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.
Because this is getting downvoted, and to check if my memory serves me well:
Here's an excerpt from a 2013 article in Scientific American that appears on the first page of results when searching for "voyager left the solar system" [1]:
> Voyager 1 was starting to get a reputation as the spacecraft that cried wolf, after scientists repeatedly claimed it was leaving the solar system, only to change their minds and say it wasn’t quite there yet.
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).
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.
Veeger is currently less that 200 AU, and it's dying. For us to build a craft that could stay alive long enough to make it to 550AU and still be functioning would take an incredible leap in technology. This plan also has a fatal flaw in that you can only ever hope to look at one thing. You can't just slew that craft to be able to line up the next target.
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 is when the conditions are right for the planting. If you've never planted seeds in less than ideal conditions, it'll be hard to understand. At the time of Voyagers, the conditions were right in a way that only happens every 175ish years. Anything now and since would have been less than ideal conditions to the point the newly launched craft would not be as performant as Voyagers.
If we're waiting around on planetary alignments to do missions things we could do in decades will end up taking centuries. Speed isn't the only metric that matters; in the meantime we could be testing alternate forms of propulsion from lightsails to nuclear propulsion.
It's the same notion that has us going "back to the moon" right now. The US did something impressive and interesting several times. In the absence of anything else impressive and interesting now, we're trying to pull the same trick again. As if we're going to arrive on the Moon's surface and suddenly discover it isn't a barren sphere with a rocky surface, no atmosphere & tiny amounts of water on it.
There's a reason why Apollo was cancelled. Putting people on the moon is interesting in the context that it was accomplished. Putting people on the moon today is like that friend who won't stop talking about how we was on the football team in senior year and they went to the state championship.
BS. We've discovered there's significant amounts of water on the Moon, we could be investigating that. We could be setting up real time cameras there to observe earth 24/7. We could be doing experiments with atomic clocks to check how orbital periods vary, and many more. We could be building launch infrastructure there. we could be investigating lunar geology, such as underground lava tubes whose existence has been confirmed but about whose interiors we can currently only theorize. It's absolutely absurd that we have several active rovers tootling around Mars and non on the Moon.
This argument that 'we went there already, there no reason to go back' just demonstrates a lack of imagination, at best.
Putting people on the moon today is like that friend who won't stop talking about how we was on the football team in senior year and they went to the state championship.
No, that'd be talking about how much we achieved with the moon landings while doing little else since.
We've been building race cars for a long time, but every time a new one is built they give it some test/practice laps before actually entering it into a race. That's all Artemis is doing is working out the kinks of the new space craft. There are larger plans now, and you can't go from ideation of plan to completion of plan in one attempt. Each Artemis mission is testing and moving towards the next step. The people involved in Apollo are no longer around, so a new generation of people need to gain experience. The Apollo spacecraft are also not being used, so new equipment is being put through the paces.
If you seriously believe that there's nothing new to learn from continuing to study the moon up close and in person, then you're just deliberately being obstinate about the subject. Humans are explorers, and the moon is just the next closest thing to explore. You're "won't stop talking about" comment is also just lame. If the 1400s explorers had decided that continuing to sail the seas looking for new routes or new lands was like having a friend that wouldn't stop talking about their childhood experiences, then the colonists would never have left Europe.
A racecar is an instrument of competition using the bearing of human capability though. Each variation of the car, track, and driver changes the ceiling and floor of how competitive the human can be. Space travel and satellite landing does not have enough participants to make a competition, and even if there were so much of it is not based on human capability in the moment but on preparations done beforehand. The launch conditions are very narrow and specific, the humans are merely there to monitor because they don't have the capability to micromanage to the degree needed the way computers do, and the variations that can be performed in operation are small and few in number. There's value in all of it and it is a huge accomplishment each time a satellite landing occurs, but the scale, resources, and planning required make it wasteful and asinine to turn it into a competition.
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.
By who? The Parker is doing everything it can to get closer to the sun by dipping into the sun's atmosphere while New Horizons went to Pluto and is getting further and further away from the sun. I don't think you could have a more opposite mission than these two.
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
I've read that there were very rare conditions to launch Voyagers which gave them tremendous advantage with gravitational maneuvers. It happens very rarely, I don't remember the exact periods but maybe it happens once per hundreds of years.
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.
I second your recommendation. I watched it last night, and loved it. It was beautiful to see the level of competence and devotion of the tiny group running the spacecraft.
Here's a talk about how the Voyager team fixed the flight data computer on Voyager 1 when a memory chip went bad on it a few years ago. It goes over how the flight computer works and he walks through a few assembly routines. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcUycQoz0zg
Some of the challenges they had to deal with while developing the fix:
- The only source code they had for the flight data software was an OCR'd Microsoft Word document (with typos) that was likely scanned from a hard copy assembler listing printout.
- The processor runs a custom instruction set developed by JPL for the Voyager mission. The documentation they had on the processor was incomplete.
- Everybody who had designed the flight software was dead.
- They had no assembler, no debugger, and no processor simulator. They had no testbed, the only two FDS processors were in space.
The 2025 YouTube video is "How We Diagnosed and Fixed the 2023 Voyager 1 Anomaly from 15 Billion Miles Away" by David Cummings of JPL.
There is a Vimeo video of the Voyager team reacting when data first began trickling in from Voyager 1 after the fix in April 2024. "Voyager 1 Team Reacts to Receiving Engineering Data From Spacecraft" (JPLraw channel): https://vimeo.com/939376171
Cummings is the one against the back wall who shoots his two arms up in the air in celebration. He and Armen Arslanian (in the blue shirt to his left, right in the image) developed the software fix.
> 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.)
With sufficient motivation and effort, you could have a self-updating microcontroller. You could, if you really wanted to, write firmware just as robust, reliable, and flexible as the Voyager system.
It's just that in most cases, the amount of effort required is orders of magnitude higher than is really justifiable.
> 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.
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.
Around 2030–2036, the power will likely drop below the level needed to run even a single instrument. At that point, Voyager 1 will officially "die" as a scientific mission.
But Voyager will keep going forever.
Because there is no air resistance or friction in the vacuum of space, Voyager 1 doesn't need "fuel" to keep moving. According to Newton’s First Law of Motion, an object in motion stays in motion unless acted upon by an external force. Since there's nothing out there to stop it, it will continue its journey long after its systems go dark.
In 40,000 years: It will pass within 1.7 light-years of the star AC+79 3888 in the constellation Ursa Minor.
In 300,000 years: It might pass near the star Sirius.
The Long Haul: It is expected to orbit the center of our Milky Way galaxy indefinitely, potentially for billions of years, carrying the "Golden Record" as a final message from humanity.
Fun Fact: If Voyager 1 were to hit a pebble-sized object at its current speed, it would be catastrophic. Fortunately, space is so incredibly empty that the odds of it hitting anything larger than a dust grain for the next several billion years are nearly zero
Am still keeping my hopes up, scientists will make it wake up once every 6 months and just ping home saying it’s alive. I’ll still call it very much alive, even without science equipments running.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For others, this truly excellent 2016 paper is "Voyager Interstellar Mission: Challenges of Flying a Very Old Spacecraft on a Very Long Mission" by Sun Kang Matsumoto. She was/is a Voyager Fault Protection and CCS Flight Software Systems Engineer (CCS was the onboard command computer) and she was also one of the "stars" in It's Quieter in the Twilight.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
The computer can single-step through the program far more accurately than you can. You can inspect the full state of the CPU and memory at any moment of execution. The debugger can tell you the real, exact value of a variable at runtime.
There is simply no reason to try doing this in your head. You're worse at it than the debugger is. And I say this as someone who does have the skill. It's just not necessary.
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.
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?
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.
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".
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.
Because this is getting downvoted, and to check if my memory serves me well:
Here's an excerpt from a 2013 article in Scientific American that appears on the first page of results when searching for "voyager left the solar system" [1]:
> Voyager 1 was starting to get a reputation as the spacecraft that cried wolf, after scientists repeatedly claimed it was leaving the solar system, only to change their minds and say it wasn’t quite there yet.
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/voyager-1-leaves-...
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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
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.
whoa... why aren't we doing that?
Even cooler is setting up transmitters and receivers at suitable spots on opposite sides of two stars.
Veeger is currently less that 200 AU, and it's dying. For us to build a craft that could stay alive long enough to make it to 550AU and still be functioning would take an incredible leap in technology. This plan also has a fatal flaw in that you can only ever hope to look at one thing. You can't just slew that craft to be able to line up the next target.
You mean V'ger
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/V%27ger
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.
The best time to plant is when the conditions are right for the planting. If you've never planted seeds in less than ideal conditions, it'll be hard to understand. At the time of Voyagers, the conditions were right in a way that only happens every 175ish years. Anything now and since would have been less than ideal conditions to the point the newly launched craft would not be as performant as Voyagers.
If we're waiting around on planetary alignments to do missions things we could do in decades will end up taking centuries. Speed isn't the only metric that matters; in the meantime we could be testing alternate forms of propulsion from lightsails to nuclear propulsion.
I'd argue there are `50 years / planck time` better times to plant a tree than now.
It's the same notion that has us going "back to the moon" right now. The US did something impressive and interesting several times. In the absence of anything else impressive and interesting now, we're trying to pull the same trick again. As if we're going to arrive on the Moon's surface and suddenly discover it isn't a barren sphere with a rocky surface, no atmosphere & tiny amounts of water on it.
There's a reason why Apollo was cancelled. Putting people on the moon is interesting in the context that it was accomplished. Putting people on the moon today is like that friend who won't stop talking about how we was on the football team in senior year and they went to the state championship.
BS. We've discovered there's significant amounts of water on the Moon, we could be investigating that. We could be setting up real time cameras there to observe earth 24/7. We could be doing experiments with atomic clocks to check how orbital periods vary, and many more. We could be building launch infrastructure there. we could be investigating lunar geology, such as underground lava tubes whose existence has been confirmed but about whose interiors we can currently only theorize. It's absolutely absurd that we have several active rovers tootling around Mars and non on the Moon.
This argument that 'we went there already, there no reason to go back' just demonstrates a lack of imagination, at best.
Putting people on the moon today is like that friend who won't stop talking about how we was on the football team in senior year and they went to the state championship.
No, that'd be talking about how much we achieved with the moon landings while doing little else since.
A permanent moon base has real practical benefits. Most likely a key prerequisite to manned missions further than orbit.
We've been building race cars for a long time, but every time a new one is built they give it some test/practice laps before actually entering it into a race. That's all Artemis is doing is working out the kinks of the new space craft. There are larger plans now, and you can't go from ideation of plan to completion of plan in one attempt. Each Artemis mission is testing and moving towards the next step. The people involved in Apollo are no longer around, so a new generation of people need to gain experience. The Apollo spacecraft are also not being used, so new equipment is being put through the paces.
If you seriously believe that there's nothing new to learn from continuing to study the moon up close and in person, then you're just deliberately being obstinate about the subject. Humans are explorers, and the moon is just the next closest thing to explore. You're "won't stop talking about" comment is also just lame. If the 1400s explorers had decided that continuing to sail the seas looking for new routes or new lands was like having a friend that wouldn't stop talking about their childhood experiences, then the colonists would never have left Europe.
A racecar is an instrument of competition using the bearing of human capability though. Each variation of the car, track, and driver changes the ceiling and floor of how competitive the human can be. Space travel and satellite landing does not have enough participants to make a competition, and even if there were so much of it is not based on human capability in the moment but on preparations done beforehand. The launch conditions are very narrow and specific, the humans are merely there to monitor because they don't have the capability to micromanage to the degree needed the way computers do, and the variations that can be performed in operation are small and few in number. There's value in all of it and it is a huge accomplishment each time a satellite landing occurs, but the scale, resources, and planning required make it wasteful and asinine to turn it into a competition.
> What else are you looking to see from such deep space?
Deep space itself - that's what the Voyagers are measuring.
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.
apparently not so
https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/70473
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Horizons#Speed
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
By who? The Parker is doing everything it can to get closer to the sun by dipping into the sun's atmosphere while New Horizons went to Pluto and is getting further and further away from the sun. I don't think you could have a more opposite mission than these two.
IDK a lot of media. I think they’re two surface level similar missions.
It’s not so much about what they’re doing, but rather how they’re built and represented to the public
IDK, my point is I can see how some people might get confused about the more Guinness book style factoid around these missions
Parker probe is fastest relative to Sun
Horizons has been fastest when it left Earth
A grandparent comment says it’s slower?
Yes, but we could install different tools and measuring instruments and make it worthwhile.
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
The voyagers had a planetary alignment working for them
I've read that there were very rare conditions to launch Voyagers which gave them tremendous advantage with gravitational maneuvers. It happens very rarely, I don't remember the exact periods but maybe it happens once per hundreds of years.
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!
Private has all the same problems as public: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DearMoon_project
>> But when I look at the national debt that seems even more out of reach
Of course, I would like to note, you have just spent 20 times the NASA annual budget, in a 3 week war of choice...
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.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt17658964/
I second your recommendation. I watched it last night, and loved it. It was beautiful to see the level of competence and devotion of the tiny group running the spacecraft.
Yep! If there was ever a solid recommendation for a movie to recommend to your dad...
> 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.
As another commenter noted, NASA did not design Voyager. They are responsible for launch and operations.
Here's a talk about how the Voyager team fixed the flight data computer on Voyager 1 when a memory chip went bad on it a few years ago. It goes over how the flight computer works and he walks through a few assembly routines. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcUycQoz0zg
Some of the challenges they had to deal with while developing the fix:
- The only source code they had for the flight data software was an OCR'd Microsoft Word document (with typos) that was likely scanned from a hard copy assembler listing printout.
- The processor runs a custom instruction set developed by JPL for the Voyager mission. The documentation they had on the processor was incomplete.
- Everybody who had designed the flight software was dead.
- They had no assembler, no debugger, and no processor simulator. They had no testbed, the only two FDS processors were in space.
The 2025 YouTube video is "How We Diagnosed and Fixed the 2023 Voyager 1 Anomaly from 15 Billion Miles Away" by David Cummings of JPL.
There is a Vimeo video of the Voyager team reacting when data first began trickling in from Voyager 1 after the fix in April 2024. "Voyager 1 Team Reacts to Receiving Engineering Data From Spacecraft" (JPLraw channel): https://vimeo.com/939376171
Cummings is the one against the back wall who shoots his two arms up in the air in celebration. He and Armen Arslanian (in the blue shirt to his left, right in the image) developed the software fix.
The slides from Cummings' presentation can be downloaded as a PDF from the Flight Software Workshop Day 2 page, first entry: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1BXSBUgEJExsLSE-m585I...
> 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.)
With sufficient motivation and effort, you could have a self-updating microcontroller. You could, if you really wanted to, write firmware just as robust, reliable, and flexible as the Voyager system.
It's just that in most cases, the amount of effort required is orders of magnitude higher than is really justifiable.
> 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.
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.
Around 2030–2036, the power will likely drop below the level needed to run even a single instrument. At that point, Voyager 1 will officially "die" as a scientific mission.
But Voyager will keep going forever. Because there is no air resistance or friction in the vacuum of space, Voyager 1 doesn't need "fuel" to keep moving. According to Newton’s First Law of Motion, an object in motion stays in motion unless acted upon by an external force. Since there's nothing out there to stop it, it will continue its journey long after its systems go dark.
In 40,000 years: It will pass within 1.7 light-years of the star AC+79 3888 in the constellation Ursa Minor. In 300,000 years: It might pass near the star Sirius. The Long Haul: It is expected to orbit the center of our Milky Way galaxy indefinitely, potentially for billions of years, carrying the "Golden Record" as a final message from humanity. Fun Fact: If Voyager 1 were to hit a pebble-sized object at its current speed, it would be catastrophic. Fortunately, space is so incredibly empty that the odds of it hitting anything larger than a dust grain for the next several billion years are nearly zero
Aniara is a wonderful take on these issues with humans on board.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7589524/
Without the benefit of large special effects budgets, I found it incredibly effective, and left me nostalgic and reflective for days.
Am still keeping my hopes up, scientists will make it wake up once every 6 months and just ping home saying it’s alive. I’ll still call it very much alive, even without science equipments running.
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.
e.g. https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/as-nasas-voyager-1-surveys-int... [2021]
> 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!
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.
For others, this truly excellent 2016 paper is "Voyager Interstellar Mission: Challenges of Flying a Very Old Spacecraft on a Very Long Mission" by Sun Kang Matsumoto. She was/is a Voyager Fault Protection and CCS Flight Software Systems Engineer (CCS was the onboard command computer) and she was also one of the "stars" in It's Quieter in the Twilight.
> 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.
here: https://science.nasa.gov/mission/voyager/instruments/
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!
> 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?
Reminds me of this: https://www.badspacecomics.com/post/the-suit
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.
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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.
> 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).
The computer can single-step through the program far more accurately than you can. You can inspect the full state of the CPU and memory at any moment of execution. The debugger can tell you the real, exact value of a variable at runtime.
There is simply no reason to try doing this in your head. You're worse at it than the debugger is. And I say this as someone who does have the skill. It's just not necessary.
I want to learn that.
It’s just silicone. Who hard could it be?
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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.
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.
I’m doing mobile app development, it is about how much it takes to get submission approved and get significant amount of users.
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!
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.
New Horizons made it to Pluto in less than 10 years. Technically faster, but still not a year or two.
The next planetary alignment will be in the mid-2150s.
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