I had the honor and pleasure to take a class from the venerable professor, JPL director, and Voyager project scientist Ed Stone at Caltech in 2018. He excitedly told us a "secret" on November 1st that Voyager 2 had reached interstellar space, and he showed us the actual data proving it. But we had to keep it a secret until the press release that Monday, November 5. It was a special moment to see his passion for the project almost 50 years in, and felt incredibly special to hear it directly from him. RIP professor.
Not to detract from the amazing success that is Voyager - I also still remember attending a lecture given by a JPL engineer that worked on one of the instruments - but I feel like the "Voyager has reached interstellar space" thing has been milked to death by PR. There was a period where I feel like there was one such announcement published in media each month with very unsatisfactory explanation (if any) how it differs from the last one.
It continues to irritate me that There aren't any other functioning deep space probes besides New Horizons (launched in 2006, and which flies at a slower speed than Voyagers). One new operating deep space probe in nearly 50 years is just embarrassing. I mean yay space telescopes and everything, but we seem to have given up anything that isn't a state-of-the-art prestige project. I was hopeful about projects like Breakthrough starshot but that seems to have stalled: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Starshot
If we launched a second New Horizons when the last one passed Pluto, the second one would already have passed Pluto as well.
Crazy to think how much time has passed since that flyby.
Also, one of the program managers was on The Moth podcast describing the panic when new Horizons rebooted days before the flyby.
NASA's New Horizons spacecraft launched on January 19, 2006, and performed its historic flyby of Pluto on July 14, 2015. This journey took 3,463 days (approximately 9.5 years).
3,932 days July 14, 2015–April 19, 2026
Isn't a big part of the problem that the voyager slingshot is one of the best you can get, and it's a once in multiple-lifetimes event?
Even if we launch a new deep space probe as best we can they're gonna be real slow?
What was unique about the Voyager flight path is that the alignment of planets allowed us to visit Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune in a single trip using gravity assists. From what I've read, the final velocity they obtained allowing them to reach interstellar space during their lifetime could be obtained with less rare gravity assists.
For Voyager 1, Jupiter's gravity assist was the only one that increased velocity, the flybys ultimately sapped velocity.
New Horizons is faster than Voyagers and did not require an alignment.
It was launched faster but the final speed is slower - it'll never catch up.
Hmm, I definitely remembered it being referred to as the fastest human made thing. Just missed the salient "launched" detail
Maybe that was Parker? Parker and new horizons often get lumped together for some reason
A grandparent comment says it’s slower?
Yes, but we could install different tools and measuring instruments and make it worthwhile.
What else are you looking to see from such deep space? Nothing we launch will ever reach anything anything interesting in probably the life of humanity. Just to get to Pluto in our life times meant going so fast that it could only fly by. Maybe flying around in the Oort cloud might, unlikely though, be interesting.
Exoplanet closeups?
You can use the sun as a gravitational lens: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_gravitational_lens
You need to be about 550 au out.
Observing the heliopause at different locations would be interesting. The two Voyagers and New Horizon are all headed more or less through the bow. We still have a lot of uncertainty about what shape the tail of the heliosphere is, not to mention many other details.
The best time to plant a tree is 50 years ago. The second best time is now.
> What else are you looking to see from such deep space?
Deep space itself - that's what the Voyagers are measuring.
The voyagers had a planetary alignment working for them
This might explain the Fermi paradox. If life isn't as common as we think it might be and say there are only a few other intelligent alien civilizations in the milky way then if they are a bit farther away like 70000 light years then what are the odds that they sent some sort of hello signal off into the universe which would take 70000 years at the speed of light to reach us and in the exact time it reached earth we had the technology to receive their signal. We have only had the capability to detect signals for not even 200 years.
Next think about what effort we have done to send a galactic hello. We don't have any deep space probes sent off in the universe constantly sending a hello message. So if all we did was fire a hello message away from earth for 24 hours what are the odds that some alien life picked it up verses they had that day off and missed our signal.
I think this is a much more plausible explanation to the Fermi paradox. If we want to do our part to prove it wrong we need to begin sending a universe hello from earth transmission and run it for not years, not decades, not centuries but from now and for the rest of humanity. Hopefully some other alien civilization has realized the same and they too begin sending a continuous transmission we might get lucky and pick up.
Your explanation is just as good as the Fermi paradox. In Futurama, the Omicronians know about the Earth from old TV show signals, that's been constantly sent from Earth by then. Would any alien civilization have the patience to constantly send hello world for a millenia or maybe hundred thousand years.
Both assume that there _is_ some other life, but that it's hard to reach. We don't know if there is anything else.
Earth could be completely unique in the existence, even with all the endless multiuniverses. Mathematical propabilities are not proof that there _must be_ life somewhere else. The answer could just as well be '0'. Only life that was, is and will ever be. When we are eventually gone, that's it. No more life.
edit: sorry about the negativity in my reply; just pondering out loud :D
Totally agree with you. What a shame. But when I look at the national debt that seems even more out of reach, I do tend to consider that maybe the stars should wait till we have our s..tuff together here on earth. Privately funded, no issues, go for it at warp speed!
I would love to better understand how a device launched the year before I was born could be so flexible in its configuration and operation. I can't update the code running on a microcontroller on my desk in front of me without it triggering a reboot.
When they talk about rerouting power and performing a "big bang" reconfiguration with a 23 hour lag on equipment that was underpowered when the 8088 came out... it kind of melts my brain.
Apparently it still has ten years worth of fuel left!
NASA pioneered a lot of what underpins modern design of critical computer systems. Voyager's systems are impressively robust. As far as I know, they can patch it by directly sending up new assembly instructions that are written into its memory, and doing a warm reboot to get it to start executing new instructions without powering down anything. They had the foresight to make their software highly editable, while also having multiple redundancy and emergency systems. Despite this, I wonder how much pressure the people writing this software feel. Even with all the simulators and months of rigorous testing, sending up something that can (in the worst case) break the probe has to be terrifying.
Watch the documentary "It's Quieter in the Twilight" to find out how the people responsible for Voyager 1 & 2 feel about it.
> Even with all the simulators and months of rigorous testing, sending up something that can (in the worst case) break the probe has to be terrifying.
I would guess that even that case is partially accounted for by a watchdog that is hardwired into the system.
> microcontroller on my desk in front of me without it triggering a reboot
Most microcontrollers can update their own flash while running, either with a built-in bootloader or a user-programmed bootloader that takes up a little bit of the flash.
What makes you think that Voyager isn't "rebooted" though?
This kind of update is often kind of ass to do, though, because you may not be able to execute from said flash while you’re updating it.
So you copy a small write routine into RAM, copy a chunk of new data there too, jump to the routine, then it returns to your main bootloader in flash which receives the next chunk from a UART or whatever (because of course it doesn’t fit into RAM all at once), rinse and repeat. You aren’t exactly going to be serving realtime interrupts during this.
(So if you do need minimal downtime, you probably have dual external flash chips, or even just two microcontrollers given execute-from-external-flash would bump you up to fancy micros.)
I think there’s going to be more than a few people feeling a little emotional when the days that the Voyagers go dark come. What magnificent machines.
I hope not to see that day
Are you planning on dying before 2036? That's one estimate for when they'll run out of power.
With little what I know of Voyager, the beautiful machine has broke all previous estimates. And thus hoping it will last until we have another such machine overtake the distance before this one goes into total shutdown
Unfortunately the lifetime of the plutonium RTG is very very predictable (due to the half life of the isotope they use). They are constantly shutting down parts of the probe exactly because the RTG is providing less and less power, and at some point it won't even be enough to heat the probe and run the computers.
That's a dark question inviting unnecessary "yeah, why not?"
I think it wasn't intended.
Curious, has Voyager 1 brought in any data in recent years that is scientifically meaningful? Not to put down the efforts of keeping it alive, I love that. Just wonder how much of its task is "done".
From the article: “Voyager 1 still has two remaining operating science instruments — one that listens to plasma waves and one that measures magnetic fields. They are still working great, sending back data from a region of space no other human-made craft has ever explored. The team remains focused on keeping both Voyagers going for as long as possible.”
yeah the sparse data being returned from Voyager are the only direct observations ever made of the outer solar system / beyond. Even if the data is humdrum and exactly as expected, that in itself is worth something.
But worth enough to send a new probe?
Generally we don’t construct and maintain expensive scientific equipment just for the fun of it. There usually is some question or debate we expect them to answer or settle.
Worth enough is always debatable but here are some future proposed science goals for an interstellar probe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_Probe_(spacecraft...
I can really recommend the documentary It's Quieter in the Twilight. It covers the flight-team operating Voyager, and shows in-depth what they and Voyager is doing.
Thanks, I enjoyed that.
I hope the voyagers can last longer. We are trapped on Earth, but it is just fascinating (and relieving) thinking of them expanding the boundary of human's space adventure.
If anybody wants further context, here's an excellent paper on the status of the Voyager mission as of 2016, written by one of the engineers at JPL. It has an overview of what all the instruments on Voyager do and everything the team had done to keep the mission going as of that point. https://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/~pbarfuss/VIMChallenges.pdf I also highly recommend the documentary "It's Quieter in the Twilight" which is about the entire Voyager team and their efforts to keep the program operational.
> During a routine, planned roll maneuver on Feb. 27
It's amazing not only are the electrical components still operational, but some mechanical ones as well.
It uses a tape drive to record observations and radio them back to earth. I find it amazing to imagine a single reel of tape (and the belts in the drive) still being reliable 48 years later...
Planned obsolescence is a choice, not a likelihood
There's quite a lot of machinery from that era (and older) still functioning today, so it's not that surprising to see the same of this probe that was specifically designed for space travel.
Is there an exhaustive list of all the systems and experiments that are still running on these probes? I'm really curious about what data it's collecting and sending back to us.
Thanks! Looks like it's just the magnetometer and a receiver instrument. Once the pool of instruments runs dry, I wonder how thinly they'll be able to slice the functionality of the remaining, non-experimental systems to prolong their lifetime as much as possible.
Amazing that this spacecraft has been operating for nearly half a century.
May the same be true of my vibe coded b2b SaaSes.
Just have to nuke it into orbit!
> the sequence of commands to shut down the instrument will take 23 or so hours to reach the spacecraft
Closing in on one light day!
> Engineers are confident that shutting down the LECP will give Voyager 1 about a year of breathing room. They are using the time to finalize a more ambitious energy-saving fix for both Voyagers they call “the Big Bang,” which is designed to further extend Voyager operations. The idea is to swap out a group of powered devices all at once — hence the nickname — turning some things off and replacing them with lower-power alternatives to keep the spacecraft warm enough to continue gathering science data.
> The team will implement the Big Bang on Voyager 2 first, which has a little more power to spare and is closer to Earth, making it the safer test subject. Tests are planned for May and June 2026. If they go well, the team will attempt the same fix on Voyager 1 no sooner than July. If it works, there is even a chance that Voyager 1’s LECP could be switched back on.
Voyager 1 has only a year left otherwise? Also, what low-powered alternatives are there? Is there that much redundancy? I'd love to know what their idea and plan are?
Also,
> For Voyager 1, the LECP was next on that list. The team shut off the LECP on Voyager 2 in March 2025.
Why? Voyager 2 has more power to spare, per the prior quote.
> Why? Voyager 2 has more power to spare, per the prior quote.
Because Voyager 2 has different equipment active. It still has the Cosmic Ray Subsystem active.
> They are still working great, sending back data from a region of space no other human-made craft has ever explored
Unlike the non human-made craft in the region?
Well, we don't know about them, do we? Technically speaking, some alien might have already plotted the entire Milky Way hundreds of years ago without telling us.
like meteorites?
Craft?
Imagine deploying your bug fix and having to wait two days to find out if it worked!
An old timer once told me about how he would read his printouts, make new punch cards, send them over to the main office, someone would put the new cards into the system the next morning, and then read the printouts on the day after that to see if his code worked or not.
This. Except worse, during busy days you had to stand on line for an hour or more for a turn on the machines. I believe the skill of debugging by mentally stepping through a program's execution came from such long run times, a useful skill many younger programmers lack.
I want to learn that.
It’s just silicone. Who hard could it be?
> a useful skill many younger programmers lack.
Because it’s unnecessary.
It’s not a difficult skill.
When folks are in that situation, they tend to adapt quickly to their reality. But that’s not the reality for the vast majority of developers today.
Thankfully.
Yep I really hate the characterisation that tried to imply people are weaker or worse because they lack a contextually relevant skill.
I spent about 6 months teaching myself how to tie a set of useful knots, and the reality is by now I can't do most of them anymore because day to day it turns out I just never need to tie a Midshipmen's knot (it's super useful when the siruation arises..which is rarely for an IT worker).
HPC systems often still use batch scheduling systems where (even for a fast job) you may very well get your results the next day (or whenever your job actually runs and completes.)
It is annoying to find out that your job failed to run or exited immediately due to a typo or other minor mistake.
Of course ML training (and scientific computing) jobs can take weeks or months to complete. Checkpoint and restart features are important because node or other failures are almost inevitable.
There are definitely projects where getting a full test pass can take a day or two. I worked on one where we only got a full run each weekend, and if someone broke the tests? Nobody gets their results...
I once left a company after deploying a fix to solve a rare crash due to a data race and only figured out if it worked after I had started the new job by poking my old coworkers about it.
I’m doing mobile app development, it is about how much it takes to get submission approved and get significant amount of users.
Aprocryphal, but I've heard that at Oracle, when pushing an update to their database software, it'll be maybe a week before the tests complete on it (after it reaches the front of the queue of course). I couldn't even.
Sounds like just another Monday for a firmware dev, honestly. Can't repro your bug because your board is subtly different than mine, but I think I see what's wrong?
I've had those times in swift in a terrestrial setting!
Ideally, just how much longer can the crafts keep going even with the "Big Bang" fix, given the old hardware that they carry?
I reckon "old hardware" is likely to be more reliable of "new hardware", generally speaking... If we could fix how they get energy, these things could probably go on for centuries.
Can we send faster better equipped craft to move past solar system in a year or two ?
The planetary alignment that allowed the Voyager probes to move so fast only occurs every 175 years. Even with this advantage it took them 12 years to get to Neptune. So the short answer is no.
But without the planetary alignment, can't we just rely on brute force ? Better fuel and bigger engines?
The truth is that, as much as people LOVE bringing it up, the alignment was special only because it allowed us to slingshot from body to body with almost no fuel aboard the probe itself.
That's it. Nothing to do with speed. We could launch something that goes way faster right now, if someone wanted to pay for it. Hell, we could have done it 50 years ago.
We didn't because it would go in a straight line towards "nothing".
NASA under Isaacman is newly, more seriously, exploring nuclear propulsion. If they really do pull the trigger, the answer is definitely yes.