Voyager 1, the first spacecraft into interstellar space, may have gone dark

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

Voyager 1 discovered active volcanoes, moons and planetary rings, gradually proving that Earth and all of humanity could be squeezed into a single pixel in a photo, a “light blue dot,‘, as the astronomer Carl Sagan put it. It stretched over a four-year mission to the present day and embarked on the deepest journey ever into space.

Now it may have finally said goodbye to that distant point.

Traveler 1, the farthest man-made object in space, has not sent coherent data to Earth since November. NASA has been trying to diagnose what Voyager mission project manager Suzanne Dodd called the “most serious problem” the robotic probe has faced since it began operating in 2010.

The spacecraft encountered a glitch in one of its computers, rendering it unable to send technical and scientific data back to Earth.

The loss of Voyager 1 would end decades of scientific breakthroughs and mark the beginning of the end for a mission that shaped humanity’s farthest ambition and inspired generations to look to the heavens.

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

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

Launched in 1977, they were primarily built for a four-year voyage Jupiter And Saturnbuilding on previous flybys of the Pioneer 10 and 11 probes.

The Voyager mission took advantage of a rare alignment of the outer planets – once every 175 years – allowing the probes to visit all four.

Using each planet’s gravity, the Voyager spacecraft could swing toward the next, according to NASA.

The mission to Jupiter And Saturn was a success.

The flybys in the 1980s yielded several new discoveries, including new insights into the so-called Great Red Spot on Jupiter, the rings around Saturn, and the many moons of each planet.

Voyager 2 has also explored Uranus And Neptuneand in 1989 became the only spacecraft to explore all four outer planets.

Voyager 1, meanwhile, had set sail for deep space and used its camera to photograph the planets it left behind along the way. Voyager 2 would later embark on its own journey into deep space.

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

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

On Valentine’s Day 1990, Voyager 1, traveling 4 billion miles from the sun to the outer reaches of the solar system, turned around and took a picture of Earth that Dr. Sagan and others thought it was a humble self-portrait of humanity.

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

She added: “I’ve had a lot of people come up to me and say, ‘Wow, I love Voyager. It’s what got me excited about the space. It made me think about our place here on earth and what that means.’”

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

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

Although spacecraft “all look the same,” she said, more people recognize the tattoo than she expected.

“I think this shows how famous Voyager is,” she said.

The Voyagers have made their mark popular culturewhich inspired a very intelligent “Voyager 6” in “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” and references thereto “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 leave the heliosphere, the space around the solar system that is directly influenced by the sun. There is a technical debate among scientists about whether Voyager 1 actually left the solar system, but nevertheless went interstellar and crossed the space between the stars.

That charted a new path for heliophysics, which looks at how the sun affects the space around it. In 2018 Voyager 2 followed his twin brother among the stars.

Before Voyager 1, scientific data about the Sun’s gases and material came only from within the confines of the heliosphere, said Dr. Jamie Rankin, Voyager’s deputy project scientist.

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

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

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

But recovery means crawling 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 vessel.

Over the years, it has been repeatedly shown that a smartphone has hundreds of thousands of times the memory of the Voyager 1 – and that the radio transmitter emits as many watts as a light bulb in a refrigerator.

“There was one analogy: It’s like trying to figure out where the cursor is on your laptop screen when your laptop screen isn’t working,” Ms Dodd said.

Her team is still hopeful, she said, especially as the tantalizing 50th launch anniversary approaches in 2027. Voyager 1 has survived failures before, but none were this serious.

Voyager 2 is still operational, but outdated. It has faced its own problems technical problems at.

NASA had already estimated that both spacecraft’s nuclear-powered generators would likely die around 2025.

Even as the interstellar Voyager mission nears its end, the journey still has a long way to go.

Voyager 1 and its twin, each 40,000 years away from the next nearest star, will arguably remain on a mission indefinitely.

“If Voyager were to encounter beings from another civilization in space sometime in the distant future, it would carry a message,” Dr. Sagan said in a 1980 interview.

Each spacecraft carries a gold-plated record loaded with a series of audio recordings and images that represent the richness of humanity, its diverse cultures and life on Earth.

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