Voyager 1 goes dark after 47 years in space
When Voyager 1 launched in 1977, scientists hoped it could do what it was built to do and take up-close images of Jupiter and Saturn. It did that — and much more.
Voyager 1 discovered active volcanoes, moons and planetary rings, proving along the way that Earth and all of humanity could be squished into a single pixel in a photograph, a “pale blue dot,” as astronomer Carl Sagan called it. It stretched a four-year mission into the present day, embarking on the deepest journey ever into space.
Now, it may have bid its final farewell to that faraway dot.
Voyager 1, the farthest human-made object in space, hasn't sent coherent data to Earth since November. NASA has been trying to diagnose what the Voyager mission's project manager, Suzanne Dodd, called the “most serious issue” the robotic probe has faced since she took the job in 2010.
The spacecraft encountered a glitch in one of its computers that has eliminated its ability to send engineering and science data back to Earth.
The loss of Voyager 1 would cap decades of scientific breakthroughs and signal the beginning of the end for a mission that has given shape to humanity's most distant ambition and inspired generations to look to the skies.
“Scientifically, it's a big loss,” Dodd said. “I think — emotionally — it's maybe even a bigger loss.”
Voyager 1 is one half of the Voyager mission. It has a twin spacecraft, Voyager 2.
Launched in 1977, they were primarily built for a four-year trip to Jupiter and Saturn, expanding on earlier flybys by the Pioneer 10 and 11 probes.
The Voyager mission capitalized on a rare alignment of the outer planets — once every 175 years — allowing the probes to visit all four.
Using the gravity of each planet, the Voyager spacecraft could swing onto the next, according to NASA.
The mission to Jupiter and Saturn was a success.
The 1980s flybys yielded several new discoveries, including new insights about the so-called great red spot on Jupiter, the rings around Saturn and the many moons of each planet.
Voyager 2 also explored Uranus and Neptune, becoming in 1989 the only spacecraft to explore all four outer planets.
Voyager 1, meanwhile, had set a course for deep space, using its camera to photograph the planets it was leaving behind along the way. Voyager 2 would later begin its own trek into deep space.
“Anybody who is interested in space is interested in the things Voyager discovered about the outer planets and their moons,” said Kate Howells, the public education specialist at the Planetary Society, an organization co-founded by Sagan to promote space exploration.
“But I think the pale blue dot was one of those things that was sort of more poetic and touching,” she added.