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On March 5, 1979, the probe passed Jupiter at 174,000 miles (280,000 kilometers). There it saw active volcanoes on the moon Io. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center calls them the first live eruptions ever seen on another world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Its closest approach to Saturn came on November 12, 1980, at about 78,000 miles (126,000 kilometers). Voyager 1 measured the planet’s atmosphere and found that its rings are not uniform sheets. It also studied Saturn’s moon Titan<\/a>, whose air is about 90 percent nitrogen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On February 17, 1998, Voyager 1 overtook Pioneer 10 and became the most distant human-made object. It was 69.4 astronomical units from the Sun. One astronomical unit is the average distance between Earth and the Sun.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The probe crossed the termination shock, where the solar wind slows down sharply, on December 16, 2004. In August 2012 it left the heliosphere, the bubble of charged particles that the Sun blows around itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Our earlier coverage looked at the hot boundary at the edge of the heliosphere<\/a>. Voyager 2 followed in 2018 on a different path. NASA’s New Horizons, which flew past the two-lobed world Arrokoth<\/a>, is far behind both.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Three radioisotope thermoelectric generators power the probe. They turn the heat of radioactive material into electricity, the idea behind NASA’s newer nuclear power plans<\/a>. At launch, each one produced about 158 watts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n According to JPL, both Voyagers now lose about 4 watts a year. In early September, engineers turned off three devices on Voyager 1 and switched to lower-power alternatives. Without that swap, another instrument might have gone dark as early as summer 2027.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Weeks later, the probe went quiet. The team did not hear it during two scheduled contacts on October 18 and 19, and the signal returned on October 20. Engineers found that one group of thrusters had gone offline and their backups had turned on, a programmed safety response.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “This is the first time we’ve seen the spacecraft do something like this, but we are also at a point in the mission where we have to expect the unexpected,” said Kareem Badaruddin, Voyager mission manager at JPL.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Suzanne Dodd, the project manager, described what a day’s delay means for the people who fly it. “If you want to say ‘hello’ to Voyager, you send your message and then you go home and you wait two days before you finally get a response,” she said in an October 29 update from the team.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For the evening of November 17, NASA has asked people around the world to shine a light skyward after sunset. Participants flash the probe’s call sign, VGR, in Morse code. A phone, a flashlight or a bike light will do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The code has a link to the probe itself. The Golden Record aboard both Voyagers carries the Latin phrase “Ad astra per aspera” (through struggle to the stars) in Morse code.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At noon Eastern time on November 19, JPL will host a discussion with Nicky Fox, head of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, and the Voyager team. NASA also plans a documentary for 2027, the mission’s 50th anniversary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n NASA has not said when Voyager 1 will fall silent. The shrinking power supply has already forced the team to turn off two science instruments in recent years, and its mission page reports one shutdown on April 17 without naming the instrument.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The thruster switch explains how the probe reacted, not why. As of the team’s October 29 update, engineers were still investigating the cause of the two-day pause, and Badaruddin said they were “eager to understand what happened.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n NASA announced the milestone and the events in a media advisory<\/a> updated on November 13 and on its Voyager 1 mission page<\/a>. The Voyager team described the power swap and the October pause in a blog post<\/a> on October 29.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Image: NASA\/JPL-Caltech<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" NASA’s Voyager 1 will reach one light-day from Earth at 5:16 a.m. on Wednesday, November 18, 2026, Eastern time. The … <\/p>\nBeyond Pioneer 10 in 1998<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Four watts lost every year<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Morse code for VGR<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
No end date for the mission<\/h2>\n\n\n\n