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Voyager 1, First Craft in Interstellar Space, May Have Gone Dark

The 46-year-old probe, which flew by Jupiter and Saturn in its youth and inspired earthlings with images of the planet as a “Pale Blue Dot,” hasn’t sent usable data from interstellar space in months.

By Orlando Mayorquin

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 the 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 man-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,” Ms. 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 Dr. 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.

On Valentine’s Day 1990, Voyager 1, darting 3.7 billion miles away from the sun toward the outer reaches of the solar system, turned around and snapped a photo of Earth that Dr. Sagan and others understood to be a humbling self-portrait of humanity.

“It’s known the world over, and it does connect humanity to the stars,” Ms. Dodd said of the mission.

She added: “I’ve had many, many many people come up to me and say: ‘Wow, I love Voyager. It’s what got me excited about space. It’s what got me thinking about our place here on Earth and what that means.’”

Ms. Howells, 35, counts herself among those people.

About 10 years ago, to celebrate the beginning of her space career, Ms. Howells spent her first paycheck from the Planetary Society to get a Voyager tattoo.

Though spacecraft “all kind of look the same,” she said, more people recognize the tattoo than she anticipated.

“I think that speaks to how famous Voyager is,” she said.

The Voyagers made their mark on popular culture , inspiring a highly intelligent “Voyager 6” in “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” and references on “The X Files” and “The West Wing.”

Even as more advanced probes were launched from Earth, Voyager 1 continued to reliably enrich our understanding of space.

In 2012, it became the first man-made object to exit the heliosphere, the space around the solar system directly influenced by the sun. There is a technical debate among scientists around whether Voyager 1 has actually left the solar system, but, nonetheless, it became interstellar — traversing the space between stars.

That charted a new path for heliophysics, which looks at how the sun influences the space around it. In 2018, Voyager 2 followed its twin between the stars.

Before Voyager 1, scientific data on the sun’s gases and material came only from within the heliosphere’s confines, according to Dr. Jamie Rankin, Voyager’s deputy project scientist.

“And so now we can for the first time kind of connect the inside-out view from the outside-in,” Dr. Rankin said, “That’s a big part of it,” she added. “But the other half is simply that a lot of this material can’t be measured any other way than sending a spacecraft out there.”

Voyager 1 and 2 are the only such spacecraft. Before it went offline, Voyager 1 had been studying an anomalous disturbance in the magnetic field and plasma particles in interstellar space.

“Nothing else is getting launched to go out there,” Ms. Dodd said. “So that’s why we’re spending the time and being careful about trying to recover this spacecraft — because the science is so valuable.”

But recovery means getting under the hood of an aging spacecraft more than 15 billion miles away, equipped with the technology of yesteryear. It takes 45 hours to exchange information with the craft.

It has been repeated over the years that a smartphone has hundreds of thousands of times Voyager 1’s memory — and that the radio transmitter emits as many watts as a refrigerator lightbulb.

“There was one analogy given that is it’s like trying to figure out where your cursor is on your laptop screen when your laptop screen doesn’t work,” Ms. Dodd said.

Her team is still holding out hope, she said, especially as the tantalizing 50th launch anniversary in 2027 approaches. Voyager 1 has survived glitches before, though none as serious.

Voyager 2 is still operational, but aging. It has faced its own technical difficulties too.

NASA had already estimated that the nuclear-powered generators of both spacecrafts would likely die around 2025.

Even if the Voyager interstellar mission is near its end, the voyage still has far to go.

Voyager 1 and its twin, each 40,000 years away from the next closest star, will arguably remain on an indefinite mission.

“If Voyager should sometime in its distant future encounter beings from some other civilization in space, it bears a message,” Dr. Sagan said in a 1980 interview .

Each spacecraft carries a gold-plated phonograph record loaded with an array of sound recordings and images representing humanity’s richness, its diverse cultures and life on Earth.

“A gift across the cosmic ocean from one island of civilization to another,” Dr. Sagan said.

Orlando Mayorquin is a general assignment and breaking news reporter based in New York. More about Orlando Mayorquin

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NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft finally phones home after 5 months of no contact

On Saturday, April 5, Voyager 1 finally "phoned home" and updated its NASA operating team about its health.

NASA's interstellar explorer Voyager 1 is finally communicating with ground control in an understandable way again. On Saturday (April 20), Voyager 1 updated ground control about its health status for the first time in 5 months. While the Voyager 1 spacecraft still isn't sending valid science data back to Earth, it is now returning usable information about the health and operating status of its onboard engineering systems. 

Thirty-five years after its launch in 1977, Voyager 1 became the first human-made object to leave the solar system and enter interstellar space . It was followed out of our cosmic quarters by its space-faring sibling, Voyager 2 , six years later in 2018. Voyager 2, thankfully, is still operational and communicating well with Earth. 

The two spacecraft remain the only human-made objects exploring space beyond the influence of the sun. However, on Nov. 14, 2023, after 11 years of exploring interstellar space and while sitting a staggering 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, Voyager 1's binary code — computer language composed of 0s and 1s that it uses to communicate with its flight team at NASA — stopped making sense.

Related: We finally know why NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft stopped communicating — scientists are working on a fix

In March, NASA's Voyager 1 operating team sent a digital "poke" to the spacecraft, prompting its flight data subsystem (FDS) to send a full memory readout back home.

This memory dump revealed to scientists and engineers that the "glitch" is the result of a corrupted code contained on a single chip representing around 3% of the FDS memory. The loss of this code rendered Voyager 1's science and engineering data unusable.

The NASA team can't physically repair or replace this chip, of course, but what they can do is remotely place the affected code elsewhere in the FDS memory. Though no single section of the memory is large enough to hold this code entirely, the team can slice it into sections and store these chunks separately. To do this, they will also have to adjust the relevant storage sections to ensure the addition of this corrupted code won't cause those areas to stop operating individually, or working together as a whole. In addition to this, NASA staff will also have to ensure any references to the corrupted code's location are updated.

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On April 18, 2024, the team began sending the code to its new location in the FDS memory. This was a painstaking process, as a radio signal takes 22.5 hours to traverse the distance between Earth and Voyager 1, and it then takes another 22.5 hours to get a signal back from the craft. 

By Saturday (April 20), however, the team confirmed their modification had worked. For the first time in five months, the scientists were able to communicate with Voyager 1 and check its health. Over the next few weeks, the team will work on adjusting the rest of the FDS software and aim to recover the regions of the system that are responsible for packaging and returning vital science data from beyond the limits of the solar system.

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: [email protected].

Robert Lea is a science journalist in the U.K. whose articles have been published in Physics World, New Scientist, Astronomy Magazine, All About Space, Newsweek and ZME Science. He also writes about science communication for Elsevier and the European Journal of Physics. Rob holds a bachelor of science degree in physics and astronomy from the U.K.’s Open University. Follow him on Twitter @sciencef1rst.

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• Robb62 'V'ger must contact the creator. Reply
• Holy HannaH! Couldn't help but think that "repair" sounded extremely similar to the mechanics of DNA and the evolution of life. Reply
• Torbjorn Larsson *Applause* indeed, thanks to the Voyager teams for the hard work! Reply
• SpaceSpinner I notice that the article says that it has been in space for 35 years. Either I have gone back in time 10 years, or their AI is off by 10 years. V-*ger has been captured! Reply

Admin said: On Saturday, April 5, Voyager 1 finally "phoned home" and updated its NASA operating team about its health. The interstellar explorer is back in touch after five months of sending back nonsense data. NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft finally phones home after 5 months of no contact : Read more

evw said: I'm incredibly grateful for the persistence and dedication of the Voyagers' teams and for the amazing accomplishments that have kept these two spacecrafts operational so many years beyond their expected lifetimes. V-1 was launched when I was 25 years young; I was nearly delirious with joy. Exploring the physical universe captivated my attention while I was in elementary school and has kept me mesmerized since. I'm very emotional writing this note, thinking about what amounts to a miracle of technology and longevity in my eyes. BRAVO!!! THANK YOU EVERYONE PAST & PRESENT!!!

• EBairead I presume it's Fortran. Well done all. Reply

SpaceSpinner said: I notice that the article says that it has been in space for 35 years. Either I have gone back in time 10 years, or their AI is off by 10 years. V-*ger has been captured!

EBairead said: I presume it's Fortran. Well done all.

• View All 13 Comments

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News | December 1, 2017

Voyager 1 fires up thrusters after 37 years.

An artist concept depicting one of NASA's twin Voyager spacecraft. Humanity's farthest and longest-lived spacecraft are celebrating 40 years in August and September 2017.

If you tried to start a car that's been sitting in a garage for decades, you might not expect the engine to respond. But a set of thrusters aboard the Voyager 1 spacecraft successfully fired up Wednesday after 37 years without use.

Voyager 1, NASA's farthest and fastest spacecraft, is the only human-made object in interstellar space, the environment between the stars. The spacecraft, which has been flying for 40 years, relies on small devices called thrusters to orient itself so it can communicate with Earth. These thrusters fire in tiny pulses, or "puffs," lasting mere milliseconds, to subtly rotate the spacecraft so that its antenna points at our planet. Now, the Voyager team is able to use a set of four backup thrusters, dormant since 1980.

"With these thrusters that are still functional after 37 years without use, we will be able to extend the life of the Voyager 1 spacecraft by two to three years," said Suzanne Dodd, project manager for Voyager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California.

Since 2014, engineers have noticed that the thrusters Voyager 1 has been using to orient the spacecraft, called "attitude control thrusters," have been degrading. Over time, the thrusters require more puffs to give off the same amount of energy. At 13 billion miles from Earth, there's no mechanic shop nearby to get a tune-up.

The Voyager team assembled a group of propulsion experts at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, to study the problem. Chris Jones, Robert Shotwell, Carl Guernsey and Todd Barber analyzed options and predicted how the spacecraft would respond in different scenarios. They agreed on an unusual solution: Try giving the job of orientation to a set of thrusters that had been asleep for 37 years.

"The Voyager flight team dug up decades-old data and examined the software that was coded in an outdated assembler language, to make sure we could safely test the thrusters," said Jones, chief engineer at JPL.

In the early days of the mission, Voyager 1 flew by Jupiter, Saturn, and important moons of each. To accurately fly by and point the spacecraft's instruments at a smorgasbord of targets, engineers used "trajectory correction maneuver," or TCM, thrusters that are identical in size and functionality to the attitude control thrusters, and are located on the back side of the spacecraft. But because Voyager 1's last planetary encounter was Saturn, the Voyager team hadn't needed to use the TCM thrusters since November 8, 1980. Back then, the TCM thrusters were used in a more continuous firing mode; they had never been used in the brief bursts necessary to orient the spacecraft.

All of Voyager's thrusters were developed by Aerojet Rocketdyne. The same kind of thruster, called the MR-103, flew on other NASA spacecraft as well, such as Cassini and Dawn.

On Tuesday, Nov. 28, 2017, Voyager engineers fired up the four TCM thrusters for the first time in 37 years and tested their ability to orient the spacecraft using 10-millisecond pulses. The team waited eagerly as the test results traveled through space, taking 19 hours and 35 minutes to reach an antenna in Goldstone, California, that is part of NASA's Deep Space Network.

Lo and behold, on Wednesday, Nov. 29, they learned the TCM thrusters worked perfectly -- and just as well as the attitude control thrusters.

"The Voyager team got more excited each time with each milestone in the thruster test. The mood was one of relief, joy and incredulity after witnessing these well-rested thrusters pick up the baton as if no time had passed at all," said Barber, a JPL propulsion engineer.

The plan going forward is to switch to the TCM thrusters in January. To make the change, Voyager has to turn on one heater per thruster, which requires power -- a limited resource for the aging mission. When there is no longer enough power to operate the heaters, the team will switch back to the attitude control thrusters.

The thruster test went so well, the team will likely do a similar test on the TCM thrusters for Voyager 2, the twin spacecraft of Voyager 1. The attitude control thrusters currently used for Voyager 2 are not yet as degraded as Voyager 1's, however.

Voyager 2 is also on course to enter interstellar space, likely within the next few years.

The Voyager spacecraft were built by JPL, which continues to operate both. JPL is a division of Caltech in Pasadena. The Voyager missions are a part of the NASA Heliophysics System Observatory, sponsored by the Heliophysics Division of the Science Mission Directorate in Washington. For more information about the Voyager spacecraft, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov/voyager

https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov

News Media Contact

Elizabeth Landau Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. 818-354-6425 [email protected] 2017-310

Voyager 1, Now Most Distant Human-made Object in Space

In a dark, cold, vacant neighborhood near the very edge of our solar system, the Voyager 1 spacecraft is set to break another record and become the explorer that has traveled farthest from home.

At approximately 2:10 p.m. Pacific time on February 17, 1998, Voyager 1, launched more than two decades ago, will cruise beyond the Pioneer 10 spacecraft and become the most distant human-created object in space at 10.4 billion kilometers (6.5 billion miles.) The two are headed in almost opposite directions away from the Sun. As with other spacecraft traveling past the orbit of Mars, both Voyager and Pioneer derive their electrical power from onboard nuclear batteries.

"For 25 years, the Pioneer 10 spacecraft led the way, pressing the frontiers of exploration, and now the baton is being passed from Pioneer 10 to Voyager 1 to continue exploring where no one has gone before," said Dr. Edward C. Stone, Voyager project scientist and director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

For 25 years, the Pioneer 10 spacecraft led the way, pressing the frontiers of exploration, and now the baton is being passed from Pioneer 10 to Voyager 1 to continue exploring where no one has gone before.

Dr. Edward Stone

Voyager Project Scientist

"At almost 70 times farther from the Sun than the Earth, Voyager 1 is at the very edge of the Solar System. The Sun there is only 1/5,000th as bright as here on Earth -- so it is extremely cold and there is very little solar energy to keep the spacecraft warm or to provide electrical power. The reason we can continue to operate at such great distances from the Sun is because we have radioisotope thermal electric generators (RTGs) on the spacecraft that create electricity and keep the spacecraft operating," Stone said. "The fact that the spacecraft is still returning data is a remarkable technical achievement."

Voyager 1 was launched from Cape Canaveral on September 5, 1977. The spacecraft encountered Jupiter on March 5, 1979, and Saturn on November 12, 1980.

Then, because its trajectory was designed to fly close to Saturn's large moon Titan, Voyager 1's path was bent northward by Saturn's gravity, sending the spacecraft out of the ecliptic plane - the plane in which all the planets except Pluto orbit the Sun.

Launched on March 2, 1972, the Pioneer 10 mission officially ended on March 31, 1997. However NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffet Field, CA, intermittently receives science data from Pioneer as part of a training program for flight controllers of the Lunar Prospector spacecraft now orbiting the Moon.

"The Voyager mission today presents an unequaled technical challenge. The spacecraft are now so far from home that it takes nine hours and 36 minutes for a radio signal traveling at the speed of light to reach Earth,"said Ed B. Massey, project manager for the Voyager Interstellar Mission. "That signal, produced by a 20 watt radio transmitter, is so faint that the amount of power reaching our antennas is 20 billion times smaller than the power of a digital watch battery."

Having completed their planetary explorations, Voyager 1 and its twin, Voyager 2, are studying the environment of space in the outer solar system. Although beyond the orbits of all the planets, the spacecraft still are well within the boundary of the Sun's magnetic field, called the heliosphere. Science instruments on both spacecraft sense signals that scientists believe are coming from the outermost edge of the heliosphere, known as the heliopause.

The heliosphere results from the Sun emitting a steady flow of electrically charged particles called the solar wind. As the solar wind expands supersonically into space in all directions, it creates a magnetized bubble -- the heliosphere -- around the Sun. Eventually, the solar wind encounters the electrically charged particles and magnetic field in the interstellar gas. In this zone the solar wind abruptly slows down from supersonic to subsonic speed, creating a termination shock. Before the spacecraft travel beyond the heliopause into interstellar space, they will pass through this termination shock.

"The data coming back from Voyager now suggest that we may pass through the termination shock in the next three to five years," Stone said. "If that's the case, then one would expect that within 10 years or so we would actually be very close to penetrating the heliopause itself and entering into interstellar space for the first time."

Reaching the termination shock and heliopause will be major milestones for the mission because no spacecraft have been there before and the Voyagers will gather the first direct evidence of their structure. Encountering the termination shock and heliopause has been a long-sought goal for many space physicists, and exactly where these two boundaries are located and what they are like still remains a mystery.

Science data are returned to Earth in real-time to the 34- meter Deep Space Network (DSN) antennas located in California, Australia and Spain. Both spacecraft have enough electricity and attitude control propellant to continue operating until about 2020, when electrical power produced by the RTGs will no longer support science instrument operation. At that time, Voyager 1 will be almost 150 times farther from the Sun than the Earth -- more than 20 billion kilometers (almost 14 billion miles) away.

On Feb. 17, Voyager 1 will be 10.4 billion kilometers (6.5 billion miles) from Earth and is departing the Solar System at a speed of 17.4 kilometers per second (39,000 miles per hour). At the same time, Voyager 2 will be 8.1 billion kilometers (5.1 billion miles) from Earth and is departing the solar system at a speed of 15.9 kilometers per second (35,000 miles per hour).

JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology, manages the Voyager Interstellar Mission for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, D. C.

Written by Mary A. Hardin (Jet Propulsion Laboratory)

Ed Stone, JPL director and top scientist on Voyager mission, dies at 88

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Ed Stone, the scientist who guided NASA’s breakthrough Voyager mission to the outer planets for 50 years and led the Jet Propulsion Laboratory when it landed its first rover on Mars, died Tuesday. He was 88.

A physicist who got in on the ground floor of space exploration, Stone played a leading role in NASA missions to Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. The discoveries made under his watch revolutionized scientists’ understanding of the solar system and fueled humanity’s ambition to explore distant worlds.

Carolyn Porco, who worked on imaging on JPL’s Voyager and Cassini missions, called Stone “a thoroughly lovely man” who was “as close to perfect as a project scientist could ever be.”

“When two science teams were in contention over some spacecraft resource, and Ed had to decide between the two, even the guy who lost went away thinking, ‘Well, if this is what Ed has decided, then it must be the right answer,’” Porco said by email Tuesday. “I feel blessed to have known Ed. And like many people today, I’m very sad to know he’s gone.”

Stone was a 36-year-old Caltech physics professor in 1972 when he was asked to serve as chief scientist for an audacious plan to send a pair of spacecraft to explore the solar system’s four giant planets for the first time.

It was the opportunity of a lifetime, but he wasn’t sure he wanted the gig.

“I hesitated because I was a fairly young professor at that point. I still had a lot of research I wanted to do,” he recalled 40 year later.

He took it anyway, and from the mission’s first encounter with Jupiter in 1979 to its final flyby of Neptune in 1989, Stone became the scientific face of the Voyager mission. He guided the science agenda and helped the public make sense of revolutionary images and data not just from Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, but from many of their fascinating moons.

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Stone and his more than 200 science collaborators were the first to discover lightning on Jupiter and volcanoes on its moon Io. They spotted six never-before-seen moons around Saturn and found evidence of the largest ocean in the solar system on Jupiter’s moon Europa, as well as geysers on Neptune’s moon Triton.

“It seemed like everywhere we looked, as we encountered those planets and their moons, we were surprised,” Stone told the Los Angeles Times in 2011. “We were finding things we never imagined, gaining a clearer understanding of the environment Earth was part of. I can close my eyes and still remember every part of it.”

The Voyager 1 spacecraft became the first manmade object to reach interstellar space in 2012, and Voyager 2 followed suit in 2018.

The twin probes continue to send weekly communications to Earth from interstellar space. Stone retired in 2022 on the mission’s 50th anniversary.

“A part of Ed lives on in the two Voyager spacecraft. The fingerprints of his dedication and keen leadership are woven into the Voyager mission,” said Linda Spilker, who joined the mission in 1977 and succeeded him as project scientist.

The Voyager mission was Stone’s crowning achievement, but hardly his only one.

He was a principal investigator on nine NASA missions and a co-investigator on five others, including several satellites designed to study cosmic rays, the solar wind and the Earth’s magnetic field.

He became director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge in 1991, a role he held for a decade.

It was an era of cost-cutting at NASA, but Stone still managed to launch Galileo’s five-year mission to Jupiter and send the Cassini spacecraft to Saturn . He was also at the agency’s helm when Mars Pathfinder delivered the Sojourner rover to the Red Planet. It marked the first time that humans had put a robotic rover on the surface of another planet.

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Throughout his tenure at JPL, Stone continued to work and teach at Caltech, even teaching freshman physics during some of Voyager’s long cruise times between planets.

He also served as chairman of the board of the California Assn. for Research in Astronomy, which is responsible for building and operating the W.M. Keck Observatory and its two 10-meter telescopes on Mauna Kea, Hawaii.

Edward Carroll Stone Jr. was born in Iowa on Jan. 23, 1936, and grew up in Burlington, where his father ran a small construction business and his mother kept the company books.

The eldest of two brothers, Stone was attracted to science from a young age. Under his father’s watchful eye, he learned how to take apart and reassemble all varieties of technology, from radios to cars.

“I was always interested in learning about why something is this way and not that way,” Stone told an interviewer in 2018. “I wanted to understand and measure and observe.”

After studying physics at Burlington Junior College, he received his master’s and doctorate at the University of Chicago. Shortly after he began his graduate studies, news broke in 1957 that the former Soviet Union had launched Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite.

“Just like that, because of the Cold War and our need to match Sputnik, a whole new realm absolutely opened up,” he said.

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Stone built a device for measuring the intensity of solar energetic particles above the atmosphere that hitched a ride to space aboard an Air Force satellite in 1961. Unfortunately the spacecraft’s transmitter didn’t work, so only a very limited quantity of data was returned to Earth. However, it was still enough to indicate that the intensity of the particles was lower than expected.

Despite the transmitter glitch, Stone said the project was thrilling. “We were taking the first steps in a whole new area of research and exploration,” he said. “We were right at the beginning.”

He joined the faculty at Caltech in 1964 and created more space experiments, this time for NASA.

Stone’s particular area of interest was cosmic rays — high-speed atomic nuclei that can originate from explosive events on the sun or from violent events beyond the solar system.

One of his cosmic-ray experiments was included among the 11 major Voyager experiments.

Colleagues praised Stone for his leadership of the Voyager science team.

“He was a great hero, a giant among men,” said Porco, adding that Stone was known to treat everyone — from top scientists to graduate students — with respect.

Voyager team scientist Thomas Donahue put it this way: “Over the years, Ed Stone has proved to be remarkably adept at keeping a bunch of prima donnas on track.”

Stone was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1984 and received the National Medal of Science from President George H.W. Bush in 1991 in recognition of his leadership of the Voyager mission. He won the Shaw Prize in Astronomy in 2019 , an honor that comes with a $1.2-million award. In 2012 his hometown of Burlington, Iowa, named its new middle school after him.

“This is truly an honor because it comes from the community where my exploration journey began,” Stone told a local newspaper.

Decades after Voyager’s launch he was asked to select his favorite moment from the mission. He chose the discovery of volcanoes on Jupiter’s moon Io .

“Finding a moon that’s 100 times more active volcanically than the entire Earth, it’s really quite striking,” he said. “And this was typical of what Voyager was going to do on the rest of its journey through the outer solar system.

“Time after time, we found that nature was much more inventive than our models,” he said.

His wife, Alice, whom he met on a blind date at the University of Chicago and married in 1962, died in December. The couple are survived by their two daughters, Susan and Janet Stone, and two grandsons.

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Deborah Netburn covers faith, spirituality and joy for the Los Angeles Times. She started at The Times in 2006 and has worked across a wide range of sections including entertainment, home and garden, national news, technology and science.

Corinne Purtill is a science and medicine reporter for the Los Angeles Times. Her writing on science and human behavior has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Time Magazine, the BBC, Quartz and elsewhere. Before joining The Times, she worked as the senior London correspondent for GlobalPost (now PRI) and as a reporter and assignment editor at the Cambodia Daily in Phnom Penh. She is a native of Southern California and a graduate of Stanford University.

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Nasa sets coverage for u.s. spacewalk 90 outside space station.

Tiernan P. Doyle

Nasa headquarters.

NASA will provide live coverage, beginning at 6:30 a.m. EDT Thursday, June 13, as two astronauts conduct a spacewalk outside of the International Space Station. The spacewalk is scheduled to begin at 8 a.m. and last about six and a half hours.

NASA will stream the spacewalk on NASA+ , NASA Television, the NASA app , YouTube , and the agency’s website . Learn how to stream NASA TV through a variety of platforms including social media.

NASA astronauts Tracy C. Dyson and Matt Dominick will exit the station’s Quest airlock to complete the removal of a faulty electronics box, called a radio frequency group, from a communications antenna on the starboard truss of the space station. The pair also will collect samples for analysis to understand the ability of microorganisms to survive and reproduce on the exterior of the orbiting laboratory.

Dyson will serve as spacewalk crew member 1 and will wear a suit with red stripes. Dominick will serve as spacewalk crew member 2 and will wear an unmarked suit. U.S. spacewalk 90 will be the fourth for Dyson and the first for Dominick in support of the space station.

Following the completion of the spacewalk, NASA will announce participating crew members for U.S. spacewalks 91 and 92, scheduled for Monday, June 24 and Tuesday, July 2, and will provide additional coverage details.

Get breaking news, images, and features from the space station on the station blog , Instagram , Facebook , and X .

Learn more about International Space Station research and operations at:

https://www.nasa.gov/station

Josh Finch / Claire O’Shea Headquarters, Washington 202-358-1100 [email protected] / claire.a.o’[email protected]

Leah Cheshier / Anna Schneider Johnson Space Center, Houston 281-483-5111 [email protected] / [email protected]

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William Anders, Apollo 8 astronaut who shot ‘Earthrise,’ dies at 90

As part of the first crewed mission to orbit the moon, he looked toward home and took one of the most famous photos of all time.

On Christmas Eve in 1968, the three astronauts on Apollo 8 looked back toward home as their craft made one of its 10 orbits around the moon. Framed inside the window was the marbled blue orb of Earth, sitting above the slate gray lunar surface and surrounded — beautiful and vulnerable — by the blackness of space.

“Oh my God! Look at that picture over there,” said William Anders, an Air Force major at the time, on NASA’s first crew to leave the confines of Earth’s orbit. “Here’s the Earth coming up. Wow, that’s pretty.”

He asked Navy Capt. James A. Lovell Jr. to pass him a roll of color film. “Oh man,” Lovell said, in a conversation captured on the onboard recorder, “that’s great.”

The shot taken by Maj. Anders — an image later known as “Earthrise” — became one of the most significant photos of all time: a humbling, awesome and inspirational reminder of humanity’s small and fragile presence in the cosmos.

“To me it was strange that we had worked and had come all the way to the moon to study the moon, and what we really discovered was the Earth,” recalled Maj. Anders, who died June 7 in the crash of a private plane he was piloting over waters near Jones Island in the San Juan Channel in Washington state. He was 90.

The death was confirmed by his son, Greg Anders, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel. Eric Peter, the sheriff of San Juan County, said an investigation was launched into the cause of the crash of the vintage two-seat Beechcraft T-34 Mentor.

The Apollo 8 mission lifted off shortly before 8 a.m. on Dec. 21, 1968, with the giant Saturn V rocket pushing them out of earth’s orbit for the 240,000-mile journey to the moon. That had not been the original plan.

The astronauts — Maj. Anders, Lovell and commander Col. Frank Borman — had at first trained to orbit the Earth to test the lunar module, designed to bring a future crew to the moon’s surface. Maj. Anders, a specialist in space radiation, was assigned to put the module through tests.

The final engineering work on the module was not completed in time, however. That forced NASA to make Apollo 8 a scouting party — and the first crewed mission to orbit the moon. The main task was to photograph and film the terrain, study the lunar surface composition and map out possible landing sites for the historic first steps on the moon. (On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong hopped from the ladder of the Apollo 11 lunar module to the surface of the moon, followed by Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin. )

Apollo 8 was fitted with a simulated lunar module, called the Lunar Module Test Article, to assess how the command craft maneuvered during lunar orbit. As part of the camera supplies was black-and-white film and several color rolls of Kodak Ektachrome, according to NASA.

For about 20 hours, the craft circled the moon. On the fourth orbit, the Earth came into perfect view. Half the Earth shines in the sun’s rays; the night side of the planet blends into the inky infinity of space. “So here was this orb looking like a Christmas tree ornament,” Maj. Anders recalled in a NASA oral history .

“As I looked down at the Earth, which is about the size of your fist at arm’s length, I’m thinking, ‘This is not a very big place. Why can’t we get along?’” Maj. Anders said in a video played to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 8 mission in 2018.

The Apollo 8 flight capped a year of staggering turmoil. In the United States, racial and political tensions boiled over in violence over the Vietnam War and the assassinations of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy. In Eastern Europe, Czechoslovakia was the latest Soviet bloc to suffer the Kremlin’s wrath to put down a pro-freedom uprising .

Maj. Anders’s photo, released by NASA in the final days of 1968, instantly became a powerful counterpoint for unity and reflection. The image was used in a 1969 U.S. postage stamp and reproduced on posters and pop art. “Earthrise” also helped advance the environmental movement by inspiring the creation of Earth Day in 1970.

In 2003, the image was on the cover of Life magazine’s collection of “100 Photographs That Changed the World.” (Maj. Anders jokingly called “Earthrise” a “crappy photo” because he considered it slightly out of focus.)

“He traveled to the threshold of the Moon and helped all of us see something else: ourselves,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson wrote in a social media post after Maj. Anders’s death.

At the end of a Christmas Eve television broadcast by the Apollo 8 crew — watched by more than 500 million people around the world — the astronauts took turns reading the opening biblical passage from the Book of Genesis. Maj. Anders was first: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.”

William Alison Anders was born on Oct. 17, 1933, in Hong Kong, then a British colony, where his mother lived while his father, a Navy lieutenant, served aboard a gunboat patrolling the Yangtze River in China.

The family then lived in Annapolis, Md., before returning to Asia. His father, Lt. Arthur Anders, was second-in-command of the gunboat Panay, which helped evacuate Americans after Japan sharply escalated its battles with China in July 1937 in the Sino-Japanese War.

The young William and his mother fled to the Philippines. Japanese warplanes targeted the Panay, wounding the elder Anders and inflicting so much damage to the vessel that it began to sink. Lt. Anders helped evacuate the crew and received the Navy Cross for valor.

The younger Anders graduated from the Naval Academy in 1955 but later obtained an Air Force commission. He served as a fighter pilot in California and Iceland, tracking Soviet aircraft. In 1962, he received a master’s degree in nuclear engineering, specializing in space radiation, from the Air Force Institute of Technology in Ohio. He was selected by NASA for astronaut training a year later.

Maj. Anders retired from NASA and the Air Force in 1969 and became executive secretary of the National Aeronautics and Space Council, a presidential advisory unit. He served as U.S. ambassador to Norway from May 1976 to June 1977.

He had stints in the private sector, including as the chief executive of General Dynamics Corp., an aerospace and defense company, before he retired to Washington state and took up racing aircraft. He retired from the Air Force Reserve in 1988 as a major general.

In a 2018 interview with the Guardian, Maj. Anders said “Earthrise” changed him, too. “It really undercut my religious beliefs. The idea that things rotate around the pope and up there is a big supercomputer wondering whether Billy was a good boy yesterday? It doesn’t make any sense.”

He married the former Valerie Hoard in 1955. In addition to his wife and their son Greg, survivors include three other sons, Alan, Glen, and Eric; and two daughters, Gayle and Diana. (Maj. Anders and his wife founded the Heritage Flight Museum , now located in Burlington, Wash.)

Twenty-two years after Maj. Anders’s photo, the astronomer Carl Sagan suggested to NASA that the Voyager 1 space probe turn its camera back to Earth for a parting image from the fringes of the solar system from about 4 billion miles away. Earth is nothing more than a pinprick.

The two perspectives of our planet — Anders’s view from orbiting the moon and the “Pale Blue Dot” as Sagan called it — reinforced with images what poets always recognized: the Earth as a shared cocoon in the merciless heavens.

‘To see the earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats,” wrote the poet Archibald MacLeish in a commentary in the New York Times on Christmas Day 1968, “is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold.”

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News | April 27, 2023

Nasa's voyager will do more science with new power strategy.

Editor's note: Language was added in the second paragraph on May 1 to underscore that the mission will continue even after a science instrument is retired.

The plan will keep Voyager 2's science instruments turned on a few years longer than previously anticipated, enabling yet more revelations from interstellar space.

Launched in 1977, the Voyager 2 spacecraft is more than 12 billion miles (20 billion kilometers) from Earth, using five science instruments to study interstellar space. To help keep those instruments operating despite a diminishing power supply, the aging spacecraft has begun using a small reservoir of backup power set aside as part of an onboard safety mechanism. The move will enable the mission to postpone shutting down a science instrument until 2026, rather than this year.

Switching off a science instrument will not end the mission. After shutting off the one instrument in 2026, the probe will continue to operate four science instruments until the declining power supply requires another to be turned off. If Voyager 2 remains healthy, the engineering team anticipates the mission could potentially continue for years to come.

Voyager 2 and its twin Voyager 1 are the only spacecraft ever to operate outside the heliosphere, the protective bubble of particles and magnetic fields generated by the Sun. The probes are helping scientists answer questions about the shape of the heliosphere and its role in protecting Earth from the energetic particles and other radiation found in the interstellar environment.

“The science data that the Voyagers are returning gets more valuable the farther away from the Sun they go, so we are definitely interested in keeping as many science instruments operating as long as possible,” said Linda Spilker, Voyager's project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which manages the mission for NASA.

Power to the Probes

Both Voyager probes power themselves with radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs), which convert heat from decaying plutonium into electricity. The continual decay process means the generator produces slightly less power each year. So far, the declining power supply hasn't impacted the mission's science output, but to compensate for the loss, engineers have turned off heaters and other systems that are not essential to keeping the spacecraft flying.

Each of NASA's Voyager probes are equipped with three radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs), including the one shown here. The RTGs provide power for the spacecraft by converting the heat generated by the decay of plutonium-238 into electricity. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

With those options now exhausted on Voyager 2, one of the spacecraft's five science instruments was next on their list. (Voyager 1 is operating one less science instrument than its twin because an instrument failed early in the mission. As a result, the decision about whether to turn off an instrument on Voyager 1 won't come until sometime next year.)

In search of a way to avoid shutting down a Voyager 2 science instrument, the team took a closer look at a safety mechanism designed to protect the instruments in case the spacecraft's voltage – the flow of electricity – changes significantly. Because a fluctuation in voltage could damage the instruments, Voyager is equipped with a voltage regulator that triggers a backup circuit in such an event. The circuit can access a small amount of power from the RTG that's set aside for this purpose. Instead of reserving that power, the mission will now be using it to keep the science instruments operating.

Although the spacecraft's voltage will not be tightly regulated as a result, even after more than 45 years in flight, the electrical systems on both probes remain relatively stable, minimizing the need for a safety net. The engineering team is also able to monitor the voltage and respond if it fluctuates too much. If the new approach works well for Voyager 2, the team may implement it on Voyager 1 as well.

“Variable voltages pose a risk to the instruments, but we've determined that it's a small risk, and the alternative offers a big reward of being able to keep the science instruments turned on longer,” said Suzanne Dodd, Voyager's project manager at JPL. “We've been monitoring the spacecraft for a few weeks, and it seems like this new approach is working.”

The Voyager mission was originally scheduled to last only four years, sending both probes past Saturn and Jupiter. NASA extended the mission so that Voyager 2 could visit Neptune and Uranus; it is still the only spacecraft ever to have encountered the ice giants. In 1990, NASA extended the mission again, this time with the goal of sending the probes outside the heliosphere. Voyager 1 reached the boundary in 2012, while Voyager 2 (traveling slower and in a different direction than its twin) reached it in 2018.

More About the Mission

A division of Caltech in Pasadena, JPL built and operates the Voyager spacecraft. The Voyager missions are a part of the NASA Heliophysics System Observatory, sponsored by the Heliophysics Division of the Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

For more information about the Voyager spacecraft, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov/voyager

News Media Contact

Calla Cofield Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. 626-808-2469 [email protected] 2023-059

NASA Launches Second Small Climate Satellite to Study Earth’s Poles

Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket lifted off from Launch Complex 1 at Māhia, New Zealand at 3:15 p.m. NZST June 5, 2024 (11:15 p.m. EDT, June 4) carrying the second and final small satellite for NASA’s PREFIRE (Polar Radiant Energy in the Far-InfraRed Experiment) mission.

Data from the pair of CubeSats will offer new insights into how much heat the Arctic and Antarctica radiate into space and how this influences global climate.

The second of NASA’s PREFIRE (Polar Radiant Energy in the Far-InfraRed Experiment) two satellites is communicating with ground controllers after launching at 3:15 p.m. NZST, Wednesday (11:15 p.m. EDT, June 4). Data from these two shoebox-size cube satellites, or CubeSats, will better predict how Earth’s ice, seas, and weather will change in a warming world — providing information to help humanity thrive on our changing planet.

The CubeSat launched on top Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket from the company’s Launch Complex 1 in Māhia, New Zealand, and follows the May 25 launch of the first PREFIRE CubeSat. After a 30-day checkout period, when engineers and scientists confirm both CubeSats are operating normally, the mission is expected to operate for 10 months.

This video gives an overview of the PREFIRE mission, which aims to improve global climate change predictions by expanding scientists’ understanding of heat radiated from Earth at the polar regions.

“By helping to clarify the role that Earth’s polar regions play in regulating our planet’s energy budget, the PREFIRE mission will ultimately help improve climate and ice models,” said Amanda Whitehurst, PREFIRE program executive, at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Improved models will benefit humanity by giving us a better idea of how our climate and weather patterns will change in the coming years.”

Capitalizing on NASA’s unique vantage point in space, PREFIRE will help understand the balance between incoming heat energy from the Sun and the outgoing heat given off at Earth’s poles. The Arctic and Antarctica act something like the radiator in a car’s engine, shedding much of the heat initially absorbed at the tropics back into space. The majority of that heat is emitted as far-infrared radiation. The water vapor content of the atmosphere, along with the presence, structure, and composition of clouds, influences the amount of radiation that escapes into space from the poles.

The PREFIRE mission will give researchers information on where and when far-infrared energy radiates from the Arctic and Antarctic environments into space. The mission also will use its two CubeSats in asynchronous, near-polar orbits to study how relatively short-lived phenomena like cloud formation, moisture changes, and ice sheet melt affect far-infrared emissions over time. The two satellites pass over the same part of Earth at different times of day, giving researchers information on changing conditions.

“Climate change is reshaping our environment and atmosphere in ways that we need to prepare for,” said Brian Drouin, PREFIRE’s deputy principal investigator at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “This mission will give us new measurements of the far-infrared wavelengths being emitted from Earth’s poles, which we can use to improve climate and weather models and help people around the world deal with the consequences of climate change.”

Each CubeSat carries an instrument called a thermal infrared spectrometer, which uses specially shaped mirrors and sensors to measure infrared wavelengths. Miniaturizing the instruments to fit on CubeSats required downsizing some parts while scaling up other components.

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“Equipped with advanced infrared sensors that are more sensitive than any similar instrument, the PREFIRE CubeSats will help us better understand Earth’s polar regions and improve our climate models,” said Laurie Leshin, director at NASA JPL. “Their observations will lead to more accurate predictions about sea level rise, weather patterns, and changes in snow and ice cover, which will help us navigate the challenges of a warming world.”

NASA’s Launch Services Program, based out of the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, in partnership with NASA’s Earth System Science Pathfinder Program, is providing the launch service as part of the agency’s Venture-class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare ( VADR ) launch services contract.

The PREFIRE mission was jointly developed by NASA and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. NASA JPL manages the mission for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate and provided the spectrometers. Blue Canyon Technologies built the CubeSats and the University of Wisconsin-Madison will process the data the instruments collect. The launch services provider is Rocket Lab USA Inc. of Long Beach, California.

To learn more about PREFIRE, visit:

https://science.nasa.gov/mission/prefire/

News Media Contact

Karen Fox / Elizabeth Vlock

NASA Headquarters, Washington

202-385-1287 / 202-358-1600

[email protected] / [email protected]

Jane J. Lee / Andrew Wang

Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

818-354-0307 / 626-379-6874

[email protected] / [email protected]