Voyager Mission Honored at JPL For More Than Four Decades of Historic Space Exploration

Johnny B. Goode is alive and well deep in interstellar space.

When the NASA Voyager mission began in the summer of  1977 with two tandem spacecraft launched into orbit within a month of each other, the US scientific space community set out to rewrite textbooks and literally map the outer planets of our solar system, using the giant planets’ gravitational fields as slingshots to propel the Voyager mission through the cosmos.

The twin spacecraft also serve as ambassadors, with each carrying a golden record containing images of life on Earth, diagrams of basic scientific principles, and audio that includes sounds from nature, greetings in multiple languages, and music. 

Chuck Berry’s 1957 rock ‘n’ roll hit, “Johnny B. Goode,” is in that music mix.

The gold-coated records serve as a cosmic “message in a bottle” for anyone who might encounter the space probes, according to JPL. At the rate gold decays in space and is eroded by cosmic radiation, the records will last more than a billion years.

NASA’s twin Voyager probes also each carry an eight-track tape player for recording data, they have about 3 million times less memory than modern cell phones, and they transmit data about 38,000 times slower than a 5G internet connection, according to JPL.

But 45 years later, the two spacecraft are still sending back data to JPL, and on Thursday, members and scientists of the original mission gathered at JPL’s von Kármán Auditorium for an emotional reunion and celebration of the achievement.

Among the participants were Suzanne Dodd, current Voyager project manager, JPL; Linda Spilker, Voyager deputy project scientist, JPL; Todd Barber, Voyager propulsion engineer, JPL, and Ed Stone, 83, who began as project scientist for the Voyager at its inception in 1972, and coordinated 11 Voyager scientific teams. 

“August 25 is a special day in the history of the Voyager project,” said Dodd, “and who knows what great events might happen on future August 25ths.”

The twin Voyager probes are NASA’s longest-operating mission and the only spacecraft ever to explore interstellar space, the galactic ocean that our Sun and its planets travel through, and are now more than three times farther from the sun than Pluto.

The Voyagers, managed and operated by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, remain on the cutting edge of space exploration. 

As detailed by JPL in its anniversary announcement,  the Sun and the planets reside in the heliosphere, a protective bubble created by the Sun’s magnetic field and the outward flow of solar wind (charged particles from the Sun). 

Researchers—some of them younger than the two distant spacecraft —are now combining Voyager’s observations with data from newer missions to get a more complete picture of our Sun and how the heliosphere interacts with interstellar space, according to JPL.

“The heliophysics mission fleet provides invaluable insights into our Sun, from understanding the corona or the outermost part of the Sun’s atmosphere, to examining the Sun’s impacts throughout the solar system, including here on Earth, in our atmosphere, and on into interstellar space,” said Nicola Fox, director of the Heliophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington. 

“Over the last 45 years, the Voyager missions have been integral in providing this knowledge and have helped change our understanding of the Sun and its influence in ways no other spacecraft can.”

And remarkably, the spacecraft are likely good for at least another decade, said Dodd. 

“If everything goes well, the spacecraft could last another ten years,” she said. “We actually have a stretch goal of 15 more years of operation. That would take a lot of luck, but nobody thought the Voyager would last 45 years.”