The Voyager 1 and 2 probes, launched in 1977, have defied all odds to journey beyond our solar system. Their incredible longevity and continued scientific contributions are a testament to human ingenuity and the sheer power of redundancy. This article explores the incredible story of these spacecraft, their current challenges, and the dedicated team keeping them operational.
New research suggests that Miranda, one of Uranus’s moons, may have once harbored a vast ocean beneath its icy surface. This discovery adds to the growing list of potential ocean worlds in our solar system and hints at the surprising diversity of these icy bodies.
After nearly 5 decades of groundbreaking discoveries, NASA has switched off the plasma science instrument aboard Voyager 2, the longest-running space probe. This decision was made to conserve power as the spacecraft ventures further into interstellar space.
NASA has successfully re-established communication with Voyager 1, the most distant spacecraft in human history. The spacecraft had experienced a communications issue for five months, traced to a faulty computer chip. Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California reconfigured the spacecraft’s coding to resolve the problem, resulting in the restoration of engineering updates. The team continues to work on recovering science data transmission, which takes over 22 hours to reach Voyager 1’s location over 15 billion miles away in interstellar space.
