Of course, NASA knew this day would come long before the missions launched. Sadly, that means the so-called interstellar mission won’t be able to tell us what they see once they reach the stars. And even after that, NASA expects to continue receiving engineering data from the probes until 2035, when they exceed the range of the Deep Space Network antennas. Mission planners intend to keep communicating with the spacecraft until they fail or lose power.īoth should be able to keep at least one scientific instrument running until 2025. And the discoveries haven’t ended quite yet. But Earth is still in contact with Voyager 1.
It’s a risky move, and there’s a chance we may not hear from Voyager 2 once the receivers are turned back on.
However, the space agency has temporarily stopped receiving messages from Voyager 2 while they work to repair and update one of the three Deep Space Network antennas used to communicate with the probes, The New York Times reported in March. Since their launch more than 40 years ago, NASA has remained in near-constant contact with the Voyager probes. All said, by studying data from the two probes, astronomers have been able to compare, contrast and confirm results about the boundary that separates our solar system from interstellar space.
In recent years, the twin probes also have discovered that the solar wind moves more slowly at our solar system’s edge than expected. It recorded a small trickle of solar particles streaming through the heliopause. They had originally expected that particles from our sun would not “leak out” of the heliosphere into interstellar space. Then, when Voyager 2 reached this same boundary of interstellar space in 2018, it found similar results.īut Voyager 2 offered up another surprise when NASA scientists released its first results from beyond the heliopause. Scientists were surprised when Voyager 1 measured the magnetic field just inside and just outside of the heliopause, finding no significant changes in its overall direction. This protective bubble is called the heliosphere, and the heliopause is its outer boundary - where our Sun’s influence is finally overpowered by distant activity like erupting supernovas. The powerful wind carves a huge cavity in the interstellar medium (the region between stars) that encapsulates all the planets. Our Sun produces an intense stream of particles, dubbed the solar wind, that flows outward in all directions and creates a magnetic field that shields the planets from interstellar particles. Instead, they determined it thanks to measurable changes Voyager 1 detected when it hit a region called the heliopause. There are no road signs letting NASA know that the craft broke the barrier. And they still have a long way to go.īack in 2012, Voyager 1 became the first spacecraft to reach interstellar space. Though they are each taking different paths, both spacecraft are still screaming their way out of the solar system. Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are still functioning today, making them the longest-running and most-distant space mission in history. To this day, scientists are still making new discoveries by exploring Voyager's decades-old data.īut these probes haven’t stopped scouting the outer solar system.
And Voyager 2 returned humanity’s only close-up looks at Uranus and Neptune. Saturn surrendered its atmospheric composition and new rings. Thanks to a rare alignment of the solar system’s four outer planets - which happens just once every 175 years - the agency had the chance to redefine astronomy by exploring Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune in one fell swoop.Īt Jupiter, the probes surprised scientists when they spotted volcanoes on the moon Io and discovered Europa is likely an ocean world. But with the triumph of the Apollo Moon landings just five years behind them, NASA was ready to dive headfirst into another bold idea. The space agency was still in its infancy then. In 1977, NASA launched the twin Voyager spacecraft to probe the outer reaches of our solar system.