Voyager 1 Now Most Distant Human-Made Object in Space 

voyage 1

In a dark, cold, vacant neighborhood near the very edge of our solar system, the Voyager 1 spacecraft is set to break another record and become the explorer that has traveled farthest from home.

At approximately 2:10 p.m. Pacific time on February 17, 1998, Voyager 1, launched more than two decades ago, will cruise beyond the Pioneer 10 spacecraft and become the most distant human-created object in space at 10.4 billion kilometers (6.5 billion miles.) The two are headed in almost opposite directions away from the Sun. As with other spacecraft traveling past the orbit of Mars, both Voyager and Pioneer derive their electrical power from onboard nuclear batteries.

"For 25 years, the Pioneer 10 spacecraft led the way, pressing the frontiers of exploration, and now the baton is being passed from Pioneer 10 to Voyager 1 to continue exploring where no one has gone before," said Dr. Edward C. Stone, Voyager project scientist and director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

"At almost 70 times farther from the Sun than the Earth, Voyager 1 is at the very edge of the Solar System. The Sun there is only 1/5,000th as bright as here on Earth -- so it is extremely cold and there is very little solar energy to keep the spacecraft warm or to provide electrical power. The reason we can continue to operate at such great distances from the Sun is because we have radioisotope thermal electric generators (RTGs) on the spacecraft that create electricity and keep the spacecraft operating," Stone said. "The fact that the spacecraft is still returning data is a remarkable technical achievement."

Voyager 1 was launched from Cape Canaveral on September 5, 1977. The spacecraft encountered Jupiter on March 5, 1979, and Saturn on November 12, 1980.

Then, because its trajectory was designed to fly close to Saturn's large moon Titan, Voyager 1's path was bent northward by Saturn's gravity, sending the spacecraft out of the ecliptic plane - the plane in which all the planets except Pluto orbit the Sun.

Launched on March 2, 1972, the Pioneer 10 mission officially ended on March 31, 1997. However NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffet Field, CA, intermittently receives science data from Pioneer as part of a training program for flight controllers of the Lunar Prospector spacecraft now orbiting the Moon.

"The Voyager mission today presents an unequaled technical challenge. The spacecraft are now so far from home that it takes nine hours and 36 minutes for a radio signal traveling at the speed of light to reach Earth,"said Ed B. Massey, project manager for the Voyager Interstellar Mission. "That signal, produced by a 20 watt radio transmitter, is so faint that the amount of power reaching our antennas is 20 billion times smaller than the power of a digital watch battery,"

Having completed their planetary explorations, Voyager 1 and its twin, Voyager 2, are studying the environment of space in the outer solar system. Although beyond the orbits of all the planets, the spacecraft still are well within the boundary of the Sun's magnetic field, called the heliosphere. Science instruments on both spacecraft sense signals that scientists believe are coming from the outermost edge of the heliosphere, known as the heliopause.

The heliosphere results from the Sun emitting a steady flow of electrically charged particles called the solar wind. As the solar wind expands supersonically into space in all directions, it creates a magnetized bubble -- the heliosphere -- around the Sun. Eventually, the solar wind encounters the electrically charged particles and magnetic field in the interstellar gas. In this zone the solar wind abruptly slows down from supersonic to subsonic speed, creating a termination shock. Before the spacecraft travel beyond the heliopause into interstellar space, they will pass through this termination shock.

"The data coming back from Voyager now suggest that we may pass through the termination shock in the next three to five years," Stone said. "If that's the case, then one would expect that within 10 years or so we would actually be very close to penetrating the heliopause itself and entering into interstellar space for the first time."

Reaching the termination shock and heliopause will be major milestones for the mission because no spacecraft have been there before and the Voyagers will gather the first direct evidence of their structure. Encountering the termination shock and heliopause has been a long-sought goal for many space physicists, and exactly where these two boundaries are located and what they are like still remains a mystery.

Science data are returned to Earth in real-time to the 34- meter Deep Space Network (DSN) antennas located in California, Australia and Spain. Both spacecraft have enough electricity and attitude control propellant to continue operating until about 2020, when electrical power produced by the RTGs will no longer support science instrument operation. At that time, Voyager 1 will be almost 150 times farther from the Sun than the Earth -- more than 20 billion kilometers (almost 14 billion miles) away.

On Feb. 17, Voyager 1 will be 10.4 billion kilometers (6.5 billion miles) from Earth and is departing the Solar System at a speed of 17.4 kilometers per second (39,000 miles per hour). At the same time, Voyager 2 will be 8.1 billion kilometers (5.1 billion miles) from Earth and is departing the solar system at a speed of 15.9 kilometers per second (35,000 miles per hour).

JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology, manages the Voyager Interstellar Mission for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, D. C.

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40 years ago: voyager 1 explores saturn, johnson space center.

Today, Voyager 1 is the most distant spacecraft from Earth, more than 14 billion miles away and continuing on its journey out of our solar system. Forty years ago, it made its closest approach to Saturn. Although it was not the first to explore the giant ringed planet, as the Pioneer 11 spacecraft completed the first flyby in 1979, Voyager carried sophisticated instruments to conduct more in-depth investigations. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California managed the two Voyager spacecraft launched in 1977 to explore Jupiter and Saturn. Voyager 2 went on to investigate Uranus and Neptune as well, taking advantage of a rare planetary alignment that occurs once every 175 years that enabled the spacecraft to use the gravity of one planet to redirect it to the next.

voyager_1_launch

To carry out its studies during the planetary encounters as well as while cruising through interplanetary space, Voyager 1 carried a suite of 11 instruments, including:

  • an imaging science system consisting of narrow-angle and wide-angle cameras to photograph the planets and their satellites;
  • a radio science system to determine the planets’ physical properties;
  • an infrared interferometer spectrometer to investigate local and global energy balance and atmospheric composition;
  • an ultraviolet spectrometer to measure atmospheric properties;
  • a magnetometer to analyze the planets’ magnetic fields and interactions with the solar wind;
  • a plasma spectrometer to investigate microscopic properties of plasma ions;
  • a low energy charged particle device to measure fluxes and distributions of ions;
  • a cosmic ray detection system to determine the origin and behavior of cosmic radiation;
  • a planetary radio astronomy investigation to study radio emissions from Jupiter;
  • a photopolarimeter to measure the planets’ surface compositions; and
  • a plasma wave system to study the planets’ magnetospheres.

voyager_instruments

Two weeks after its launch from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on Sep. 5, 1977, Voyager 1 turned its cameras back toward its home planet and took the first single-frame image of the Earth-Moon system, providing a taste of future discoveries at the outer planets. The spacecraft crossed the asteroid belt without incident between Dec. 10, 1977, and Sep. 8, 1978, and flew by Jupiter on March 5, 1979. During the four-month encounter, Voyager 1 returned 19,000 photographs of the giant planet, its four largest satellites, discovered two new moons, and found a thin ring encircling Jupiter. The spacecraft’s instruments recorded a wealth of scientific data that greatly expanded our knowledge of the planet. After a 17-month interplanetary cruise, Voyager 1 began its Saturn observations on Aug. 22, 1980, still 68 million miles from the planet. Because of its interest to scientists, mission planners chose the spacecraft’s trajectory to make a close flyby of Saturn’s largest moon Titan, the only planetary satellite with a dense atmosphere, just before the closest approach to the planet itself. This trajectory meant that Voyager 1 would pass over Saturn’s south pole and the gravity assist would send it out of the ecliptic, the plane where the solar system’s planets reside, thus precluding further planetary encounters. 

saturn_w_tethys_top_and_dione_nov_3_8_m_miles

During its approach to Saturn, Voyager 1 returned spectacular images of the planet and ever-more detailed photographs of its rings. These revealed structural features of the various rings, indicating distinctive compositions of each, in particular with regard to particle size. The broad rings easily identifiable from Earth were seen to be composed of thousands of smaller ringlets. Observations of the outer F-ring, discovered by Pioneer 11 the previous year, showed it to have a braided pattern, its small particles perturbed by two newly discovered co-orbiting shepherd moons. Images of Saturn’s atmosphere showed it to be more dynamic than previously expected. Voyager’s instruments indicated that the planet’s atmosphere is composed mainly of hydrogen, with about 11% helium and traces of other gases. The spacecraft observed wind velocities of up 1,100 miles per hour and precisely measured the planet’s rotation at 10 hours and 39.4 minutes.

voyager_1_titan_full_globe_nov_12

On Nov. 12, about 18 hours before making its closest encounter with Saturn, Voyager 1 turned its attention to one of the high-priority science targets of the encounter, Titan, passing within 4,034 miles of the planet’s largest moon. The spacecraft’s cameras observed an orange haze obscuring the planet’s surface, with detached haze layers up to 300 miles above the thicker atmosphere. The instruments measured the atmospheric composition at the surface as mostly nitrogen with about 10% methane and traces of hydrocarbons, the pressure at the surface 60% greater than Earth’s mean sea level pressure, and surface temperatures around 93 K (-293 degrees Fahrenheit). Voyager 1 measured Titan’s diameter at 3,194 miles and determined its density indicated a composition of roughly equal proportions of rock and water ice. The spacecraft then made its closest approach of 78,000 miles to Saturn’s cloud tops, swung behind the planet, and began its outbound journey. Saturn’s gravity imparted enough acceleration on Voyager 1 that it achieved escape velocity from the solar system. 

voyager_1_tethys_1_2_m_km_pia01974

Voyager 1 studied many of Saturn’s smaller icy moons during the encounter and discovered three new ones, bringing the total number of known satellites at the time to 15. In order of study during the encounter and the closest distance to the spacecraft, these moons were: Tethys (258,340 miles), Mimas (54,965 miles), Enceladus (125,570 miles), Dione (100,000 miles), Rhea (45,980 miles), and Hyperion (547,200 miles). These moons range in size from 950 miles in diameter for Rhea to 180-mile-wide Hyperion. Voyager also observed 900-mile-wide outer icy moon Iapetus from a distance of 1.5 million miles. These moons are composed of a mixture of ice and rock, and most show heavily cratered surfaces with the exception of Enceladus. Iapetus displays two very different hemispheres, a dark leading side, and a much brighter trailing side, while the unique surface feature on Mimas is a large crater one-third the diameter of the moon itself.

voyager_1_dione

Four days after its closest approach, the spacecraft took a magnificent image of Saturn and its rings from a perspective never seen from Earth, the planet in a crescent phase with its night side dimly illuminated by ring-shine, sunlight reflected from the rings. Voyager 1 completed its observations of the Saturn system on Dec. 14, 1980.

voyager_1_saturn_departure_nov_16_1980_3_3_m_miles

On Feb. 14, 1990, more than 12 years after it began its journey from Earth and shortly before its cameras were permanently turned off to conserve power, Voyager 1 spun around and pointed them back into the solar system. In a mosaic of 60 images, it captured a “family portrait” of six of the solar system’s planets, including a pale blue dot called Earth more than 3.7 billion miles away. Fittingly, these were the last pictures returned from either Voyager spacecraft. In February 2020, to commemorate the photograph’s 30th anniversary, NASA released a remastered version of the image of Earth as Pale Blue Dot Revisited .

voyager_1_family_portrait

In August 2012, the spacecraft passed beyond the heliopause, the boundary between the heliosphere, the bubble-like region of space created by the Sun, and the interstellar medium. Now, more than 43 years after its launch, several of Voyager 1’s instruments are still returning useful data about conditions beyond the solar system. Engineers expect that Voyager 1 will continue to return data from interstellar space until about 2025 when it will no longer be able to power its instruments. Just in case an alien intelligence should find it one day, Voyager 1 and its twin carry gold-plated records that contain information about its home planet, including recordings of terrestrial sounds, music, and greetings in 55 languages. Instructions on how to play the record are also included.

voyager_golden_record

Image that reads Space Place and links to spaceplace.nasa.gov.

Voyager 1 and 2: The Interstellar Mission

Voyager 1 flew past jupiter in 1979..

Read about Voyager's grand tour of the outer planets.

An image of Neptune taken by the Voyager 2 spacecraft.

An image of Neptune taken by the Voyager 2 spacecraft. Image credit: NASA

NASA has beautiful photos of every planet in our solar system. We even have images of faraway Neptune , as you can see in the photo above.

Neptune is much too distant for an astronaut to travel there with a camera. So, how do we have pictures from distant locations in our solar system? Our photographers were two spacecraft, called Voyager 1 and Voyager 2!

An artist’s rendering of one of the Voyager spacecraft.

An artist’s rendering of one of the Voyager spacecraft. Image credit: NASA

The Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft launched from Earth in 1977. Their mission was to explore Jupiter and Saturn —and beyond to the outer planets of our solar system. This was a big task. No human-made object had ever attempted a journey like that before.

The two spacecraft took tens of thousands of pictures of Jupiter and Saturn and their moons. The pictures from Voyager 1 and 2 allowed us to see lots of things for the first time. For example, they captured detailed photos of Jupiter's clouds and storms, and the structure of Saturn's rings .

Image of storms on Jupiter taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft.

Image of storms on Jupiter taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft. Image credit: NASA

Voyager 1 and 2 also discovered active volcanoes on Jupiter's moon Io , and much more. Voyager 2 also took pictures of Uranus and Neptune. Together, the Voyager missions discovered 22 moons.

Since then, these spacecraft have continued to travel farther away from us. Voyager 1 and 2 are now so far away that they are in interstellar space —the region between the stars. No other spacecraft have ever flown this far away.

Where will Voyager go next?

Watch this video to find out what's beyond our solar system!

Both spacecraft are still sending information back to Earth. This data will help us learn about conditions in the distant solar system and interstellar space.

The Voyagers have enough fuel and power to operate until 2025 and beyond. Sometime after this they will not be able to communicate with Earth anymore. Unless something stops them, they will continue to travel on and on, passing other stars after many thousands of years.

Each Voyager spacecraft also carries a message. Both spacecraft carry a golden record with scenes and sounds from Earth. The records also contain music and greetings in different languages. So, if intelligent life ever find these spacecraft, they may learn something about Earth and us as well!

A photo of the golden record that was sent into space on both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2.

A photo of the golden record that was sent into space on both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

More about our universe!

A sign that says welcome to interstellar space

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Searching for other planets like ours

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The remarkable twin Voyager spacecraft continue to explore the outer reaches of the solar system decades after they completed their surveys of the Outer Planets.  Launched in 1977 (September 5 for Voyager 1 (V1) and August 20 for Voyager 2 (V2), whose trajectory took it past Jupiter after Voyager 1), the spacecraft pair made many fundamental discoveries as they flew past Jupiter (March 1979 for V1, July 1979 for V2) and Saturn (November 1980 for V1, August 1981 for V2).  The path of Voyager 2 past Saturn was targeted so that it continued within the plane of the solar system, allowing it to become the first spacecraft to visit Uranus (January 1986) and Neptune (August 1989).  Following the Neptune encounter, both spacecraft started a new phase of exploration under the intriguing title of the Voyager Interstellar Mission.

Voyager Spacecraft

Five instruments continue to collect important measurements of magnetic fields, plasmas, and charged particles as both spacecraft explore different portions of the solar system beyond the orbits of the planets.  Voyager 1 is now more than 118 astronomical units (one AU is equal to the average orbital distance of Earth from the Sun) distant from the sun, traveling at a speed (relative to the sun) of 17.1 kilometers per second (10.6 miles per second).  Voyager 2 is now more than 96 AU from the sun, traveling at a speed of 15.5 kilometers per second (9.6 miles per second).  Both spacecraft are moving considerably faster than Pioneers 10 and 11, two earlier spacecraft that became the first robotic visitors to fly past Jupiter and Saturn in the mid-70s.

Jupiter

This processed color image of Jupiter was produced in 1990 by the U.S. Geological Survey from a Voyager image captured in 1979. The colors have been enhanced to bring out detail. Zones of light-colored, ascending clouds alternate with bands of dark, descending clouds. The clouds travel around the planet in alternating eastward and westward belts at speeds of up to 540 kilometers per hour. Tremendous storms as big as Earthly continents surge around the planet. The Great Red Spot (oval shape toward the lower-left) is an enormous anticyclonic storm that drifts along its belt, eventually circling the entire planet.

As seen in the night sky at Earth, Voyager 1 is within the confines of the constellation Ophiuchus, only slightly above the celestial equator; no telescope can see it, but radio contact is expected to be maintained for at least the next ten years.  Voyager 2 is within the bounds of the constellation Telescopium (which somehow sounds quite appropriate) in the far southern night sky.

Heliosphere

Both spacecraft have already passed something called the Termination Shock † (December 2004 for V1, August 2007 for V2), where the solar wind slows as it starts to interact with the particles and fields present between the stars.  It is expected that both spacecraft will encounter the Heliopause, where the solar wind ceases as true interstellar space begins, from 10 to 20 years after crossing the Termination Shock.  Theories exist for what should be present in interstellar space, but the Voyagers will become the first man-made objects to go beyond the influences of the Sun, hopefully returning the first measurements of what it is like out there.  Each spacecraft is carrying a metal record with encoded sounds and sights from Earth, along with the needle needed to read the recordings, and simplified instructions for where the spacecraft came from, in case they are eventually discovered by intelligent extra-terrestrials.

Voyager Record

Keep track of the Voyager spacecraft on the official  Voyager Interstellar Mission website or follow  @NASAVoyager2 on Twitter.    † The sun ejects a continuous stream of charged particles (electrons, protons, etc) that is collectively termed the solar wind.  The particles are traveling extremely fast and are dense enough to form a very tenuous atmosphere; the heliosphere represents the volume of space where the effects of the solar wind dominate over those of particles in interstellar space.  The solar wind particles are moving very much faster than the local speed of sound represented by their low volume density.  When the particles begin to interact with interstellar particles and fields (the interaction can be either physically running into other particles or experiencing an electromagnetic force resulting from a charged particle moving within a magnetic field), then they start to slow down.  The point at which they become subsonic (rather than their normal hypersonic speed) is the Termination Shock.

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NASA's interstellar Voyager 1 spacecraft isn't doing so well — here's what we know

Since late 2023, engineers have been trying to get the Voyager spacecraft back online.

Voyager 1 rendering of the craft out in space, on the right side of the image.

On Dec. 12, 2023, NASA shared some worrisome news about Voyager 1, the first probe to walk away from our solar system 's gravitational party and enter the isolation of interstellar space . Surrounded by darkness, Voyager 1 seems to be glitching. 

It has been out there for more than 45 years, having supplied us with a bounty of treasure like the discovery of two new moons of Jupiter, another incredible ring of Saturn and the warm feeling that comes from knowing pieces of our lives will drift across the cosmos even after we're gone. (See: The Golden Record .) But now, Voyager 1 's fate seems to be uncertain.

As of Feb. 6, NASA said the team remains working on bringing the spacecraft back to proper health. "Engineers are still working to resolve a data issue on Voyager 1," NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said in a post on X (formerly Twitter). "We can talk to the spacecraft, and it can hear us, but it's a slow process given the spacecraft's incredible distance from Earth."

Related: NASA's interstellar Voyager probes get software updates beamed from 12 billion miles away

So, on the bright side, even though Voyager 1 sits so utterly far away from us, ground control can actually communicate with it. In fact, last year, scientists beamed some software updates to the spacecraft as well as its counterpart, Voyager 2 , from billions of miles away. Though on the dimmer side, due to that distance, a single back-and-forth communication between Voyager 1 and anyone on Earth takes a total of 45 hours. If NASA finds a solution, it won't be for some time .

The issue, engineers realized, has to do with one of Voyager 1's onboard computers known as the Flight Data System, or FDS. (The backup FDS stopped working in 1981.)

"The FDS is not communicating properly with one of the probe's subsystems, called the telemetry modulation unit (TMU)," NASA said in a blog post. "As a result, no science or engineering data is being sent back to Earth." This is of course despite the fact that ground control can indeed send information to Voyager 1, which, at the time of writing this article , sits about 162 AU's from our planet. One AU is equal to the distance between the Earth and the sun , or 149,597,870.7 kilometers (92,955,807.3 miles).

From the beginning 

Voyager 1's FDS dilemma was first noticed last year , after the probe's TMU stopped sending back clear data and started procuring a bunch of rubbish. 

As NASA explains in the blog post, one of the FDS' core jobs is to collect information about the spacecraft itself, in terms of its health and general status. "It then combines that information into a single data 'package' to be sent back to Earth by the TMU," the post says. "The data is in the form of ones and zeros, or binary code." 

However, the TMU seemed to be shuffling back a non-intelligible version of binary code recently. Or, as the team puts it, it seems like the system is "stuck." Yes, the engineers tried turning it off and on again. 

That didn't work. 

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Then, in early February, Suzanne Dodd, Voyager project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told Ars Technica that the team might have pinpointed what's going on with the FDS at last. The theory is that the problem lies somewhere with the FDS' memory; there might be a computer bit that got corrupted. Unfortunately, though, because the FDS and TMU work together to relay information about the spacecraft's health, engineers are having a hard time figuring out where exactly the possible corruption may exist. The messenger is the one that needs a messenger.

They do know, however, that the spacecraft must be alive because they are receiving what's known as a "carrier tone." Carrier tone wavelengths don't carry information, but they are signals nonetheless, akin to a heartbeat. It's also worth considering that Voyager 1 has experienced problems before, such as in 2022 when the probe's "attitude articulation and control system" exhibited some blips that were ultimately patched up. Something similar happened to Voyager 2 during the summer of 2023, when Voyager 1's twin suffered some antenna complications before coming right back online again.

Still, Dodd says this situation has been the most serious since she began working on the historic Voyager mission.

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Monisha Ravisetti

Monisha Ravisetti is Space.com's Astronomy Editor. She covers black holes, star explosions, gravitational waves, exoplanet discoveries and other enigmas hidden across the fabric of space and time. Previously, she was a science writer at CNET, and before that, reported for The Academic Times. Prior to becoming a writer, she was an immunology researcher at Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York. She graduated from New York University in 2018 with a B.A. in philosophy, physics and chemistry. She spends too much time playing online chess. Her favorite planet is Earth.

NASA's Voyager 1 glitch has scientists sad yet hopeful: 'Voyager 2 is still going strong'

NASA's Voyager 1 probe in interstellar space can't phone home (again) due to glitch

SpaceX to launch 53 satellites on Transporter-10 rideshare mission today

  • Classical Motion There must be more to this story. Let me see if I have this right. They can receive a carrier. But the modulator gives them junk. Or possibly the processor's memory. And they can send new software. New instructions. So, why not simply use the packet data, to key the carrier on and off. OOK On and Off Keying. Telegraphy. Reply
Admin said: NASA's Voyager 1 deep space probe started glitching last year, and scientists aren't sure they can fix it. NASA's interstellar Voyager 1 spacecraft isn't doing so well — here's what we know : Read more
  • Classical Motion I wish something would kick one of them back to us. I would love to see an analysis of every cubic cm of it. Reply
  • billslugg Modulating the carrier wave would do no good unless the carrier knew what information to send us. The unit that failed takes the raw data and then tells the carrier what to say. Without the modulation unit there is no data to send. Reply
Classical Motion said: I wish something would kick one of them back to us. I would love to see an analysis of every cubic cm of it.
  • Classical Motion I read that they were not sure if it was the modulator or the packet memory. The packet buffer. If they can send patch, it's easy to relocate that buffer into another section of memory. This can be done at several different memory locations to verify if it is a memory problem. If that works, then the modulator is ok. If the modulator fails with all those buffers, then it's the modulator. Turn off modulator. Just enable the carrier for a certain duration for a 1 bit. And turn it off for that certain duration for a 0 bit. One simply rotates that buffer string thru the accumulator at the duration rate, and use status flags to key the transmitter. Very simple and very short code. The packet is nothing more that a 128 BYTE or multiple size string of 1s and 0s. OOK is a very common wireless modulation. That's why I commented on more must be going on. And I would like to see what 30 years naked in space does to man molded matter. Reply
Classical Motion said: I read that they were not sure if it was the modulator or the packet memory. The packet buffer. If they can send patch, it's easy to relocate that buffer into another section of memory. This can be done at several different memory locations to verify if it is a memory problem. If that works, then the modulator is ok. If the modulator fails with all those buffers, then it's the modulator. Turn off modulator. Just enable the carrier for a certain duration for a 1 bit. And turn it off for that certain duration for a 0 bit. One simply rotates that buffer string thru the accumulator at the duration rate, and use status flags to key the transmitter. Very simple and very short code. The packet is nothing more that a 128 BYTE or multiple size string of 1s and 0s. OOK is a very common wireless modulation. That's why I commented on more must be going on. And I would like to see what 30 years naked in space does to man molded matter.
  • damienassurre I think they should make another space craft and have it pick up voyager 1 and bring it back the info it went through would very valuable to stellar travel Reply
damienassurre said: I think they should make another space craft and have it pick up voyager 1 and bring it back the info it went through would very valuable to stellar travel
  • billslugg The newer forms of memory can't be used easily in outer space as their feature size is too small and too easily corrupted by a cosmic ray. Very large, bulky features keep spacecraft memory far smaller than what earthbound computers can enjoy. As far as returning one of the Voyagers to Earth, it would take several thousand years using available technology. Better to wait for more advanced propulsion technologies. Reply
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46 Years Ago, a Rare Alignment of Our Planets Allowed For An Iconic Space Mission

With Voyager 1 on the fritz, it's a great time to look back at the 46-year space mission's origin story.

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The summer of 1977 was a great time to be a space nerd. Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope was a summer blockbuster. NASA was testing its futuristic Space Shuttle in the Mojave Desert. And, on August 2 and September 5, Voyager 2 and 1, respectfully , blasted off from Florida on their way to tour the enigmatic giant worlds of the outer solar system. The summer of 1977 changed our view of outer space forever.

The twin Voyagers carried the same array of instruments — spectrometers, cosmic ray detectors, and cameras — to tell scientists on Earth about distant worlds; they also carried matching “Golden Records” with recordings of sounds, music, and voices to tell distant worlds about life on Earth.

Altogether, each Voyager carried slightly less computing power than a modern smartphone. By today’s standards, they're bare-bones machines, and in some senses, their electronics were outmoded even by the time they launched. But sometimes simplicity works: the Voyagers have outlived many of their original designers. And it's hard to imagine not knowing the things Voyagers 1 and 2 revealed about the outer reaches of our Solar System: that Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is a gargantuan hurricane, that Europa’s ice is cracked because of tides churning beneath it, that Io is volcanically active on a terrifying scale, or that Titan has hydrocarbon seas and rivers beneath its methane smog.

Thanks to the Voyagers, NASA knew it was worth launching the Galileo mission to Jupiter and the Cassini mission to Saturn.

“I remember seeing the image of the moon Io for the first time and thinking that the Caltech students had engineered a brilliant stunt — they must have substituted a picture of a poorly made pizza for the picture of Io!” recalls Voyager program co-investigator Alan Cummings in a post for NASA. “All that orange and black on Io changed our thinking about the moons in the Solar System. I think most of us thought they would all look more or less like our own Moon. But, wow, how wrong was that!”

image of the edge of a planet in orange, with blue volcanic plumes, on a black background

This image from one of the Voyager spacecraft is one of the first glimpses of Io’s erupting volcanoes.

Two Long One-Way Trips

Voyager 1 swept past Jupiter in 1979, using the planet’s tremendous gravity to power a slingshot outward toward Saturn and its haze-shrouded moon Titan (mission planners had to choose between a flyby of Titan or Pluto, and they chose Titan). From there, the tug of Saturn’s gravity “bent the spacecraft's path inexorably northward out of the ecliptic plane.” Voyager 1 was on its way out of the Solar System.

Voyager 2 also flew past Jupiter for a gravity assist in 1979, then past Saturn in 1980, but its path also carried it past the Solar System’s two most distant worlds, “ice giants” Uranus and Neptune. To this day, Voyager 2 is the only spacecraft we’ve sent to either of the ice giants.

“The planet Uranus turned out to be a fuzzy blue tennis ball, with an atmosphere not at all as exciting as Jupiter or Saturn,” recalls Suzanne Dodd, now the Voyager program manager, in a post for NASA. “So initially, it felt a little disappointing, but then there was the moon Miranda. That was shocking – a jumble of different geologies on the same body. It was the jewel of the encounter.”

After flying past Neptune in 1989, Voyager 2 carried on its own way out of the Solar System, curving south (relative to Earth’s poles) while its sister headed north.

grayscale mosaic images of planets

Voyager 1 captured this mosaic portrait of 6 of the Solar System’s 8 planets (and the Sun) from above the plane of the planets’ orbits, 4 billion miles from home.

How The Planets Aligned

The trips were only possible because of a rare alignment of the planets. Our Solar System’s massive outermost worlds lumber slowly along wide, long orbits: Jupiter takes about 12 years to make a lap around the Sun, while Uranus takes 84; Neptune orbits the Sun in such a wide circle that its orbit takes a staggering 165 years to complete. But once every 175 years, the planets happen to pass the same point in their orbits at the same time, so that from Earth’s viewpoint they all line up in a roughly straight line.

Aerospace engineer Gary Flandro, working in NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, realized that such an alignment was due to happen in the late 1970s and that NASA could take advantage of it to explore the outer Solar System. The outer planets’ rare alignment meant that a spacecraft could reach all four of them on a single curving trajectory, using each planet’s gravity to get a speed boost and help set the course for the next world. Each spacecraft could save fuel and reach its destinations in a fraction of the time.

Based on Flandro’s calculations, the original version of Voyager would have been a fleet of four spacecraft, dispatched in pairs to the outer worlds: two to Jupiter, Saturn, and Pluto, and two more to Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune. But the price tag for that pair of missions would have been about $1 billion at the time (equivalent to a little over $5 billion today), and NASA’s planetary science missions were competing for funding against the newly-approved Space Shuttle program — part of a longstanding budget rivalry between crewed spaceflight and planetary science.

Eventually, the pared-down version involved two spacecraft, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. And NASA chose to overlook poor little Pluto in favor of Saturn’s moon Titan.

The planetary alignment also meant that in 1990, Voyager 1 could point its camera back toward Earth and capture a “family portrait” of our Solar System. That portrait included the now-famous Pale Blue Dot: a color image of Earth from 4 billion miles away, looking tiny and fragile amid the vastness of space.

Candice Handsen, now a senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute, and then part of the Voyager imaging team, recalls that her colleagues printed out Voyager 1’s wide-angle mosaic of the Solar System, with the more focused color images of individual planets as insets, and hung them along a wall in the Von Karman Auditorium at JPL.

“Jurrie [Van der Woude] said that he had to replace the picture of Earth rather often — people always wanted to touch it,” writes Handsen.

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voyage 1

Voyager 1 Is Sending Nonsensical Ones and Zeros Back to Earth

The end may finally be near ... for the spacecraft, at least.

a satellite in space

  • The first spacecraft to ever leave our heliosphere, Voyager 1 is a legendary spacecraft. Now, after 46 years, it is beginning to show its age.
  • According to NASA, a glitch in the spacecraft’s Flight Data System (FDS) is causing Voyager 1 to send back a repeating series of ones and zeroes rather than science and engineering data.
  • The Voyager team is currently working on a fix for the issue, but its 15-billion-mile distance and outdated tech means that a solution is likely weeks in the making—if it arrives at all.

Some 46 years after that initial launch, the science phase of Voyager 1’s mission may be about to come to an end. Last week, NASA announced that it was working to resolve a computer glitch aboard the spacecraft—part of its Flight Data System (FDS) was causing Voyager 1 to not ‘phone home’ any scientific or engineering data. Commands that take almost an entire day to reach Voyager 1—which is now, at 15 billion miles away, almost 11 times further away from Earth than Earth is from the Sun —combined with decades-old documents mean that a potential fix will likely be weeks in the making.

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

The precise issue affecting Voyager 1 is that the FDS is not communicating with one of the spacecraft’s subsystems, called the telemetry modulation unit (TMU). As the FDS gathers information—whether that be astronomical data or simple health check-ups—the TMU sends a single data package back to Earth. But right now, according to NASA, the TMU is only returning a “repeating pattern of ones and zeroes as if it were stuck.” The Voyager team has already tried restarting the FDS, but the classic “unplug it and plug it back in” didn’t resolve the glitch.

This isn’t the first mishap to showcase the Voyager spacecrafts’ age. This summer, NASA lost contact with Voyager 2 when a human error caused its antenna to tilt away from Earth—not good if you want steady, reliable communication with your far-flung probe. And in 2022, Voyager 1 experienced a glitch in its attitude articulation and control system (AACS) that made it send back similarly garbled telemetry data— a problem for which it took engineers several months to find a work around.

NASA hopes to keep both spacecraft operating with at least one science instrument until 2025, and to be able to send engineering data back to the probes for many more years with Deep Space Network (DSN)—an international array of radio antennas. If all goes according to plan, the DSN could still reach the twin spacecraft well into the mid-2030s.

Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 have far exceeded their original mission parameters, and are currently the oldest operating spacecraft in history—some “senior moments” are to be expected.

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Darren lives in Portland, has a cat, and writes/edits about sci-fi and how our world works. You can find his previous stuff at Gizmodo and Paste if you look hard enough. 

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45 years ago, NASA's Voyager spacecraft flew past Jupiter. See how the iconic video compares to photos of the planet today.

  • NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft flew past Jupiter 45 years ago, capturing iconic footage.
  • The Voyager probe's movie of Jupiter made history, revealing the planet like never before.
  • See how those images compare to Jupiter pictures from NASA's Juno mission today.

Insider Today

Voyager was one of NASA's most ambitious missions , and Jupiter is arguably our solar system's most beautiful planet. So when the two met for the first time, it was history — and art — in the making.

NASA launched its twin Voyager spacecrafts in the summer of 1977. Voyager 1 was first to approach Jupiter, entering the gas giant's orbit in March 1979.

As the probe approached our solar system 's largest and swirliest planet that spring, it captured the iconic video below. It's a time-lapse movie made of 66 images.

"Jupiter is far more complex in its atmospheric motions than we had ever imagined," Bradford Smith, who was leading the imaging team, said in a press briefing that February, even before Voyager had gotten close enough to make this video, according to Astronomy.com .

He added that his team was "happily bewildered."

The spacecraft made its closest approach to Jupiter on March 5, 1979.

The footage was monumental. To put it in perspective, prior to Voyager, the best close-up images of Jupiter were from the Pioneer 10 spacecraft. They looked like this:

Voyager was a major upgrade.

The first probe photographed Jupiter for 4 months, capturing 19,000 pictures. Voyager 2 entered Jupiter's orbit as Voyager 1 was on its way out and took an additional 14,000 photos before completing its Jupiter encounter in August 1979.

That was 45 years ago. Today we have a wealth of stunningly detailed, colorful snapshots of Jupiter and its moons , thanks to NASA's more modern Juno spacecraft, which has been orbiting the gas giant since 2016.

Compared to Voyager's first glimpse of Jupiter, Juno's portraits capture its intricate features in finer detail. With the help of modern image processing, Jupiter's colors, patterns, and violent weather are on full display.

The planet's iconic Great Red Spot is an anticyclone large enough to swallow Earth. Juno data has revealed that it extends up to 310 miles below the visible surface of the Jovian atmosphere.

That's greater than the distance between you and the International Space Station when it's overhead.

Juno even spots Jupiter's moons up close sometimes — such as Io, which Voyager discovered to have active volcanoes spewing lava into space .

Juno has even spotted Io's shadow gliding over Jupiter's turbulent surface.

The Voyager spacecrafts are now in interstellar space, the only human-made objects to ever leave our solar system. They are both slowly losing their power supply.

Juno should still be circling Jupiter, and sending back gorgeous images like this, until at least September 2025.

That's when Juno's current mission ends, but if it's still functional NASA might keep it going for more years to come.

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Watch: NASA released the closest-ever images of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot

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Voyager 1 live position and data

This page shows Voyager 1 location and other relevant astronomical data in real time. The celestial coordinates, magnitude, distances and speed are updated in real time and are computed using high quality data sets provided by the JPL Horizons ephemeris service (see acknowledgements for details). The sky map shown in the background represents a rectangular portion of the sky 60x40 arcminutes wide. By comparison the diameter of the full Moon is about 30 arcmins, so the full horizontal extent of the map is approximately 2 full Moons wide. Depending on the device you are using, the map can be dragged horizondally or vertically using the mouse or touchscreen. The deep sky image in the background is provided by the Digitized Sky Survey ( acknowledgements ).

Current close conjunctions

List of bright objects (stars brighter than magnitude 9.0 and galaxies brighter than magmitude 14.0) close to Voyager 1 (less than 1.5 degrees):

Additional resources

  • 15 Days Ephemerides
  • Interactive Sky Map (Planetarium)
  • Rise & Set Times
  • Distance from Earth

Astronomy databases

  • The Digitized Sky Survey, a photographic survey of the whole sky created using images from different telescopes, including the Oschin Schmidt Telescope on Palomar Mountain
  • The Hipparcos Star Catalogue, containing more than 100.000 bright stars
  • The PGC 2003 Catalogue, containing information about 1 million galaxies
  • The GSC 2.3 Catalogue, containing information about more than 2 billion stars and galaxies

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Voyager 1 Stories

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NASA’s Voyager Team Focuses on Software Patch, Thrusters

The efforts should help extend the lifetimes of the agency’s interstellar explorers. Engineers for NASA’s Voyager mission are taking steps to help make sure both spacecraft, launched in 1977, continue to explore interstellar space for years to come. One effort…

voyage 1

NASA’s Voyager Will Do More Science With New Power Strategy

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

voyage 1

Edward Stone Retires After 50 Years as NASA Voyager’s Project Scientist

Stone’s remarkable tenure on NASA’s longest-operating mission spans decades of historic discoveries and firsts. Edward Stone has retired as the project scientist for NASA’s Voyager mission a half-century after taking on the role. Stone accepted scientific leadership of the historic…

voyage 1

Engineers Solve Data Glitch on NASA’s Voyager 1

A critical system aboard the probe was sending garbled data about its status. Engineers have fixed the issue but are still seeking the root cause. Engineers have repaired an issue affecting data from NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft. Earlier this year,…

voyage 1

Voyager, NASA’s Longest-Lived Mission, Logs 45 Years in Space

Launched in 1977, the twin Voyager probes are NASA’s longest-operating mission and the only spacecraft ever to explore interstellar space. NASA’s twin Voyager probes have become, in some ways, time capsules of their era: They each carry an eight-track tape…

voyage 1

10 Things: Going Interstellar

Humanity’s great leap into interstellar space – the space between the stars – has begun. Here are 10 things we’ve learned about going interstellar.

voyage 1

Engineers Investigating NASA’s Voyager 1 Telemetry Data

While the spacecraft continues to return science data and otherwise operate as normal, the mission team is searching for the source of a system data issue. The engineering team with NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft is trying to solve a mystery:…

Studying the Edge of the Sun’s Magnetic Bubble

Our corner of the universe, the solar system, is nestled inside the Milky Way galaxy, home to more than 100 billion stars. The solar system is encased in a bubble called the heliosphere, which separates us from the vast galaxy…

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40 Years On, Remembering Voyager’s Legacy at Saturn

Voyager 2 made its closest approach to Saturn on Aug. 25, 1981. The mission revealed a planet so phenomenal scientists had to go back.

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As NASA’s Voyager 1 Surveys Interstellar Space, Its Density Measurements Are Making Waves

Until recently, every spacecraft in history had made all of its measurements inside our heliosphere, the magnetic bubble inflated by our Sun. But on August 25, 2012, NASA’s Voyager 1 changed that. As it crossed the heliosphere’s boundary, it became…

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Where are they now.

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Galleries of Images Voyager Took

The Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft explored Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune before starting their journey toward interstellar space. Here you'll find some of those iconic images, including "The Pale Blue Dot" - famously described by Carl Sagan - and what are still the only up-close images of Uranus and Neptune.

Jupiters Great Spot

Photography of Jupiter began in January 1979, when images of the brightly banded planet already exceeded the best taken from Earth. Voyager 1 completed its Jupiter encounter in early April, after taking almost 19,000 pictures and many other scientific measurements. Voyager 2 picked up the baton in late April and its encounter continued into August. They took more than 33,000 pictures of Jupiter and its five major satellites.

Image of Saturn

The Voyager 1 and 2 Saturn encounters occurred nine months apart, in November 1980 and August 1981. Voyager 1 is leaving the solar system. Voyager 2 completed its encounter with Uranus in January 1986 and with Neptune in August 1989, and is now also en route out of the solar system.

Image of Uranus

NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft flew closely past distant Uranus, the seventh planet from the Sun, in January. At its closet, the spacecraft came within 81,800 kilometers (50,600 miles) of Uranus's cloudtops on Jan. 24, 1986. Voyager 2 radioed thousands of images and voluminous amounts of other scientific data on the planet, its moons, rings, atmosphere, interior and the magnetic environment surrounding Uranus.

Image of Neptune

In the summer of 1989, NASA's Voyager 2 became the first spacecraft to observe the planet Neptune, its final planetary target. Passing about 4,950 kilometers (3,000 miles) above Neptune's north pole, Voyager 2 made its closest approach to any planet since leaving Earth 12 years ago. Five hours later, Voyager 2 passed about 40,000 kilometers (25,000 miles) from Neptune's largest moon, Triton, the last solid body the spacecraft will have an opportunity to study.

Image of Neptune

This narrow-angle color image of the Earth, dubbed 'Pale Blue Dot', is a part of the first ever 'portrait' of the solar system taken by Voyager 1. The spacecraft acquired a total of 60 frames for a mosaic of the solar system from a distance of more than 4 billion miles from Earth and about 32 degrees above the ecliptic. From Voyager's great distance Earth is a mere point of light, less than the size of a picture element even in the narrow-angle camera. Earth was a crescent only 0.12 pixel in size. Coincidentally, Earth lies right in the center of one of the scattered light rays resulting from taking the image so close to the sun. This blown-up image of the Earth was taken through three color filters -- violet, blue and green -- and recombined to produce the color image. The background features in the image are artifacts resulting from the magnification.

Futurism

Things Are Looking Pretty Grim for Voyager 1

Serious stuff.

T hings have gone from bad to worse for Voyager 1, which has been out of contact with Earth-bound mission control for months now — and there's no telling when it may come back online.

In an interview with  Ars Technica , Voyager project manager Suzanne Dodd said the 46-year-old craft, which is currently careening some 15 billion miles away, is in worse shape than she's ever seen it.

Back in November, a computer glitch caused the pioneering probe to stop sending its telemetry data back to NASA. Since then, its team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California has been, essentially, flying it blind.

"It would be the biggest miracle if we get it back. We certainly haven't given up," Dodd said. "This is, by far, the most serious [problem] since I’ve been project manager."

Launched, counterintuitively, a few weeks after the Voyager 2 craft back in the fall of 1977 , the groundbreaking craft has spent the first three-quarters of its tour flying through the outer reaches of our own Solar System, and has since 2012 been officially exploring interstellar space. Throughout the decades , it's experienced all sorts of technical difficulties — but lately there's a mood of inevitability for its unavoidable demise.

"Not to be morose, but a lot of Voyager people are dead," Dodd told Ars . "So the people that built the spacecraft are not alive anymore. We do have a reasonably good set of documentation, but a lot of it is in paper, so you do this archaeology dig to get documents."

Ground Control to Voyager

According to its project manager, Voyager 1's current issue seems to stem from its Flight Data Subsystem (FDS), one of its three main computers tasked with sending its operational data back to terra firma. For the past three months, the mission's "tiger team" of only eight experts has been trying to pinpoint exactly what's ailing the probe, but that's pretty hard to do when it can't send back its own diagnostics.

While the team is "99.9 percent" sure they've figured out what's wrong with Voyager 1, they haven't been able to do much about it because, as the project manager explains, the issue stems from some corrupted memory — meaning they can't see past the glitch itself.

"A bit [of memory] got flipped or corrupted," Dodd explained. "But without the telemetry, we can't see where that FDS memory corruption is."

This lengthy lack of communication, which has been broken only by signals telling NASA that Voyager 1 is still alive out there, is cause for major concern.

"This anomaly causes us not to have any telemetry," Dodd said. "We're kind of shooting in the blind a little bit because we don't know what the status of the spacecraft is completely."

More on NASA: Mass Layoffs Hit NASA

The post Things Are Looking Pretty Grim for Voyager 1 appeared first on Futurism .

Things have gone from bad to worse for Voyager 1, which has been out of contact with its Earth-bound mission control for months now.

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Cyndi Lauper inks deal with firm behind ABBA Voyage for new immersive performance project

Pop icon Cyndi Lauper, who rose to fame thanks to hits like “Time After Time” and “Girls Just Want To Have Fun,” has entered a partnership with the Swedish masterminds behind the immersive virtual concert ABBA Voyage - Björn Ulvaeus’ Pophouse Entertainment Group - to develop new ways to bring her music to fans. (Feb. 29)

Cyndi Lauper arrives at the 74th annual Tony Awards in New York on Sept. 26, 2021, left, and Bjorn Ulvaeus appears at the premiere of "Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again" in London on July 16, 2018. (AP Photo)

Cyndi Lauper arrives at the 74th annual Tony Awards in New York on Sept. 26, 2021, left, and Bjorn Ulvaeus appears at the premiere of “Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again” in London on July 16, 2018. (AP Photo)

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STOCKHOLM (AP) — Legendary pop icon Cyndi Lauper, who rose to fame in the 1980s with hits such as “Time After Time” and “Girls Just Want To Have Fun,” has entered a partnership with the Swedish masterminds behind the immersive virtual concert ABBA Voyage .

The partnership announced Thursday by the Pophouse Entertainment Group co-founded by ABBA singer Björn Ulvaeus , involves the acquisition of a majority share of the award-winning singer-songwriter’s music. The aim is to develop new ways to bring Lauper’s music to fans and younger audiences through new performances and live experiences.

Lauper said she agreed to the sale, for an undisclosed amount, when it became apparent the Swedish company wasn’t just in it for the money. “Most suits, when you tell them an idea, their eyes glaze over, they just want your greatest hits,” Lauper told The Associated Press at the Pophouse headquarters in Stockholm earlier this month. “But these guys are a multimedia company, they’re not looking to just buy my catalog, they want to make something new.”

Four decades after her breakthrough solo album, the 70-year-old Queens native is still brimming with ideas and the energy to bring them to stage.

Lauper said she’s not aiming to replicate the glittery supernova brought to stage in ABBA Voyage where stupefying technology offers digital avatars of the ABBA band members as they looked in their 1970s heyday, but rather an “immersive theater piece” that transports audiences to the New York she grew up in.

“It’s about where I came from and the three women that were very influential in my life, my mom, my grandmother and my aunt,” she said.

Lauper has long advocated for women’s rights and gender equality, and her 1983 hit “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” reinvented by other female artists through the years, has become a feminist anthem. Lauper seems humbled by this responsibility.

It was during the large Women’s March in 2017 following the inauguration of Donald Trump where she saw protesters with signs reading “Girls just want to have fun(damental rights)”that gave her the impetus to raise money for women’s health. So far, she has raised more than $150,000 to help small organizations that provide safe and legal abortions.

“I grew up with three women. I saw the disenfranchisement very clearly. And I saw the struggles, I saw the joy, I saw the love,” she said. “And it made me come out with boxing gloves on.”

Lauper hopes the new show can bring the memories of those women back to life a little, along with “the reasons I sang certain songs, and the things that I wrote about.”

voyage 1

IMAGES

  1. Voyager 1 Enters "Magnetic Highway," The Final Area before Interstellar

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  2. Happy 36th Birthday Voyager 1!

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  3. Voyager 1 Launch

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  4. Voyager 1 has left the Solar System. Will we ever overtake it?

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  5. Historical Audio Recordings: Voyager 1 Spacecraft

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  6. Herdeiro de Aécio: O LANÇAMENTO DA VOYAGER 2

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VIDEO

  1. LE VOYAGE 6

  2. Mon voyage au Cameroun

  3. BEGINNING OF A VOYAGE

  4. Voyage 1.6 2022 final 41

  5. Voyage 1.6 21 /22

  6. Voyager 1 Has Made “Impossible” Discovery after 45 Years in Space!

COMMENTS

  1. Voyager 1

    Voyager 1 was the first spacecraft to cross the heliosphere, the boundary where the influences outside our solar system are stronger than those from our Sun. Voyager 1 is the first human-made object to venture into interstellar space. Voyager 1 discovered a thin ring around Jupiter and two new Jovian moons: Thebe and Metis.

  2. Voyager 1

    Voyager 1 is a space probe launched by NASA on September 5, 1977, as part of the Voyager program to study the outer Solar System and the interstellar space beyond the Sun's heliosphere. It was launched 16 days after its twin Voyager 2.

  3. Voyager

    Instrument Status. This is a real-time indicator of Voyagers' distance from Earth in astronomical units (AU) and either miles (mi) or kilometers (km). Note: Because Earth moves around the sun faster than Voyager 1 is speeding away from the inner solar system, the distance between Earth and the spacecraft actually decreases at certain times of year.

  4. Voyager

    This is a real-time indicator of Voyager 1's distance from Earth in astronomical units (AU) and either miles (mi) or kilometers (km). Note: Because Earth moves around the sun faster than Voyager 1 is speeding away from the inner solar system, the distance between Earth and the spacecraft actually decreases at certain times of year.

  5. Voyager 1: Facts about Earth's farthest spacecraft

    Voyager 1 is the first spacecraft to travel beyond the solar system and reach interstellar space . The probe launched on Sept. 5, 1977 — about two weeks after its twin Voyager 2 — and as of ...

  6. Voyager 1

    Voyager 1 reached interstellar space in August 2012 and is the most distant human-made object in existence. Launched just shortly after its twin spacecraft, Voyager 2, in 1977, Voyager 1 explored the Jovian and Saturnian systems discovering new moons, active volcanoes and a wealth of data about the outer solar system. Voyagers 1 and 2 were ...

  7. Voyager

    Mission Overview. The twin Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft are exploring where nothing from Earth has flown before. Continuing on their more-than-40-year journey since their 1977 launches, they each are much farther away from Earth and the sun than Pluto. In August 2012, Voyager 1 made the historic entry into interstellar space, the region between ...

  8. 45 Years Ago: Voyager 1 Begins its Epic Journey to the Outer ...

    Forty-five years ago, the Voyager 1 spacecraft began an epic journey that continues to this day. The second of a pair of spacecraft, Voyager 1 lifted off on Sept. 5, 1977, 16 days after its twin left on a similar voyage. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, managed the two spacecraft on their missions to explore the outer planets.

  9. Voyager

    Voyager 1 and its twin Voyager 2 are the only spacecraft ever to operate outside the heliosphere, the protective bubble of particles and magnetic fields generated by the Sun. Voyager 1 reached the interstellar boundary in 2012, while Voyager 2 (traveling slower and in a different direction than its twin) reached it in 2018. Mission Type.

  10. Voyager 1 Now Most Distant Human-Made Object in Space

    At approximately 2:10 p.m. Pacific time on February 17, 1998, Voyager 1, launched more than two decades ago, will cruise beyond the Pioneer 10 spacecraft and become the most distant human-created object in space at 10.4 billion kilometers (6.5 billion miles.) The two are headed in almost opposite directions away from the Sun.

  11. 40 Years Ago: Voyager 1 Explores Saturn

    Nov 12, 2020. Today, Voyager 1 is the most distant spacecraft from Earth, more than 14 billion miles away and continuing on its journey out of our solar system. Forty years ago, it made its closest approach to Saturn. Although it was not the first to explore the giant ringed planet, as the Pioneer 11 spacecraft completed the first flyby in 1979 ...

  12. Voyager 1's Pale Blue Dot

    Voyager 1 was launched Sept. 5, 1977, just days after its twin — Voyager 2 — on Aug. 20. Because it was on a faster route to the mission's first encounter, at Jupiter, Voyager 1 overtook Voyager 2 on Dec. 15, 1977. (This was the reason for the order of their naming.)

  13. Voyager 1

    Voyager 1, robotic U.S. interplanetary probe launched in 1977 that visited Jupiter and Saturn and was the first spacecraft to reach interstellar space. Voyager 1 swung by Jupiter on March 5, 1979, and then headed for Saturn, which it reached on November 12, 1980.

  14. Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth

    Voyager 1 is so far away that it takes 22.5 hours for commands sent from Earth to reach the spacecraft. Additionally, the team must wait 45 hours to receive a response. Keeping the Voyager probes ...

  15. Voyager 1 and 2: The Interstellar Mission

    The Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft launched from Earth in 1977. Their mission was to explore Jupiter and Saturn —and beyond to the outer planets of our solar system. This was a big task. No human-made object had ever attempted a journey like that before. The two spacecraft took tens of thousands of pictures of Jupiter and Saturn and their moons.

  16. Where are the Voyagers now?

    Voyager 2 is now more than 96 AU from the sun, traveling at a speed of 15.5 kilometers per second (9.6 miles per second). Both spacecraft are moving considerably faster than Pioneers 10 and 11, two earlier spacecraft that became the first robotic visitors to fly past Jupiter and Saturn in the mid-70s. This processed color image of Jupiter was ...

  17. NASA's interstellar Voyager 1 spacecraft isn't doing so well

    On Dec. 12, 2023, NASA shared some worrisome news about Voyager 1, the first probe to walk away from our solar system 's gravitational party and enter the isolation of interstellar space ...

  18. 46 Years Ago, a Rare Alignment of Our Planets Allowed For An ...

    With Voyager 1 on the fritz, it's a great time to look back at the 46-year space mission's origin story. by Kiona Smith. Feb. 26, 2024. The summer of 1977 was a great time to be a space nerd.

  19. Voyager 1 Is Returning a Mishmash of 1s And 0s From Space. NASA Is

    Voyager 1, the most distant human-made object from Earth, is sending back a repetitive jumble of 1s and 0s that don't make any sense. Scientists at NASA are desperately trying to fix the glitch from 24 billion kilometers (15 billion miles) away. The probe can still receive commands from Earth but messages to interstellar space require ...

  20. Videos about Voyager 1 and 2

    Videos about Voyager 1 and 2. Look, listen and learn from the scientists and engineers that have dedicated their lives to this historic mission. NASA Beams a #MessageToVoyager. Voyager Images from the Odysseys (NASA Space Photos) Reflections on the Pale Blue Dot.

  21. Voyager 1 Is Sending Nonsensical Ones and Zeros Back to Earth

    According to NASA, a glitch in the spacecraft's Flight Data System (FDS) is causing Voyager 1 to send back a repeating series of ones and zeroes rather than science and engineering data. The ...

  22. See How NASA's Iconic Voyager Video of Jupiter Compares to New Photos

    Voyager 1 was first to approach Jupiter, entering the gas giant's orbit in March 1979. As the probe approached our solar system's largest and swirliest planet that spring, it captured the iconic ...

  23. Voyager 1 Tracker

    Voyager 1 live position and data. This page shows Voyager 1 location and other relevant astronomical data in real time. The celestial coordinates, magnitude, distances and speed are updated in real time and are computed using high quality data sets provided by the JPL Horizons ephemeris service (see acknowledgements for details). The sky map shown in the background represents a rectangular ...

  24. Voyager 1 Stories

    Voyager, NASA's Longest-Lived Mission, Logs 45 Years in Space. 6 min read. Launched in 1977, the twin Voyager probes are NASA's longest-operating mission and the only spacecraft ever to explore interstellar space. NASA's twin Voyager probes have become, in some ways, time capsules of their era: They each carry an eight-track tape….

  25. Voyager

    The Voyager 1 and 2 Saturn encounters occurred nine months apart, in November 1980 and August 1981. Voyager 1 is leaving the solar system. Voyager 2 completed its encounter with Uranus in January 1986 and with Neptune in August 1989, and is now also en route out of the solar system.

  26. Things Are Looking Pretty Grim for Voyager 1

    Things have gone from bad to worse for Voyager 1, which has been out of contact with Earth-bound mission control for months now — and there's no telling when it may come back online. In an ...

  27. Cyndi Lauper inks deal with firm behind ABBA Voyage for new immersive

    STOCKHOLM (AP) — Legendary pop icon Cyndi Lauper, who rose to fame in the 1980s with hits such as "Time After Time" and "Girls Just Want To Have Fun," has entered a partnership with the Swedish masterminds behind the immersive virtual concert ABBA Voyage.. The partnership announced Thursday by the Pophouse Entertainment Group co-founded by ABBA singer Björn Ulvaeus, involves the ...