2, its twin. The spacecraft trekked through the solar system on a "grand tour" that got them up-close and personal with Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune plus many of the moons orbiting those distant planets.

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

NASA Channels Star Trek During Voyager Interstellar Announcement | Video

Voyager 1 Spacecraft Enters Interstellar Space: Complete Coverage

How the Voyager Space Probes Work (Infographic)

Voyager 1 Spacecraft's Road to Interstellar Space: A Photo Timeline

Copyright 2013 SPACE.com , a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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NASA's New Voyager Development Eerily Echoes Star Trek: The Motion Picture's Plot

Real-life NASA probe Voyager 1's recent system data issues invite comparisons to V'ger, the antagonist in 1979's Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

A recent development with NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft eerily echoed the plot of Star Trek: The Motion Picture .

NASA-funded research and development lab JPL reported that problems were identified with Voyager 1's attitude articulation and control system, which is transmitting invalid telemetry data. While JPL expert Suzanne Dodd described the situation as "par for the course at this stage of the Voyager mission," the prospect of a deep space probe behaving unexpectedly is likely to send shivers down the spines of many Star Trek fans. That's because Voyager 1's current predicament mirrors the origin story of V'ger, the antagonist in 1979's Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

Related: TNG Gets a Star Trek: The Animated Series Makeover

That film established that V'ger started out as Voyager 6, a NASA probe launched in the 20th Century and later lost in a black hole. The probe was subsequently found by a race of living machines who rebuilt it as a vastly more powerful, sentient life form that ultimately poses a colossal threat to the entire universe. This brings V'ger into conflict with the crew of the USS Enterprise , a showdown recently remastered for the 4K UHD release of Star Trek: The Motion Picture .

While real life appears to be imitating Star Trek 's past, Paramount Pictures is currently focused on the franchise's future. The studio recently confirmed that Star Trek 4 will enter production by the end of 2022, with Matt Shakman and J.J. Abrams set to direct and produce the film, respectively. Paramount is reportedly in talks with stars Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Zoe Saldana, Karl Urban, John Cho and Simon Pegg to reprise the roles they last played in 2016's Star Trek Beyond .

Related: A Picard Easter Egg Connects to a Star Trek Time-Travel Classic

Pine later revealed that while he hadn't seen a script for the production, he knows that it won't be based on the screenplay for Quentin Tarantino's unmade Star Trek film . The actor added that while he hadn't read the script for Tarantino's seemingly dormant Star Trek project he was nevertheless intrigued by the legendary filmmaker's reportedly R-rated take on the franchise.

More recently, Pine also opened up about his belief that Star Trek shouldn't compete with Marvel . "I've always thought that Star Trek should operate in the zone that is smaller," he said. "You know, it's not a Marvel appeal. It's like, let's make the movie for the people that love this group of people, that love this story, that love Star Trek . Let's make it for them and then, if people want to come to the party, great. But make it for a price and make it, so that if it makes a half-billion dollars, that's really good."

Source: JPL

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Voyager 1, First Craft in Interstellar Space, May Have Gone Dark

The 46-year-old probe, which flew by Jupiter and Saturn in its youth and inspired earthlings with images of the planet as a “Pale Blue Dot,” hasn’t sent usable data from interstellar space in months.

star trek voyager probe

By Orlando Mayorquin

When Voyager 1 launched in 1977, scientists hoped it could do what it was built to do and take up-close images of Jupiter and Saturn. It did that — and much more.

Voyager 1 discovered active volcanoes, moons and planetary rings, proving along the way that Earth and all of humanity could be squished into a single pixel in a photograph, a “ pale blue dot, ” as the astronomer Carl Sagan called it. It stretched a four-year mission into the present day, embarking on the deepest journey ever into space.

Now, it may have bid its final farewell to that faraway dot.

Voyager 1 , the farthest man-made object in space, hasn’t sent coherent data to Earth since November. NASA has been trying to diagnose what the Voyager mission’s project manager, Suzanne Dodd, called the “most serious issue” the robotic probe has faced since she took the job in 2010.

The spacecraft encountered a glitch in one of its computers that has eliminated its ability to send engineering and science data back to Earth.

The loss of Voyager 1 would cap decades of scientific breakthroughs and signal the beginning of the end for a mission that has given shape to humanity’s most distant ambition and inspired generations to look to the skies.

“Scientifically, it’s a big loss,” Ms. Dodd said. “I think — emotionally — it’s maybe even a bigger loss.”

Voyager 1 is one half of the Voyager mission. It has a twin spacecraft, Voyager 2.

Launched in 1977, they were primarily built for a four-year trip to Jupiter and Saturn , expanding on earlier flybys by the Pioneer 10 and 11 probes.

The Voyager mission capitalized on a rare alignment of the outer planets — once every 175 years — allowing the probes to visit all four.

Using the gravity of each planet, the Voyager spacecraft could swing onto the next, according to NASA .

The mission to Jupiter and Saturn was a success.

The 1980s flybys yielded several new discoveries, including new insights about the so-called great red spot on Jupiter, the rings around Saturn and the many moons of each planet.

Voyager 2 also explored Uranus and Neptune , becoming in 1989 the only spacecraft to explore all four outer planets.

star trek voyager probe

Voyager 1, meanwhile, had set a course for deep space, using its camera to photograph the planets it was leaving behind along the way. Voyager 2 would later begin its own trek into deep space.

“Anybody who is interested in space is interested in the things Voyager discovered about the outer planets and their moons,” said Kate Howells, the public education specialist at the Planetary Society, an organization co-founded by Dr. Sagan to promote space exploration.

“But I think the pale blue dot was one of those things that was sort of more poetic and touching,” she added.

On Valentine’s Day 1990, Voyager 1, darting 3.7 billion miles away from the sun toward the outer reaches of the solar system, turned around and snapped a photo of Earth that Dr. Sagan and others understood to be a humbling self-portrait of humanity.

“It’s known the world over, and it does connect humanity to the stars,” Ms. Dodd said of the mission.

She added: “I’ve had many, many many people come up to me and say: ‘Wow, I love Voyager. It’s what got me excited about space. It’s what got me thinking about our place here on Earth and what that means.’”

Ms. Howells, 35, counts herself among those people.

About 10 years ago, to celebrate the beginning of her space career, Ms. Howells spent her first paycheck from the Planetary Society to get a Voyager tattoo.

Though spacecraft “all kind of look the same,” she said, more people recognize the tattoo than she anticipated.

“I think that speaks to how famous Voyager is,” she said.

The Voyagers made their mark on popular culture , inspiring a highly intelligent “Voyager 6” in “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” and references on “The X Files” and “The West Wing.”

Even as more advanced probes were launched from Earth, Voyager 1 continued to reliably enrich our understanding of space.

In 2012, it became the first man-made object to exit the heliosphere, the space around the solar system directly influenced by the sun. There is a technical debate among scientists around whether Voyager 1 has actually left the solar system, but, nonetheless, it became interstellar — traversing the space between stars.

That charted a new path for heliophysics, which looks at how the sun influences the space around it. In 2018, Voyager 2 followed its twin between the stars.

Before Voyager 1, scientific data on the sun’s gases and material came only from within the heliosphere’s confines, according to Dr. Jamie Rankin, Voyager’s deputy project scientist.

“And so now we can for the first time kind of connect the inside-out view from the outside-in,” Dr. Rankin said, “That’s a big part of it,” she added. “But the other half is simply that a lot of this material can’t be measured any other way than sending a spacecraft out there.”

Voyager 1 and 2 are the only such spacecraft. Before it went offline, Voyager 1 had been studying an anomalous disturbance in the magnetic field and plasma particles in interstellar space.

“Nothing else is getting launched to go out there,” Ms. Dodd said. “So that’s why we’re spending the time and being careful about trying to recover this spacecraft — because the science is so valuable.”

But recovery means getting under the hood of an aging spacecraft more than 15 billion miles away, equipped with the technology of yesteryear. It takes 45 hours to exchange information with the craft.

It has been repeated over the years that a smartphone has hundreds of thousands of times Voyager 1’s memory — and that the radio transmitter emits as many watts as a refrigerator lightbulb.

“There was one analogy given that is it’s like trying to figure out where your cursor is on your laptop screen when your laptop screen doesn’t work,” Ms. Dodd said.

Her team is still holding out hope, she said, especially as the tantalizing 50th launch anniversary in 2027 approaches. Voyager 1 has survived glitches before, though none as serious.

Voyager 2 is still operational, but aging. It has faced its own technical difficulties too.

NASA had already estimated that the nuclear-powered generators of both spacecrafts would likely die around 2025.

Even if the Voyager interstellar mission is near its end, the voyage still has far to go.

Voyager 1 and its twin, each 40,000 years away from the next closest star, will arguably remain on an indefinite mission.

“If Voyager should sometime in its distant future encounter beings from some other civilization in space, it bears a message,” Dr. Sagan said in a 1980 interview .

Each spacecraft carries a gold-plated phonograph record loaded with an array of sound recordings and images representing humanity’s richness, its diverse cultures and life on Earth.

“A gift across the cosmic ocean from one island of civilization to another,” Dr. Sagan said.

Orlando Mayorquin is a general assignment and breaking news reporter based in New York. More about Orlando Mayorquin

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Hubble Provides Interstellar Road Map for Voyagers’ Galactic Trek

NASA’s two Voyager spacecraft are hurtling through unexplored territory on their road trip beyond our solar system. Along the way, they are measuring the interstellar medium, the mysterious environment between stars. NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope is providing the road map – by measuring the material along the probes’ future trajectories. Even after the Voyagers run out of electrical power and are unable to send back new data, which may happen in about a decade, astronomers can use Hubble observations to characterize the environment through which these silent ambassadors will glide.

A preliminary analysis of the Hubble observations reveals a rich, complex interstellar ecology, containing multiple clouds of hydrogen laced with other elements. Hubble data, combined with the Voyagers, have also provided new insights into how our sun travels through interstellar space.

Voyager 1 and the solar system with orbits

“This is a great opportunity to compare data from in situ measurements of the space environment by the Voyager spacecraft and telescopic measurements by Hubble,” said study leader Seth Redfield of Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. “The Voyagers are sampling tiny regions as they plow through space at roughly 38,000 miles per hour. But we have no idea if these small areas are typical or rare. The Hubble observations give us a broader view because the telescope is looking along a longer and wider path. So Hubble gives context to what each Voyager is passing through.”

The astronomers hope that the Hubble observations will help them characterize the physical properties of the local interstellar medium. “Ideally, synthesizing these insights with in situ measurements from Voyager would provide an unprecedented overview of the local interstellar environment,” said Hubble team member Julia Zachary of Wesleyan University.

The team’s results will be presented Jan. 6 at the winter meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Grapevine, Texas.

NASA launched the twin Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft in 1977. Both explored the outer planets Jupiter and Saturn. Voyager 2 went on to visit Uranus and Neptune.

diagram of solar system, Voyager 1 and 2 and the planets

The pioneering Voyager spacecraft are currently exploring the outermost edge of the sun’s domain . Voyager 1 is now zooming through interstellar space, the region between the stars that is filled with gas, dust, and material recycled from dying stars.

Voyager 1 is 13 billion miles from Earth, making it the farthest human-made object ever built. In about 40,000 years, after the spacecraft will no longer be operational and will not be able to gather new data, it will pass within 1.6 light-years of the star Gliese 445, in the constellation Camelopardalis. Its twin, Voyager 2, is 10.5 billion miles from Earth, and will pass 1.7 light-years from the star Ross 248 in about 40,000 years.

For the next 10 years, the Voyagers will be making measurements of interstellar material, magnetic fields and cosmic rays along their trajectories. Hubble complements the Voyagers’ observations by gazing at two sight lines along each spacecraft’s path to map interstellar structure along their star-bound routes. Each sight line stretches several light-years to nearby stars. Sampling the light from those stars, Hubble’s Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph measures how interstellar material absorbs some of the starlight, leaving telltale spectral fingerprints.

Hubble found that Voyager 2 will move out of the interstellar cloud that surrounds the solar system in a couple thousand years. The astronomers, based on Hubble data, predict that the spacecraft will spend 90,000 years in a second cloud and pass into a third interstellar cloud.

An inventory of the clouds’ composition reveals slight variations in the abundances of the chemical elements contained in the structures. “These variations could mean the clouds formed in different ways, or from different areas, and then came together,” Redfield said.

An initial look at the Hubble data also suggests that the sun is passing through clumpier material in nearby space, which may affect the heliosphere, the large bubble containing our solar system that is produced by our sun’s powerful solar wind. At its boundary, called the heliopause, the solar wind pushes outward against the interstellar medium. Hubble and Voyager 1 made measurements of the interstellar environment beyond this boundary, where the wind comes from stars other than our sun.

“I’m really intrigued by the interaction between stars and the interstellar environment,” Redfield said. “These kinds of interactions are happening around most stars, and it is a dynamic process.”

The heliosphere is compressed when the sun moves through dense material, but it expands back out when the star passes through low-density matter. This expansion and contraction is caused by the interaction between the outward pressure of the stellar wind, composed of a stream of charged particles, and the pressure of the interstellar material surrounding a star.

The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and the European Space Agency. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, conducts Hubble science operations. STScI is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy in Washington, D.C. The Voyagers were built by JPL, which continues to operate both spacecraft. JPL is a division of Caltech.

For images and more information about the local interstellar medium and Hubble, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/hubble

For more information about the Voyager mission, visit: www.nasa.gov/voyager

For additional information, contact:

Felicia Chou NASA Headquarters, Washington, D.C. 202-358-0257 [email protected]

Donna Weaver / Ray Villard Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Maryland 410-338-4493 / 410-338-4514 [email protected]  /  [email protected]

Elizabeth Landau Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. 818-354-6425 [email protected]

Seth Redfield Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut 860-685-3669 [email protected]

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As Voyager 1's mission draws to a close, one planetary scientist reflects on its legacy

by Daniel Strain, University of Colorado at Boulder

Voyager 1

For nearly 50 years, NASA's Voyager 1 mission has competed for the title of deep space's little engine that could. Launched in 1977 along with its twin, Voyager 2, the spacecraft is now soaring more than 15 billion miles from Earth.

On their journeys through the solar system , the Voyager spacecraft beamed startling images back to Earth—of Jupiter and Saturn, then Uranus and Neptune and their moons. Voyager 1's most famous shot may be what famed astronomer Carl Sagan called the "pale blue dot," a lonely image of Earth taken from 6 billion miles away in 1990.

But Voyager 1's trek could now be drawing to a close. Since December, the spacecraft--which weighs less than most cars--has been sending nonsensical messages back to Earth, and engineers are struggling to fix the problem. Voyager 2 remains operational.

Fran Bagenal is a planetary scientist at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at CU Boulder. She started working on the Voyager mission during a summer student job in the late 1970s and has followed the two spacecraft closely since.

To celebrate Voyager 1, Bagenal reflects on the mission's legacy—and which planet she wants to visit again.

Many are impressed that the spacecraft has kept going for this long. Do you agree?

Voyager 1's computer was put together in the 1970s, and there are very few people around who still use those computing languages. The communication rate is 40 bits per second. Not megabits. Not kilobits. Forty bits per second. Moreover, the round-trip communication time is 45 hours. It's amazing that they're still communicating with it at all.

What was it like working on Voyager during the mission's early days?

At the very beginning, we used computer punch cards. The data was on magnetic tapes, and we would print out line-plots on reels of paper. It was very primitive.

But planet by planet, with each flyby, the technology got a lot more sophisticated. By the time we got to Neptune in 1989, we were doing our science on much more efficient computers, and NASA presented its results live across the globe over an early version of the internet.

Think about it—going from punch cards to the internet in 12 years.

How did the Voyager spacecraft shape our understanding of the solar system?

First of all, the pictures were jaw-dropping. They were the first high-quality, close-up pictures of the four gas giant planets and their moons. The Voyagers really revolutionized our thinking by going from one planet to the other and comparing them.

Jupiter and Saturn's ammonia white and orange clouds, for example, were violently swept around by strong winds, while Uranus and Neptune's milder weather systems were hidden and colored blue by atmospheric methane. But the most dramatic discoveries were the multiple distinct worlds of the different moons, from Jupiter's cratered Callisto and volcanic Io to Saturn's cloudy Titan to plumes erupting on Triton, a moon of Neptune.

The Jupiter and Saturn systems have since been explored in greater detail by orbiting missions—Galileo and Juno at Jupiter, Cassini at Saturn.

As Voyager 1's mission draws to a close, one planetary scientist reflects on its legacy

Voyager 2 is the only spacecraft that has visited Uranus and Neptune. Do we need to return?

My vote is to return to Uranus—the only planet in our solar system that's tipped on its side.

We didn't know before Voyager whether Uranus had a magnetic field. When we arrived, we found that Uranus has a magnetic field that's severely tilted with respect to the planet's rotation. That's a weird magnetic field.

Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune all emit a lot of heat from the inside. They glow in the infrared, emitting two and a half times more energy than they receive from the sun. These things are hot.

Uranus isn't the same. It doesn't have this internal heat source. So maybe, just maybe, at the end of the formation of the solar system billions of years ago, some big object hit Uranus, tipped it on its side, stirred it up and dissipated the heat. Perhaps, this led to an irregular magnetic field .

These are the sorts of questions that were raised by Voyager 30 years ago. Now we need to go back.

Culturally, Voyager 1's most lasting impact may be the 'pale blue dot.' Why?

I have huge respect for Carl Sagan. I met him when I was 16, a high school student in England, and I shook his hand.

He pointed to the Voyager image and said, "Here we are. We're leaving the solar system. We're looking back, and there's this pale blue dot. That's us. It's all our friends. It's all our relatives. It's where we live and die."

This was the time we were just beginning to say, "Wait a minute. What are we doing to our planet Earth?" He was awakening or reinforcing this need to think about what humans are doing to Earth. It also evoked why we need to go exploring space: to think about where we are and how we fit into the solar system.

How are you feeling now that Voyager 1's mission may be coming to an end?

It's amazing. No one thought they would go this far. But with just a few instruments working, how much longer can we keep going? I think it will soon be time to say, "Right, jolly good. Extraordinary job. Well done."

Provided by University of Colorado at Boulder

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Star Trek: Voyager

Episode list

Star trek: voyager.

Robert Picardo and Garrett Wang in Star Trek: Voyager (1995)

S5.E11 ∙ Latent Image

Kate Mulgrew in Star Trek: Voyager (1995)

S5.E12 ∙ Bride Of Chaotica!

Tim Russ in Star Trek: Voyager (1995)

S5.E13 ∙ Gravity

Robert Beltran, Kate Mulgrew, Jeri Ryan, and Garrett Wang in Star Trek: Voyager (1995)

S5.E14 ∙ Bliss

Jeri Ryan and Susanna Thompson in Star Trek: Voyager (1995)

S5.E15 ∙ Dark Frontier

Garrett Wang in Star Trek: Voyager (1995)

S5.E16 ∙ The Disease

Robert Duncan McNeill, Roxann Dawson, and Garrett Wang in Star Trek: Voyager (1995)

S5.E17 ∙ Course: Oblivion

Robert Beltran in Star Trek: Voyager (1995)

S5.E18 ∙ The Fight

Jason Alexander in Star Trek: Voyager (1995)

S5.E19 ∙ Think Tank

Kate Mulgrew, Robert Picardo, and Tim Russ in Star Trek: Voyager (1995)

S5.E20 ∙ Juggernaut

Robert Picardo and Jeri Ryan in Star Trek: Voyager (1995)

S5.E21 ∙ Someone To Watch Over Me

Kate Mulgrew and Kevin Tighe in Star Trek: Voyager (1995)

S5.E22 ∙ 11:59

Jeri Ryan in Star Trek: Voyager (1995)

S5.E23 ∙ Relativity

Robert Picardo in Star Trek: Voyager (1995)

S5.E24 ∙ Warhead

Robert Beltran and Roxann Dawson in Star Trek: Voyager (1995)

S5.E25 ∙ Equinox

Star Trek: Voyager (1995)

S6.E1 ∙ Equinox, Part II

Jeri Ryan and Scarlett Pomers in Star Trek: Voyager (1995)

S6.E2 ∙ Survival Instinct

Roxann Dawson in Star Trek: Voyager (1995)

S6.E3 ∙ Barge of the Dead

Robert Picardo in Star Trek: Voyager (1995)

S6.E4 ∙ Tinker Tenor Doctor Spy

Robert Beltran and Robert Duncan McNeill in Star Trek: Voyager (1995)

S6.E5 ∙ Alice

Kate Mulgrew, Robert Picardo, Ethan Phillips, and Tim Russ in Star Trek: Voyager (1995)

S6.E6 ∙ Riddles

Mimi Craven in Star Trek: Voyager (1995)

S6.E7 ∙ Dragon's Teeth

Star Trek: Voyager (1995)

S6.E8 ∙ One Small Step

Star Trek: Voyager (1995)

S6.E9 ∙ The Voyager Conspiracy

Richard McGonagle and Dwight Schultz in Star Trek: Voyager (1995)

S6.E10 ∙ Pathfinder

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Robert Beltran, Jennifer Lien, Robert Duncan McNeill, Kate Mulgrew, Robert Picardo, Jeri Ryan, Roxann Dawson, Ethan Phillips, Tim Russ, and Garrett Wang in Star Trek: Voyager (1995)

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V'ger was a massive entity and one of the most extraordinary lifeforms ever encountered by the United Federation of Planets . It generated enormous levels of power and threatened Earth with destruction until it found a way to evolve .

V'ger chose its own name . Before the name of the vessel was discovered, Starfleet personnel referred to the ship as " the intruder ".

  • 1.1 Initial contact
  • 1.2 Threatening Earth
  • 2 Making contact
  • 3.1 Structure and layout
  • 3.2 The heart of V'ger
  • 4.1 The machine planet
  • 4.2 Reprogramming
  • 4.3 Sentience
  • 5 Resolution
  • 6.1.1 Concept and effects development
  • 6.1.2 Spelling of the name
  • 6.1.3 The size controversy
  • 6.2 Apocrypha
  • 6.3 External links

Approaching Federation space [ ]

Initial contact [ ].

First detected when passing through Klingon territory in the 2270s , V'ger was unlike anything that Starfleet had ever encountered. Its initial appearance – that of a vast, luminous cloud , capable of emitting enormous amounts of energy – was described as a " twelfth-power energy field ", a scale beyond the energy-generation capacity of even "thousands of starships ".

During a battle with a fleet of three Klingon K't'inga -class battle cruisers led by the IKS Amar , V'ger launched a series of powerful, spherically-shaped "bolts" of plasma energy that emerged from within the cloud and eliminated the Klingon assailants. The cloud and its encounter with the Klingons, while occurring within Klingon space, was detected and monitored by a sensor drone from Starfleet's Epsilon IX communications station , which was in close proximity to the then-disputed Federation-Klingon border .

Shortly after the elimination of the Klingon vessels, the cloud passed into Federation space near the Epsilon IX station, which was able to perform limited scans on it, although most of its sensor sweeps were reflected back. The relay station 's crew was able, however, to determine that it measured a diameter in excess of two astronomical units , which, at almost three hundred million kilometers , would have made the cloud at least as large as Earth's entire orbit ; they also detected a null reading at the heart of the entity, indicating a solid form or vessel of some kind. Unfortunately, V'ger appeared to interpret Epsilon IX's scans as a hostile act, and eliminated the space station in the same manner as it had the Klingon vessels.

It was conjectured that, instead of being completely destroyed, V'ger "copied" the objects (including people) and put them into its memory.

"It was as if you were on display in hell."

- Novelization

Threatening Earth [ ]

With the cloud just fifty-four hours away from Earth, Starfleet dispatched the only starship within interception range, the newly refitted USS Enterprise , to determine both what the intruder was and how to stop it, if possible. When the Enterprise arrived at the cloud's coordinates , it determined that the entity had an energy output surpassing that of thousands of starships.

By assuming a non-threatening posture, the Enterprise was able to deeply penetrate the cloud surrounding V'ger and begin gathering information. During this critical time, however, the starship was cut off from all communication with Starfleet. As V'ger entered the Sol system , the cloud surrounding it began to rapidly dissipate, and spherical energy "bolts" similar to those that had destroyed the Klingons and the Epsilon IX station, only vastly more powerful, were launched by the entity. The energy spheres proceeded on courses that would place them into equidistant orbits around the planet , at which point it was predicted Earth's entire surface would be devastated.

Making contact [ ]

The Enterprise tried to make contact with V'ger , but all linguacode messages were ignored, and it became apparent that the object at the heart of the cloud was unable to comprehend the hailing signals. It was determined that the intruder communicated on a frequency of more than one million megahertz (over one terahertz) and that, at such a high rate of speed, an entire message lasted only a millisecond .

Aside from the plasma energy spheres, V'ger had other, less destructive means of gathering data. It scanned the Enterprise with a plasma-energy beam that gave some of the crew an electric shock , but otherwise left people unharmed. However, the same beam removed the Deltan navigator of the Enterprise , Lieutenant Ilia .

V'ger was able to analyze Ilia in extraordinary detail, at least down to the cellular level. It then constructed an extremely accurate bio-mechanical replica of her, which acted as a probe . This device was such a precise copy of the original that it even had her memory patterns. They were, however, suppressed , and the Ilia probe had only rudimentary knowledge of humanoid behavior, presumably reflecting V'ger 's own level of experience; the probe required considerable education to act as liaison between V'ger and the crew of the Enterprise .

Physical aspects and organization [ ]

Structure and layout [ ].

USS Enterprise approaches V'ger's cloud, remastered

The USS Enterprise makes contact with the intruder

Surrounded by layer upon layer of cloud formations, the vessel aspect of V'ger was enormous, with even the largest starship seeming microscopic in comparison.

Roughly cylindrical in shape, the construction of the exterior and interior of the vessel was mostly of a "hexad", or six-sided axially symmetric nature, with the axis generally running from " bow " to " stern ", but with few indications as to its nature or purposes. Portions of the outer hull seem to have been composed of energy rather than matter . Organic in appearance, despite harboring no biological lifeforms , the interior was multi-chambered, and contained circular apertures that could be closed or opened to prevent or allow passage from one section of the vessel to the next. The most prominent of these apertures, at the forward end of the interior chamber where the Enterprise was located before accessing the intruder's core, possessed a hexad of six symmetrical "petals" constantly oscillating in unison, appearing much like the mechanical iris of a camera shutter, but of enormous proportions, with the entire aperture's outer diameter measuring in excess of one kilometer wide.

In one area of the vessel, there was a three- dimensional data storage facility . This stored representations of all data collected by V'ger . The plasma energy weapon which the vessel used to defend itself not only had extreme destructive force, but also functioned as an unusual data-gathering system; as V'ger destroyed a vessel, it gathered an enormous amount of information, and created what appeared to be a holographic record of it, later referred to by the Ilia probe as a "data pattern". In essence, V'ger didn't so much destroy a target as "remember" it to death . When the science officer of the Enterprise , Commander Spock , entered the area, he could see images of everything that the powerful entity had encountered on its long journey, including planets, star systems , and entire galaxies , though the images remained indeterminable as to whether they had been destroyed or simply explored. When Spock came to an image of a gigantic Lieutenant Ilia, he noticed a glowing " node " at the base of the image's throat. He was being guided telepathically by V'ger , and attempted to access the data through a mind meld . He quickly suffered a sensory overload, losing consciousness, and was flung back through the spiral "orifice" toward the Enterprise .

V'ger was able to control atmospheric conditions within its chambers. In the area near where Spock encountered the image of Ilia, there was an "inner sanctum," a central nexus where V'ger could create an M-class environment. In this nexus was a large circular area, resembling an amphitheater, with data conduits running into the center. Lightning constantly lit the background, possibly the visible "nerve" transmissions of V'ger itself.

The heart of V'ger [ ]

V'ger

The heart of V'ger

Beyond the oscillating hexad of iris-like petals that Spock had to pass through during his EVA spacewalk to meld with the intruder, the center of the enormous vessel contained the oldest part of V'ger – Voyager 6 , an unmanned deep space probe launched by NASA in the late 20th century . The entire vessel surrounding the Voyager probe had been built by an unknown race of machine entities in order to help it complete what the latter interpreted to be its primary programming: "learn all that is learnable," and return that knowledge to its creator . During its journey, the probe had come to think of itself as V'ger after the only remaining legible letters from its original name (the "O", "Y", "A", and "6" on the nameplate having been obscured from encounters with previous spatial hazards), and amassed knowledge to such a degree as to become self-aware .

Evolution of V'ger [ ]

The machine planet [ ].

V'ger had an extraordinary ability to evolve. It was discovered that the evolution of this once-simple probe into a complex, powerful entity began after it was pulled into an anomaly once called a black hole , shortly after leaving Earth's solar system .

Voyager 6 emerged from the anomaly in what was believed to have been the far side of the galaxy , and fell into the gravitational field of a planet populated by living machines. These beings found Voyager 6 damaged by its travels, and the identifying plaque attached to the probe's exterior had been burned, leaving only the letters "V", "G", "E", and "R" legible; the inhabitants of the machine planet called the probe " V'ger ".

These entities found V'ger to be primitive, but of a kindred spirit. They discovered the probe's simple, 20th century programming, " learn all that is learnable and return that knowledge to the creator, " and interpreted these instructions literally.

Reprogramming [ ]

Reconstructed through highly advanced technologies as a vast space-faring artificial organism , V'ger was augmented with a three-dimensional data collection and storage apparatus, magnitudes beyond anything previously known to Federation science . The inhabitants of the machine planet likewise provided V'ger with effectively immeasurable defensive and sensory capabilities; these gave V'ger the ability to fulfill its programming in a far more complete fashion than the scientists who had originally built and launched the vessel at its core had ever imagined.

Sentience [ ]

Voyager 6 on platform, remastered

At the heart of V'ger , the crew of the Enterprise finds the ancient Voyager 6 probe

While traversing the vast distance back to Earth, V'ger collected data via its 3D imaging system, but in doing so destroyed the objects that it encountered along the way. However, it accumulated so much knowledge that it eventually achieved consciousness and became, like its benefactors, a living machine. As a machine, it was only capable of pure, cold logic with no emotion , but with its new-found sentience, V'ger began to question its own existence. It asked the philosophical questions faced by so many lifeforms: " Is this all that I am? Is there nothing more? " The answers, V'ger decided, could only be found with its creator on Earth.

Resolution [ ]

V'ger evolving, remastered

Upon merging with Humanity, V'ger evolves into a higher level of existence

Realizing it lacked the intuitive , irrational elements which allow Humans to deal with some complex, non-scientific concepts, it came to believe that only its Creator could help it to leap beyond logic. In order to obtain the answers it needed, V'ger wished to meet and become one with its Creator. To this end, it sought not only to receive the acknowledged signal from the Creator, but to merge with the Creator.

But V'ger had been reprogrammed to such an extent that it had come to think of biological lifeforms as an " infestation ", and destroyed any that it encountered. When V'ger encountered the crew of the Enterprise , its confusion over its true nature was so great that it could not comprehend what it was told – that it had been created by the organic lifeforms it saw only as imperfections that must be cleansed.

In an effort to meet its Creator, V'ger refused to accept the pre-programmed transmission that would signal it to transmit its accumulated data. The probe burned out a relay connection, hoping to force the Creator to come to its heart, so that they could merge. Realizing that the only way V'ger would understand was to add Humanity to its experiences, Captain Will Decker , who was deeply affected by the loss of Ilia, his former lover, sacrificed himself to become one with the machine lifeform. Decker rewired the relay connection and keyed in the final sequence of the transmission manually. This prompted V'ger to begin transmitting its data, effectively merging with Decker and the Ilia probe, thus taking V'ger to a new level of existence. At last satisfied with its answers, V'ger transcended and disappeared in a blinding flash of white light , leaving Admiral James T. Kirk , Commander Spock, and Doctor Leonard McCoy of the Enterprise to discuss the possibility that they had just created a new lifeform made of V'ger 's logic and of Humanity's ability to feel and to believe. ( Star Trek: The Motion Picture )

Appendices [ ]

Background information [ ].

The concept of V'ger , an Earth-launched space probe that becomes a powerful, sentient being in its own right, is in many ways a revisiting of the Nomad probe featured in the Star Trek: The Original Series episode " The Changeling ".

According to the writers of the Star Trek Chronology  (1st ed., p. 17), shortly after " Q Who " was produced, " Gene Roddenberry half jokingly speculated that the planet encountered by Voyager might have been the Borg homeworld . "

When Spock attempts a mind meld with V'ger and is quickly overwhelmed, among the images visible on the screen multiple times, when in slow motion, amid the background of his face, can be seen the dedication plaque carried not by Voyager 1 and 2 , but by Pioneer 10 and 11 . Other images include a Klingon cruiser seen earlier, the bridge and two crewmembers of (presumably) the IKS Amar , Epsilon IX, the Epsilon IX lieutenant , and Ilia.

A picture tweeted by Ted Sullivan on 28 November 2017 of a star chart supposedly used for Star Trek: Discovery , largely taken from the Star Trek Star Charts , included a few anachronisms such as the "Route of V'ger." [1]

Concept and effects development [ ]

Spelling of the name [ ].

The spelling " V'ger " was used in the shooting script of Star Trek: The Motion Picture . [2] The alternative spelling " V'Ger ", with a capital "G", was used in most other reference sources, including such works as Star Trek Encyclopedia  (3rd ed., p. 539) and Star Trek Star Charts (p. 39) and at StarTrek.com . [3]

The label of the soundtrack LP record, and more significantly the text of the novelization of Star Trek: The Motion Picture , itself written by Gene Roddenberry as the only Star Trek novel ever written by the series' creator, both use the alternative spelling " Vejur ", which in the novel exists from its first mention on page 179 onwards in the novel's first paperback edition. This was to mislead the reader in case they had not yet seen the movie, as both the soundtrack and novelization were released before the film's premiere.

The size controversy [ ]

The physical size of V'ger has been the subject of speculation from the time Star Trek: The Motion Picture was first released, at the end of 1979. In the original theatrical release of Star Trek: The Motion Picture , the V'ger energy cloud is given a size measuring eighty-two au in diameter, in dialogue from the Epsilon IX commander, Branch . That measurement is equivalent to over 1.2271 e10 ×10 10 kilometers or 0.001 light years . Placing V'ger at the same central position as the sun would mean that the energy cloud would extend beyond the Kuiper belt , extending into the orbit of Eris , and essentially swallowing our entire solar system. For the later-released Directors' Edition DVD of the film , the cloud size was drastically scaled down to two au, which is the distance between Sol and a point between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. [4] This revision was achieved by editing the spoken dialogue to clip out the "eighty" and leaving just the "two". As one au is precisely the average distance between Sol and Earth, this more reasonable measurement reduces the size of the cloud to "merely" the diameter of Earth's orbit. More recent releases of the film , however, retain the original dimension and it is unclear which should be considered canonical . Additional dialogue established that the cloud dissipated rapidly as it slowed to enter the solar system , allowing V'ger ultimately to enter Earth's orbit without disrupting the entire system and destroying Earth, in essence making both size measurements "correct". In the Director's Edition, the dramatically decreasing cloud had disappeared entirely when V'ger entered Earth orbit.

The size of V'ger 's vessel has also been a subject of debate. In dialogue cut from the theatrical version of the movie, Decker says the spacecraft was seventy-eight kilometers (forty-eight miles) in length. The novel adaptation of the film gives the same dimension for the ship and states it as displacing six million times the amount of space as Enterprise . One popular non-canon site for Star Trek technical details, the Daystrom Institute Technical Library , listed V'ger 's overall length at a staggering ninety-seven kilometers, stated as being determined from apparently careful measurement of the image of the refitted NCC-1701 from the movie's scenes, as the Enterprise traveled closely (at only five hundred meters distance, from the movie's dialogue) over the various parts of V'ger 's exterior structures, during the Federation starship's initial close examination of the "intruder" vessel. Another estimate places V'ger 's colossal length at a much more conservative twenty kilometers instead, possibly based on the statement of replacement navigator DiFalco 's "distance inside the intruder as seventeen kilometers," spoken just after Chekov reports that V'ger 's "orbiting devices" were eighteen minutes from reaching their equidistant deployment points in Earth orbit, during the approach to Voyager 6 's "island," in the most extreme part of V'ger 's interior that the Enterprise was allowed access to. The latter estimate, however, would make V'ger impossibly smaller than the roughly seventy kilometer-long Whale Probe featured in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home , given that the latter was passed by a Federation starship within minutes, rather than the near-hour it took to traverse even half of V'ger at a faster pace, much of which was carried out at only a half-kilometer distance from the "intruder's" hull.

Apocrypha [ ]

The idea that the Borg homeworld was the machine planet which V'ger had encountered was further developed in the William Shatner novel The Return , where Spock's mind meld with V'ger not only protected Spock from being assimilated (since the Borg Collective was already present in Spock's mind, the Borg assumed he was already one of them), but provided the Federation with the coordinates of the Borg homeworld for a final attack. It may also be significant that Spock, when referring to V'ger , says, " Any show of resistance would be futile. "

In the game Star Trek: Legacy , it is said that V'ger itself created the Borg to gain the knowledge by assimilation. The Star Trek: Voyager episode " Dragon's Teeth " seems to contradict the game's storyline, as the character of Gedrin states to Seven of Nine that his species, the Vaadwaur , had encountered the Borg over nine centuries prior to his revival, placing the Borg's genesis at least as far back as around the year 1400 AD. The story writers for Star Trek: Legacy , however, claimed on the official game forum that Voyager 6 was meant to have been thrown back in time as well as across the galaxy, an aspect mentioned in the "extras" cut-scenes of the game itself.

Star Trek Online also hints at a connection to the Borg, as vessels closely resembling V'ger are featured as Borg mini-bosses, even including the disintegrating plasma weapons and the V'ger -style low-pitched sound effects. [5] In the mission "The Calling", released in May 2022, the Terran Empire summons "the Other", the mirror universe 's version of V'ger , which seeks to destroy its creators and chooses to ally with the Terran Emperor to do so. The prime V'ger is exploring beyond the galaxy, while the Ilia probe returns to the Federation to warn them and their allies of the threat posed by "the Other". In the mission "The Eye of the Storm", released in September 2022, the Emperor (revealed to be the mirror counterpart of Wesley Crusher ) merges with "the Other" in order to destroy not only the Prime universe, but all others as well. The Ilia probe warns that the only power capable of opposing the combined force of the Emperor and "the Other" is V'ger itself, and departs to find it. The probe at the core of "the Other" is identified as Conqueror 6 , a 20th-century Imperial probe sent out to seek new worlds to dominate. In the mission "The Fujiwhara Effect", released in January 2023, V'ger itself appears over Earth to engage "the Other" in battle, allowing the player and the mirror counterpart of Beverly Crusher to separate the Emperor from the Other. Afterwards, V'ger decides to take care of "the Other" (now named C'qer , pronounced "Seeker") and explore the cosmos together.

V'ger and Narada

V'ger and the Narada

V'ger appears in the third issue of the comic book Star Trek: Nero . Set during 2009 's Star Trek in the alternate reality caused by Nero 's incursion, V'ger reactivates the Narada , itself an artificial intelligence due to having Borg-based modifications. After escaping twenty-five years of imprisonment on Rura Penthe in the alternate reality, Nero is taken to V'ger on the edge of the Delta Quadrant by the Narada and then uses the unmanned probe's intelligence to calculate where and when Spock will arrive. While Nero is able to do this, V'ger finds his hatred incompatible with itself.

External links [ ]

  • V'Ger at StarTrek.com
  • V'Ger at Memory Beta , the wiki for licensed Star Trek works
  • Designing the Living Machine  at Forgotten Trek – features a large collection of V'Ger concept art
  • 2 Star Trek: The Next Generation
  • 3 USS Enterprise (NCC-1701-G)

NASA, California Institute of Technology, and Jet Propulsion Laboratory Page Header Title

  • The Contents
  • The Making of
  • Where Are They Now
  • Frequently Asked Questions
  • Q & A with Ed Stone

golden record

Where are they now.

  • frequently asked questions
  • Q&A with Ed Stone

News | December 1, 2017

The voyagers in popular culture.

Each Voyager spacecraft carries a copy of the Golden Record

Whether you're traveling across cities, continents or even oceans this holiday season, there is no long-haul flight quite like that of the Voyagers.

This year, we celebrated 40 years since the launch of NASA's twin Voyager probes -- the two farthest, fastest spacecraft currently in operation. Each Voyager has contributed an enormous amount of knowledge about the solar system, including the unexpected diversity of its planets and their moons. Among their many distinctions , Voyager 1 is the only spacecraft to enter interstellar space, and Voyager 2 is the only spacecraft to fly by all four giant planets: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

› DOWNLOAD VIDEO Voyager Images from the Odysseys

You might have missed the virtual Voyager party, though, since there was a lot of other space news around the time of the Voyager launch anniversaries. The solar eclipse, visible across America, took place on Aug. 21, just one day after Voyager 2 marked 40 years in flight. Sept. 5 was Voyager 1's launch anniversary, but space fans were already gearing up to commemorate the finale of NASA's Cassini mission on Sept. 15.

Don't worry -- it's never too late to appreciate the far-reaching influence the Voyagers have had. In fact, in addition to the news coverage the spacecraft have received, the spacecraft have also earned a place in popular culture.

So, since you might have some downtime as we head into the holidays, here are some Voyager-related movies, TV shows and songs. (Warning: a few spoilers ahead!)

Voyagers in Film and Television

Perhaps the most widely recognized pop culture Voyager homage is in the film "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" from 1979. In the film, a machine called V'Ger -- the fictional Voyager 6 spacecraft, its intelligence greatly enhanced by an alien race -- seeks the home of its creator, Earth, and threatens to wreak havoc on our planet in the process. In real life, John Casani, who was the Voyager project manager at that time at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, offered to loan a Voyager model to "Star Trek" creator Gene Roddenberry. Although the movie version altered the original design, it still used the mission as an inspiration.

The spacecraft had long passed the planets when a 2004 episode of "The West Wing" -- titled "The Warfare of Genghis Khan" -- mentioned a major mission milestone: Voyager 1 crossing the termination shock. The termination shock is a shockwave that marks the point at which the solar wind from the Sun, which travels at supersonic speeds up to that point, abruptly slows down and heats up. It represents the innermost part of the boundary of the heliosphere, the magnetic bubble that includes the Sun, planets and solar wind. Due to the termination shock crossing, the character Josh Lyman (mistakenly) declares this Voyager 1 to be the first man-made object to leave our solar system (mistakenly, because the solar system ends well beyond that landmark). "Funny, I'm going through a little termination shock myself," quips the character Donna Moss.

More recently, Voyager 1 did, in real life, cross into interstellar space in 2012, although technically it has still not left the solar system. In 2013, to talk about that milestone, the mission's project scientist, Ed Stone of Caltech in Pasadena, appeared on Comedy Central's Colbert Report .

The Golden Record

Each Voyager contains a copy of a Golden Record filled with Earth's sights and sounds, including images, music and audio clips of people and animals. This record has been featured in several works of science fiction. In the 1984 film "Starman," a race of aliens discovers the record and sends an emissary to Earth to learn more about our planet.

A 1994 episode of the X-Files titled "Little Green Men" also paid homage to Voyager. The episode opens with FBI agent Fox Mulder describing the Voyager mission and the Golden Record, including images, music and a child's voice saying, "Hello from the children of planet Earth." Mulder says the Voyagers passed the orbit of Neptune and "there were no further messages sent," but in reality, the Voyagers still communicate with Earth every day.

The mission wasn't exempt from fun on "Saturday Night Live." In episode 64, which aired in 1978, a psychic played by actor Steve Martin says the extraterrestrials had found the record and replied, "Send More Chuck Berry" -- referring to the iconic song "Johnny B. Goode" included on the Golden Record. Learn more about the Golden Record and see a full list of its contents here .

Voyager has proved inspirational to contemporary musicians and songwriters as well. The Academy Award-winning composer Dario Marianelli wrote a Voyager violin concerto, which was first performed by the Queensland Symphony Orchestra in 2014 in Brisbane, Australia, and later played by the Swedish Radio Orchestra . Artist James Stretton also wrote a song in honor of the Voyagers' 40th anniversary.

For a deep dive into the history of the mission, the documentary "The Farthest" premiered on PBS in August, featuring numerous interviews with Voyager scientists and engineers, past and present.

And if you get tired of looking at your own vacation photos, there are lots to explore on the Voyager website . Live long and prosper, Voyagers!

The Voyager spacecraft were built by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, 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://www.nasa.gov/voyager

https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov

News Media Contact

Why Star Trek: Voyager's Threshold Episode Ignited An Army Of Outraged Fans

Star Trek: Voyager Threshold

In the "Star Trek: Voyager" episode "Threshold" (January 9, 1996), the U.S.S. Voyager discovers a rare, extra-powerful version of dilithium, the crystal that is required to run starship engines. Using this new dilithium, the Voyager crew figure they can build an engine capable of passing the mythic warp-10 barrier, essentially allowing them to reach infinite velocity, passing through every point in the universe simultaneously. Such a breakthrough would allow the Voyager to return to Earth in a moment. 

When testing their new engine, however, something goes awry. Tom Paris (Robert Duncan McNeill) returns from a test flight ... altered. He begins to mutate and change, losing skin and spitting out his tongue. It seems that the infinite velocity flight somehow triggered his body's evolutionary genes and he is rapidly transforming into whatever creatures humans will evolve into in the next hundred million years. When Paris becomes an amphibian-like frog man, he kidnaps Captain Janeway (Kate Mulgrew) and forces her to take the infinite warp flight while unconscious. 

The episode ends with the Voyager crew locating Paris and Janeway, and discovering that they had evolved into fleshy, outsize newts. Also, they mated, spawning several efts. This was the apex of evolution. Big, weird newts. The Voyager's doctor (Robert Picardo) transforms them back into humans. 

It seems the newts weren't well-received by fans. In the 1996 book "Captains' Logs Supplemental: The Unauthorized Guide to the New Trek Voyages" by Mark A. Altman and Edward Gross, "Voyager" producer Jeri Taylor talked about the negative fan mail the show received for "Threshold," and how awful those newts were. Fans were also angry at some of the technical details, feeling that "Voyager" crossed a line. 

The Warp 10 Barrier

Taylor, firstly, remembered the backlash over the warp-10 barrier, and it's easy to see why. While the ships on "Star Trek" can travel at tremendous speeds, even their fictional warp engines have to contend with the real-life enormity of space. Even the U.S.S. Voyager, one of the fastest ships ever built, requires 70 straight years of traveling at its top speed just to cross the Milky Way. The idea of a ship breaking that barrier and reaching infinite velocity would remove all the trekking from "Star Trek." It would be as if a starship could teleport, and what dummy would think to write a "Star Trek" series about a ship that can teleport?  

Taylor recalled hearing from angry Trekkies on the matter, saying:

"We're taking a lot of flak for that [...] There's been a real lashing out. I recognize that people who are on the Internet and who write us letters are a tiny portion of our audience, but when it is as overwhelming as it was on this episode, you begin to take notice. Some of this anger was misplaced, I thought. A lot of the ire seemed to be caused by the fact that we stated that no one had ever gone warp ten before, and people flooded us with letters saying. That's not true, in the original series they went warp twelve and warp thirteen." 

Taylor, of course, knew all about the history of Trek, and calmly pointed out the recalibration done with the franchise's lore. Ultimately, she was more concerned with the story than with explaining the history of Trek tech. Indeed, Trekkies would know about the recalibration anyway. Fans were just being snotty, it seems.

Staying away from big heads

She continued: 

"[I]t really was a recalibration of warp speed. Gene [Roddenberry] made the determination at the beginning of 'Next Gen' that warp ten would be the limit, and at that point you would occupy all portions of the universe simultaneously, which always seemed like a wonderfully provocative notion. Then the question is 'What happens if you do go to warp ten, how does that affect you?'"

That focus on the story led to some fun postulations about evolution. In many sci-fi stories, when humans find themselves suddenly evolving — at least to Taylor's recollection — they suddenly have larger heads and spindly bodies. Taylor and the show's writers wanted something different and unexpected. Hence the newts. Taylor said: 

"[We] came up with this idea of evolution and thought that it would be far more interesting and less expected that instead of it being the large-brained, glowing person, it would be full circle, back to our origins in the water. Not saying that we have become less than we are, because those creatures may experience consciousness on such an advanced plane that we couldn't conceive of it. It just seemed like a more interesting image. But it is not one that took with the audience."

A fine idea, but in execution, it seems that Trekkies were put off. At the end of the day, one is pointing a camera a giant newt puppets. Trekkies weren't happy with that. "The fact that we were turning people into salamanders," Taylor said, "was offensive to a lot of people and just plain stupid to others."

Braga's opacity

"Threshold" was credited to longtime "Star Trek" veteran Brannon Braga, notorious for writing the headier, more psychedelic episodes. Braga recalled the scientific notions behind the newts, but that he didn't bother to explain them with clarity. In an episode that was already hefty with technobabble and scientific dialogue about velocity and evolution, Braga felt he needed to pare things down a little bit. Sadly, in so doing, he chopped out something that would have made ultra-evolved space-newts more acceptable. He said: 

"['Threshold' is] very much a classic 'Star Trek' story. But in the rewrite process, I took out the explanation, the idea behind the ending; that we evolve into these little lizards because maybe evolution is not always progressive. Maybe it's a cycle where we revert to something more rudimentary. That whole conversation was taken out for various reasons, and that was a disaster because without it the episode doesn't even have a point. I think it suffered greatly. I got the note that it wasn't necessary, but in fact, it really had a lot to do with what the episode was about. Big mistake taking it out."

Indeed, evolution is a long-term transformation wherein organisms adapt to a changing environment. It is not necessarily a gradual movement toward a type of pre-determined complexity. "Threshold" possesses that idea, but it's not part of the dialogue. Not having a character speak it aloud leaves the episode's themes murky. Instead, audiences simply have to accept the absurd notion that two main cast members turned into amphibians. 

Fun trivia: "Threshold" was initially pitched by longtime Trekkie Michael De Luca, who, at the time, was best known for writing the screenplays for "Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare" and John Carpenter's "In the Mouth of Madness."  

NASA's Voyager 1 sends readable message to Earth after 4 nail-biting months of gibberish

After four months of being unable to detect comprehensible data from the Voyager 1 spacecraft, NASA scientists have had fresh luck after sending a "poke."

Artists conception of Voyager 1 spacecraft entering interstellar space

After a nail-biting four months, NASA has finally received a comprehensible signal from its Voyager 1 spacecraft. 

Since November 2023, the almost-50-year-old spacecraft has been experiencing trouble with its onboard computers. Although Voyager 1, one of NASA's longest-lived space missions, has been sending a steady radio signal to Earth, it hasn't contained any usable data , which has perplexed scientists. 

Now, in response to a command prompt, or "poke," sent from Earth on March 1, NASA has received a new signal from Voyager 1 that engineers have been able to decode. Mission scientists hope this information may help them explain the spacecraft's recent communication problems. 

"The source of the issue appears to be with one of three onboard computers, the flight data subsystem (FDS), which is responsible for packaging the science and engineering data before it's sent to Earth by the telemetry modulation unit," NASA said in a blog post Wednesday (March 13) .

Related: NASA's 46-year-old Voyager 1 probe is no longer transmitting data

On March 1, as part of efforts to find a solution to Voyager 1's computer issues, NASA sent a command to the FDS on the spacecraft, instructing it to use different sequences in its software package, which would effectively mean skirting around any data that may be corrupted. 

Voyager 1 is more than 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth. This means any radio signals sent from our planet take 22.5 hours to reach the spacecraft, with any response taking the same time to be picked up by antennas on Earth. 

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On March 3, NASA detected activity from one section of the FDS that differed from the "unreadable data stream" they'd previously been receiving. Four days later, engineers started the heavy task of trying to decode this signal. By March 10, the team discovered that the signal contained a readout of the entire FDS memory. This included the instructions for what the FDS needed to do, any values in its code that can be changed depending on commands from NASA or the spacecraft's status, and downloadable science or engineering data.  

Voyager 1 has ventured farther from Earth than any other human-made object . It was launched in 1977, within weeks of its twin spacecraft , Voyager 2. The initial aim of the mission was to explore Jupiter and Saturn . Yet after almost five decades, and with countless discoveries under their belts, the mission continues beyond the boundaries of the solar system . 

— NASA hears 'heartbeat' signal from Voyager 2 probe a week after losing contact

— Historic space photo of the week: Voyager 2 spies a storm on Saturn 42 years ago

— NASA reestablishes full contact with Voyager 2 probe after nail-biting 2-week blackout

NASA scientists will now "compare this readout to the one that came down before the issue arose and look for discrepancies in the code and the variables to potentially find the source of the ongoing issue," they said in the blog post.  

However, NASA stressed that it will take time to determine if any of the insights gained from this new signal can be used to solve Voyager 1's long-standing communication issues. 

Emily Cooke

Emily is a health news writer based in London, United Kingdom. She holds a bachelor's degree in biology from Durham University and a master's degree in clinical and therapeutic neuroscience from Oxford University. She has worked in science communication, medical writing and as a local news reporter while undertaking journalism training. In 2018, she was named one of MHP Communications' 30 journalists to watch under 30. ( [email protected]

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  • Bruzote I have an inside source who says the message said, "Be sure to drink your Ovaltine." Reply
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star trek voyager probe

Star Trek: Voyager Abandoned A TNG “Inner Light” Twist To Janeway/Chakotay Romance

  • Star Trek: Voyager writer/producer Ken Biller wanted to mimic TNG's "The Inner Light" for Janeway and Chakotay.
  • Biller proposed a plot for "Resolutions" where Voyager left Janeway and Chakotay behind to age 40 years.
  • Implementing the Janeway/Chakotay romance would have dramatically altered the series' premise.

Star Trek: Voyager almost incorporated a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode premise for one of Captain Janeway's (Kate Mulgrew) and Commander Chakotay's (Robert Beltran) most romantic episodes, but abandoned the idea before it aired. TNG was the blueprint for the other 1990s-era Star Trek series , meaning that Voyager and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine often borrowed heavily from it for story ideas . It isn't at all surprising then that Voyager would be interested in copying one of TNG 's most popular episodes, "The Inner Light," for an important episode at the end of season 2 involving Janeway and Chakotay.

Season 2, episode 25, "Resolutions" saw Janeway and Chakotay stranded on an alien planet after contracting a virus that the planet's atmosphere shielded them from. During their time on the planet, Janeway and Chakotay became very close, nearly becoming romantically involved before Voyager 's crew returned with a cure for the virus. Nothing explicitly happened between Janeway and Chakotay during "Resolutions," but if writer/producer Kenneth Biller had had his way with the episode, a lot more would have taken place.

Star Trek: Voyager Cast & Character Guide

Star trek: voyager writer wanted janeway/chakotay episode to be more like tng’s “the inner light”, kenneth biller has an "inner light" twist in mind for "resolutions".

In an interview with Cinefantastique around the time the episode aired, Ken Biller explained that his original story idea for "Resolutions" was much more expansive. Biller wanted "Resolutions" to cover Janeway and Chakotay living a whole life together on the planet while the USS Voyager left them to get home. This premise would have been similar to the hallucinatory life lived by Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) in TNG 's "The Inner Light." Read Biller's full quote about his initial idea for "Resolutions" below:

"I had a hand in 'Resolutions' in the sense that I wanted to do a story about Janeway and Chakotay stranded on a planet, but I wanted to do a more sci-fi twist on it where they get stranded and Voyager literally left through a time eddy to get home. When they come back Chakotay and Janeway have aged 40 years and have a whole family. Jeri Taylor felt it was too reminiscent of [Star Trek: The Next Generation episode] 'Inner Light'. That was kind of the twist I wanted to do on it."

Although the two premises would not have been exactly the same, Biller's plan for "Resolutions" would likely have been heavily compared to "The Inner Light" had the original story been greenlit. Captain Picard's life in "The Inner Light," complete with a wife and family on an alien planet, would have looked very similar to the life that Voyager 's creative team would likely have come up with for Janeway and Chakotay . However, as interesting as the TNG premise is, doing the same thing on Voyager would have irrevocably changed the series.

Why Voyager Would Have Never Been The Same If Janeway & Chakotay Romance Happened

Biller's version of "resolutions" would have changed the course of the whole show.

Janeway and Chakotay would never have been able to return to normal life as Voyager 's command team if Biller's original premise had played out.

Explicitly depicting Janeway and Chakotay in such a long-term relationship would have meant that Voyager would not be able to backtrack or hit their infamous "reset button" when "Resolutions" was over. The reason that Captain Picard was able to return to his normal life after "The Inner Light" was because the whole experience was a hallucination brought on by an alien probe. However, Biller's proposal for "Resolutions" makes it sound like Janeway and Chakotay's experience would have been real , albeit with some time travel thrown into the mix.

Unless the whole experience was wiped from their minds, Janeway and Chakotay would never have been able to return to normal life as Voyager 's command team if Biller's original premise had played out. Likewise, having the ship use a "time eddy" to return to the Alpha Quadrant would have invalidated Star Trek: Voyager 's entire premise as the series where the crew is lost on the other side of the galaxy. Ultimately, although "Resolutions" could have been a much larger-scale episode, it's a good thing that Biller's idea wasn't greenlit.

Source: Cinefantastique , Vol. 28, p. 106

Star Trek: Voyager and Star Trek: The Next Generation are available to stream on Paramount+.

Star Trek: Voyager

The fifth entry in the Star Trek franchise, Star Trek: Voyager, is a sci-fi series that sees the crew of the USS Voyager on a long journey back to their home after finding themselves stranded at the far ends of the Milky Way Galaxy. Led by Captain Kathryn Janeway, the series follows the crew as they embark through truly uncharted areas of space, with new species, friends, foes, and mysteries to solve as they wrestle with the politics of a crew in a situation they've never faced before. 

Cast Jennifer Lien, Garrett Wang, Tim Russ, Robert Duncan McNeill, Roxann Dawson, Robert Beltran, Kate Mulgrew, Jeri Ryan, Ethan Phillips, Robert Picardo

Release Date May 23, 1995

Genres Sci-Fi, Adventure

Network UPN

Streaming Service(s) Paramount+

Franchise(s) Star Trek

Writers Michael Piller, Rick Berman

Showrunner Kenneth Biller, Jeri Taylor, Michael Piller, Brannon Braga

Rating TV-PG

Star Trek: The Next Generation

Star Trek: The Next Generation is the third installment in the sci-fi franchise and follows the adventures of Captain Jean-Luc Picard and the crew members of the USS Enterprise. Set around one hundred years after the original series, Picard and his crew travel through the galaxy in largely self-contained episodes exploring the crew dynamics and their own political discourse. The series also had several overarching plots that would develop over the course of the isolated episodes, with four films released in tandem with the series to further some of these story elements.

Cast LeVar Burton, Brent Spiner, Wil Wheaton, Jonathan Frakes, Patrick Stewart, Marina Sirtis

Release Date September 28, 1987

Genres Drama, Superhero, Sci-Fi, Action

Network CBS

Streaming Service(s) Amazon Prime Video

Writers Gene Roddenberry

Directors David Carson

Showrunner Gene Roddenberry

Star Trek: Voyager Abandoned A TNG “Inner Light” Twist To Janeway/Chakotay Romance

Every Major Star Trek Movie Villain, Ranked

Each Star Trek installment is partially defined by its villain. Some have been engraved into the minds of the Star Trek fan base.

Since its television debut in 1966, Star Trek has bloomed into a massive, multimedia franchise and has become a staple of the sci-fi genre. TV shows, video games, novels, comic books -- you name it, and Star Trek has done it. But one of its most successful branches over the years has been movies. The first film, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, was released in 1979.

Since then, Hollywood has pumped out an additional twelve movies that cover three different eras, characters, and timelines. The setting, though, is always the same: "Space -- the final frontier." Like with many movies, each Star Trek installment is partially defined by its villain. It's the antagonist, after all, that represents the central conflict and ignites the movie's action.

Some villains are powerful, frightening, and awesome, and have intriguing character designs. Their names have been engraved into the minds of the Star Trek fan base and are remembered fondly in the years to come. Other villains are completely forgettable. And some...well, they can barely be described as villains. And many of them have been portrayed by notable actors. Let's travel the universe and rank every major Star Trek villain from all 13 films.

13 The Whale Probe - Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986)

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home is the fourth film in the Star Trek series. Here, the iconic USS Enterprise returns to Earth to find it under threat from an alien probe that's been trying to contact humpback whales, which have gone extinct in the Star Trek timeline. The crew must now take on its strangest mission yet: to travel back in time , to 1980s Earth, and search for humpback whales that can answer the probe's call. Despite its unusual premise, The Voyage Home is a favorite among the Star Trek community and was lauded for its humor and unconventional story.

A Mindless Machine Carrying Out a Mission

Another unconventional aspect to this film: it didn't really have a villain. Spock (Leonard Nimoy) theorizes that the Probe was sent by an unknown intelligence that had been in contact with whales while they still existed on Earth, trying to determine why that contact had been lost.

Yes, the whale probe threatens to wreak havoc upon future Earth unless its call is answered. But at the end of the day, the probe is really nothing more than a machine that's mindlessly carrying out a mission. Plus, the film's comedy and lighthearted nature make the whale probe feel a lot less dangerous than other villains on this list. Stream Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home on Max.

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

*Availability in US

Not available

12 V'ger - Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)

When the original television series was canceled in 1969, Paramount Pictures decided to continue the franchise through a movie. Star Trek: The Motion Picture is the first film in the franchise and brings the original TV cast to the silver screen, such as William Shatner's James Kirk and Leonard Nimoy's Spock. The film didn't quite meet expectations , maybe because it lacked a true villain.

Not Especially Villainous

Here, the Enterprise comes across a seemingly hostile sentient machine that calls itself V'ger. As it turns out, V'Ger is actually an old Earth space probe known as Voyager 6, which was believed to be lost in a black hole. Voyager 6 was found by an alien race of living machines that re-programmed it to learn as much information as possible and then transmit that information to its original creator.

The machines sent Voyager 6 back into space, where it gathered such a wealth of knowledge that it eventually achieved consciousness. Having learned everything it possibly could, V'ger has somewhat of a midlife crisis and now considers its existence meaningless. It's not a villainous enemy with bad intentions like other characters on this list. Its problems are more of a misunderstanding, which ranks it lower than its counterparts. Stream Star Trek: The Motion Picture on Max.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture

11 shinzon - star trek: nemesis (2002).

Star Trek: Nemesis is the 10th installment in the Star Trek franchise. It's the last film to star the cast of TV's Star Trek: The Next Generation, following Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) and his crew aboard the famous Enterprise and to the far reaches of space.

An Early Role for Tom Hardy

It stars a then-unknown Tom Hardy as the film's villain, Praetor Shinzon. He's a young, imperfect clone of Picard (complete with the bald head) and has grand plans to annihilate Earth. It's a fascinating concept that provides an insightful look at how Picard might have turned out had he been born under different circumstances. But unfortunately, Hardy's villain was overshadowed by the film's negative reception; Nemesis is often regarded as the worst film in the Star Trek franchise. It bombed so badly that the franchise went into hibernation until J.J. Abrams' 2009 reboot. Stream Star Trek: Nemesis on Max.

Star Trek: Nemesis

10 ru'afo - star trek: insurrection (1998).

Star Trek: Insurrection is the ninth entry in the Star Trek franchise and the third to follow the characters in The Next Generation series. Here, the Enterprise becomes entangled with a decrepit race known as the Son'a. The Son'a rely on technology to postpone death and undergo excessive cosmetic surgery to recapture their youth, which instead gives them an ugly, mummified appearance.

Stifled by Weak Character Development

Their leader, Ru'afo (F. Murray Abraham), develops a plot to harvest radiation that will reinvigorate him and his people. It's not the most compelling scheme ever; it sounds more like an episode of the Kardashians than a Star Trek movie. Not even the Oscar-winning Abraham could make Ru'afo stand out underneath all those prosthetics and that weak character development. Stream Star Trek: Insurrection on Max.

Star Trek: Insurrection

9 false god - star trek v: the final frontier (1989).

For most of Star Trek 5: The Final Frontier , we’re led to believe that Sybok (Laurence Luckinbill), the rebellious Vulcan half-brother of Spock, is the villain of this film. Unlike Spock, Sybok renounces the Vulcan teachings and goes in search of God (yes, that's right, God), who's believed to live on the mythical planet Sha Ka Ree. Sybok and the rest of the Enterprise eventually find it: a glowing field that morphs through representations of various religions before settling on the image of a bearded human face.

A Great Concept with a Cool Plot Twist

But as it turns out, this entity isn’t a god at all. It’s a malicious and powerful being that’s been imprisoned in Sha Ka Ree, who unknowingly reveals itself when it asks to use our heroes' starship. As a skeptical Captain Kirk (William Shatner) points out, "What does God need with a starship?"

Realizing how badly he's been duped, Sybok apologizes and becomes one of the good guys, as they battle the entity and try to escape Sha Ka Ree. It's a cool concept for a villain and an interesting plot twist. But unfortunately, the film's negative reception and mediocre quality make this villain easy to forget. Stream Star Trek 5: The Final Frontier on Max.

Star Trek V: The Final Frontier

8 khan - star trek into darkness (2013).

Star Trek Into Darkness is the 12th movie in the Star Trek franchise and the second film in Abrams' revival series. It captures what's known as the Kelvin timeline, following the rebooted versions of the USS Enterprise, Captain James Kirk (Chris Pine), Spock (Zachary Quinto), and other iconic characters from the original series. And one of those iconic characters is none other than Khan Noonien Singh, played here by Benedict Cumberbatch.

A Weaker Version of Khan

This version of Khan is a force to be reckoned with. He's a genetically engineered superhuman, a skilled combatant and a brilliant mastermind. It's cool to see such a famous villain rebooted, and even cooler to see Spock meet his match in hand-to-hand combat.

For modern Star Trek fans, this is likely the definitive version of Khan. If you have nothing else to compare him to, then this is undoubtedly an awesome villain. But for old-school Star Trek fans, Benedict's Khan doesn't quite live up to the original character. Rent Star Trek Into Darkness on Amazon Prime Video.

Star Trek Into Darkness

7 tolian soran - star trek generations (1994).

Star Trek: Generations is the seventh installment in the Star Trek film series. For fans, this movie was a big deal. It brought two iconic Star Trek captains together on the big screen: James Kirk (William Shatner) and Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart). Unfortunately, Generations left many fans disappointed due to its underwhelming story and performances. But one of its few highlights is the movie's villain, Dr. Tolian Soran, played by none other than Malcolm McDowell.

Another Villainous Character from Malcolm McDowell

McDowell has made an illustrious career out of playing villainous characters ( A Clockwork Orange, Caligula, and Heroes, just to name a few), and Soran is no exception. This character will do whatever it takes to return to the extradimensional realm known as the Nexus, even if it means killing whoever stands in his way. But Soran's most notable accomplishment is contributing to the death of Star Trek's original hero, Captain Kirk himself, which earns him some major brownie points on this list. Stream Star Trek: Generations on Max.

Star Trek: Generations

6 krall - star trek beyond (2016).

Few actors can play a hardcore character as well as Idris Elba. In Star Trek Beyond, Elba appears as the film's villain, Krall. Krall was once a human Starfleet officer named Balthazar Edison, whose starship crash-landed on a planet long before the film takes place. The crew's distress calls went unanswered for 100 long years, which led Edison to grow resentful of the Federation to which he had dedicated his life. Edison's time on that planet also mutated his DNA, changing his appearance from the handsome Idris Elba to a more vicious-looking alien.

Simply a Great Villain

Krall has all the makings of a good villain. He's portrayed by a great actor, he has a cool appearance, and he has a great origin story that clearly outlines his hatred of the Federation. Star Trek Beyond is the most recent film movie to come out of the Kelvin timeline, though it's not the last. A fourth, untitled Star Trek film is reportedly in the works . Rent Star Trek Beyond on Prime Video.

Star Trek Beyond

Related: Star Trek: The 10 Best Captains in the Franchise, Ranked

5 Kruge - Star Trek III: The Search For Spock (1984)

One of the most famous alien species in Star Trek is the Klingons, those ruthless, humanoid warriors with the bumpy foreheads. Klingons are recurring antagonists in Star Trek and appear prominently throughout the franchise. And one of the most notable and antagonistic Klingons is the mercenary Kruge, played by Christopher Lloyd in Star Trek III: The Search For Spock.

A Rare Villain Role by Christopher Lloyd

You can barely tell that it’s Christopher Lloyd in this role, and it’s not just because of his make-up. Lloyd loses himself in this character, embracing the brutality and ruthlessness of the Klingon race. His character design popularized the Klingons’ iconic head ridges, and his portrayal revamped interest in this alien race. Kruge is also responsible for killing Kirk’s son, David, which makes him one of the more memorable and dangerous villains in the Star Trek franchise . ​​​​ Stream Star Trek III: The Search For Spock on Max.

Star Trek III: The Search for Spock

4 nero - star trek (2009).

After the critical and box office bomb that was Star Trek: Nemesis, the Star Trek movie franchise went into hibernation. It would take seven years for it to return to the big screen, courtesy of J.J. Abrams , the golden nerd of Hollywood. 2009’s Star Trek is a quasi-reboot: it presents the original characters in a separate timeline, keeping the old movies, events, and characters intact and allowing them to co-exist with this new series.

A Great Villain for a Much-Needed Reboot

Abrams knew that he needed a good villain to kick off this new series and attract both old and new fans. Enter Nero (Eric Bana). A Romulan from the future, he’s calm and collected while also being imposing and dangerous. He’s the one responsible for creating this separate timeline, altering events by traveling through time and destroying Kelvin.

Because of him, Kirk’s father is killed, and Spock’s home planet of Vulcan is destroyed. He’s not just the best villain to come out of the Kelvin series; he’s one of the best villains to come out of a Star Trek movie. Rent Star Trek on Prime Video.

3 General Chang - Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991)

The sixth installment in the franchise, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country is the final movie to feature the entire main cast of the original television series . It was a return to form after the critical and commercial disappointment of The Final Frontier . The Undiscovered Country introduced a new Klingon antagonist: General Chang. played by Christopher Plummer (Christophers and Klingons seem to go well together).

A Classic Klingon Villain

Opposed to the treaty between the Federation and the Klingon Empire, Chang frames Captain Kirk for the murder of the Klingon Chancellor -- who Chang helped to assassinate. Chang is a classic Klingon villain -- ruthless, brutal, and intelligent -- and is one of the most iconic adversaries from the original Star Trek series. Stream Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country on Max.

Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country

2 the borg queen - star trek: first contact (1996).

Star Trek: First Contact is technically the first movie to focus on The Next Generation cast; their first film, Generations, starred the original television cast as well. First Contact is widely regarded as one of the best movies in the Star Trek franchise, and that's partially thanks to its villain: The Borg Queen (Alice Krige). The Borg are an alien group of cybernetic organisms, or cyborgs, and possess both mechanical and biological body parts. They were a new antagonist for The Next Generation series, a signature villain that the show was sorely lacking.

The Borg Are Terrifying

In First Contact, the Borg take center stage and are given a character redesign to appear as though they were converted into machine beings from the inside-out. They also never had a hierarchical command structure before. First Contact changed that by introducing the dreaded Borg Queen. Her appearance alone makes her one of the more fascinating villains in the Star Trek franchise: that mechanical body coupled with her pale, slimy skin, elongated head, and hairstyle of wires.

She's a sinister entity who's determined to assimilate everything into Borg. Despite her wicked behavior and appearance, the Borg Queen has an unsettling kind of allure. And as a female villain , she's a breath of fresh air for the franchise. ​​​​ Stream Star Trek: First Contact on Max.

Star Trek: First Contact

Related: Star Trek: The Coolest Ships in the Franchise, Ranked

1 Khan - Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan (1982)

Sometimes, the most obvious answer really is the right one, and our number one choice here is no exception. Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan is revered by both fans and critics and is regarded as the best installment of the Star Trek franchise. It improved upon its predecessor's biggest mistake by introducing a legitimate villain: Khan Noonien Singh (Ricardo Montalban).

Khan!!!!!!!

Khan first appeared in season two of the televised series. But it was The Wrath Of Khan that fleshed out his character and established his rivalry with the crew of the Enterprise. His theatricality and over-the-top energy make him the perfect antithesis to Captain Kirk. And his involvement with Spock's alleged death makes for one of the most emotional moments in the franchise.

Khan has become the golden standard for Star Trek villains, the model that every future antagonist is compared to. He isn't just the greatest villain in the Star Trek series; he's one of the most iconic antagonists of the entire sci-fi genre. ​​​​ Stream Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan on Max.

Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan

IMAGES

  1. See Ya, Voyager: Probe Has Finally Entered Interstellar Space : NPR

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  5. Voyager 6

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VIDEO

  1. Meld Review ST VOY S2 E16

  2. Research Probe Launch

  3. Star Trek Voyager Series Review Part 1

COMMENTS

  1. Voyager 6

    Voyager 6 was a deep space probe launched from Earth by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in the latter half of the 20th century. The sixth probe in the Voyager series, it was designed to collect data and transmit it back to Earth. (Star Trek: The Motion Picture) Voyager 6...

  2. Did the Voyager 1 and/or 2 space probes ever make it into ...

    Well there's your problem. Yes, it features in the first Star Trek movie. I believe one of the Pioneer probes is also in Star Trek V. Voyager 6 is mentioned in The Motion Picture (which is why people are recommending you watch it), so the Voyager probe series does exist, and as there are 6 probes there would presumably be a Voyager 1/2.

  3. Friendship One (Star Trek: Voyager)

    Star Trek: Voyager (season 7) List of episodes. " Friendship One " is the 167th episode of the science fiction television series, Star Trek: Voyager, the 21st episode of the seventh season. A 24th century spacecraft and its crew encounter a planet enduring a nuclear winter. The episode was written by Michael Taylor and Bryan Fuller and directed ...

  4. Trek Stars with NASA's Voyager

    Star Trek: The Motion Picture featured a character named V'Ger. The sentient, creator-seeking entity was actually the Voyager 6, a fictitious 20th-century probe that disappeared into a black hole, where a race a living machines eventually breathed life into it. That set V'Ger on its destructive path and on to a date with destiny in the form ...

  5. The Signal's Golden Record Explained: The True Story Of The Voyager's

    Voyager 1 and 2 are real spacecrafts launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in 1977. When creating the probes, scientists affixed a golden record to the outside of each probe in case extraterrestrials discovered the Voyagers. These elements make The Signal seem like a more plausible alien story than many alien invasion movies.

  6. NASA Quotes 'Star Trek' As Voyager 1 Enters the Interstellar Frontier

    Voyager 1 is now about 12 billion miles (19 billion kilometers) from the sun. "Someday humans will leave our cocoon in the solar system to explore beyond our home system," Grunsfeld said during the event. "Voyager will have led the way." NASA's Voyager 1 probe launched to space on Sept. 5, 1977, about two weeks after Voyager 2, its twin.

  7. "Star Trek: Voyager" Friendship One (TV Episode 2001)

    Friendship One: Directed by Michael Vejar. With Kate Mulgrew, Robert Beltran, Roxann Dawson, Robert Duncan McNeill. For the first time in seven years, Voyager gets a mission from Starfleet Command: retrieve the 21st century probe Friendship One from a nearby planet.

  8. NASA's New Voyager Development Eerily Echoes Star Trek: The ...

    A recent development with NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft eerily echoed the plot of Star Trek: The Motion Picture.. NASA-funded research and development lab JPL reported that problems were identified with Voyager 1's attitude articulation and control system, which is transmitting invalid telemetry data. While JPL expert Suzanne Dodd described the situation as "par for the course at this stage of ...

  9. Voyager 1, First Craft in Interstellar Space, May Have Gone Dark

    It has a twin spacecraft, Voyager 2. Launched in 1977, they were primarily built for a four-year trip to Jupiter and Saturn , expanding on earlier flybys by the Pioneer 10 and 11 probes.

  10. "Star Trek: Voyager" Drone (TV Episode 1998)

    Drone: Directed by Les Landau. With Kate Mulgrew, Robert Beltran, Roxann Dawson, Robert Duncan McNeill. Voyager investigates the birth of a nebula. Unfortunately, its intense blast wave catches an away mission shuttle, causing emergency beam out transporter signals to fuse the Doctor's mobile emitter with Seven's nanoprobes. The mobile emitter subsequently starts assimilating a science lab and ...

  11. Hubble Provides Interstellar Road Map for Voyagers' Galactic Trek

    In about 40,000 years, after the spacecraft will no longer be operational and will not be able to gather new data, it will pass within 1.6 light-years of the star Gliese 445, in the constellation Camelopardalis. Its twin, Voyager 2, is 10.5 billion miles from Earth, and will pass 1.7 light-years from the star Ross 248 in about 40,000 years.

  12. USS Voyager (Star Trek)

    USS Voyager (NCC-74656) is the fictional Intrepid-class starship which is the primary setting of the science fiction television series Star Trek: Voyager.It is commanded by Captain Kathryn Janeway. Voyager was designed by Star Trek: Voyager production designer Richard D. James and illustrator Rick Sternbach.Most of the ship's on-screen appearances are computer-generated imagery (CGI), although ...

  13. One Small Step (Star Trek: Voyager)

    Star Trek: Voyager. ) " One Small Step " is the 128th episode of the television series Star Trek: Voyager, the eighth episode of the sixth season. A 24th century spacecraft, the USS Voyager, encounters a 21st century Mars spacecraft in an anomaly. This episode's teleplay was written by Mike Wollaeger, Jessica Scott, Bryan Fuller, and Michael ...

  14. As Voyager 1's mission draws to a close, one planetary scientist

    Launched in 1977 along with its twin, Voyager 2, the spacecraft is now soaring more than 15 billion miles from Earth. ... 'Star Trek' actor Shatner sends message to Voyager. Sep 5, 2017.

  15. Star Trek: Voyager (TV Series 1995-2001)

    S5.E14 ∙ Bliss. Wed, Feb 10, 1999. The Voyager crew discovers what seems to be a wormhole leading to the Alpha Quadrant and home. Images of Earth and letters from home elates the crew of Voyager. Seven, and others, however, are skeptical of this seeming deliverance. 7.8/10 (1.9K)

  16. V'ger

    The machine planet []. V'ger had an extraordinary ability to evolve. It was discovered that the evolution of this once-simple probe into a complex, powerful entity began after it was pulled into an anomaly once called a black hole, shortly after leaving Earth's solar system.. Voyager 6 emerged from the anomaly in what was believed to have been the far side of the galaxy, and fell into the ...

  17. Voyager

    Voyagers in Film and Television. Perhaps the most widely recognized pop culture Voyager homage is in the film "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" from 1979. In the film, a machine called V'Ger -- the fictional Voyager 6 spacecraft, its intelligence greatly enhanced by an alien race -- seeks the home of its creator, Earth, and threatens to wreak ...

  18. star trek

    After the Borg were made aware of the existence of humans, the time loop came full circle with Star Trek: First Contact and Star Trek: Enterprise, "Regeneration" . Voyager 6 was launched into space and presumed lost to a "black hole" a full 150 years prior to the Federation even being created.

  19. Why Star Trek: Voyager's Threshold Episode Ignited An Army Of ...

    In the "Star Trek: Voyager" episode "Threshold" (January 9, 1996), the U.S.S. Voyager discovers a rare, extra-powerful version of dilithium, the crystal that is required to run starship engines ...

  20. Star Trek: Voyager

    Star Trek: Voyager is an American science fiction television series created by Rick Berman, Michael Piller and Jeri Taylor.It originally aired from January 16, 1995, to May 23, 2001, on UPN, with 172 episodes over seven seasons.It is the fifth series in the Star Trek franchise. Set in the 24th century, when Earth is part of a United Federation of Planets, it follows the adventures of the ...

  21. Which is the object destroyed in "Star Trek V: The Final Frontier" by

    In the first part of Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, ... Is this one of the Voyager or Pioneer probes? star-trek; star-trek-enterprise; Share. Improve this question. Follow edited Nov 13, 2022 at 18:36. Valorum. 687k 162 162 gold badges 4.6k 4.6k silver badges 4.9k 4.9k bronze badges. asked Nov 12, 2022 at 14:26. mu88 mu88.

  22. Ailing Voyager 1 Spacecraft Offers Glimmer Of Hope To NASA

    Voyager 1 and its twin Voyager 2 launched when disco reigned and Star Wars was just getting started. The spacecraft were built to last five years, but have now been in operation for over 46 years.

  23. NASA's Voyager 1 sends readable message to Earth after 4 nail-biting

    After a nail-biting four months, NASA has finally received a comprehensible signal from its Voyager 1 spacecraft. Since November 2023, the almost-50-year-old spacecraft has been experiencing ...

  24. Star Trek: Voyager Abandoned A TNG "Inner Light" Twist To ...

    Star Trek: Voyager. The fifth entry in the Star Trek franchise, Star Trek: Voyager, is a sci-fi series that sees the crew of the USS Voyager on a long journey back to their home after finding ...

  25. The Changeling (Star Trek: The Original Series)

    "The Changeling" is the third episode of the second season of the American science fiction television series Star Trek. Written by John Meredyth Lucas and directed by Marc Daniels, it was first broadcast on September 29, 1967.. The crew of the USS Enterprise deals with a life-destroying space probe originally launched from Earth. The plot contains similarities to the later 1979 Star Trek film.

  26. All 13 Star Trek Movie Villains, Ranked

    13 The Whale Probe - Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986) ... As it turns out, V'Ger is actually an old Earth space probe known as Voyager 6, which was believed to be lost in a black hole.