Voyager 1 and 2 continue to operate after 47 years of exploration within the Solar system.

Thousands of years from now, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 will leave our solar system. But their instruments will stop working long before that happens.

The Voyager program began in 1977 with twin spacecraft sent to venture to the outermost reaches of the solar system. This was before the space agency was even formed. However, five years removed from the Apollo Moon landings, NASA was about to fully commit to another wild idea. This is because the four outer planets in the solar system, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranans and Neptune, aligned in a way that only occurs once in 175 years, enabling the agency to change the course of astronomy by studying all the four giant planets simultaneously. The scheme was very successful. Experts were surprised when the probes found out that there were volcanoes on moon Io of Jupiter and that Europa is possibly an ocean planet. Saturn lost its atmospheric composition and new splendid rings.

As for Voyager 2, it brought back Earth’s only up-close pictures of Uranus and Neptune. Due to Voyager’s data collected many years ago, scientists still continue to discover new findings. However, these probes have not stopped searching for the distant solar system .

We are still using Voyager 1 & Voyager 2 till today, making them the longest and the farthest space missions ever made. Despite flying on different trajectories, both are still accelerating and still shouting their way out of the solar system. They still have a long way to go.

Where are the Voyager Probes Going?

At a speed of 35,000 mph, the Voyager probes are still 300 years away from the outer boundary of the Oort Cloud, a massive sphere of icy celestial objects, which starts roughly several thousand times as distant from the Sun as Earth is. The outer boundary of the Oort Cloud is so distant that, as per NASA, the two Voyager probes will require at least 30,000 years to travel beyond it completely.

After that, in approximately 40,000 years, Voyager 1 will be able to get close to another star. But it will take Voyager 2 300000 years before it can bask in the light of another star. Lucky for us, we do not have to wait long for new findings to surface. Both probes are still finding many wonderful things along the path.

What is the Voyager Mission Studying?

Voyager 1, announced in August 2012, became the first human-made object to enter the ionized region of the heliosheath. Since there are no road signs to alert NASA that the craft has achieved the barrier, we can argue that the external environment offers no resistance.

They established it on the basis of modifications that occurred in the case of Voyager 1, when it reached the area called heliopause. Sun constantly emits a flow of particles known as solar wind that moving out into space and create the magnetic shield that protects the planets from other interstellar bodies. The great gale clears a hole in the interstellar vacuum (the arena in which the stars are located) that encompasses all the planets. This protection shield is called the heliosphere, and the heliopause is where one ultimately comes across the end of solar reign and where rudimentary phenomena happening at greater distances like exploding supernovas affect our heliosphere. The fact that Voyager 1 was the first spacecraft to look inside and outside of the heliopause and found that overall direction of the magnetic field was almost the same astounded the science community.

The space beyond the heliopause, also called the interstellar medium was first reached in 2012 by Voyager 1 with similar findings, and then in 2018 Voyager 2 traveling the same path. However, Voyager 2 offered another unexpected moment when NASA scholars reported the initial data obtained from beyond the heliopause.

They had thoughtfully assumed that they were particles from our sun could not ‘spill over’ from the heliosphere into the interstellar medium. And Voyager 1 lacked any signs of leakage as well. But Voyager 2 did the opposite of what it expected. Analysing its findings, Voyager-I pointed to a trivial flow of solar particles permeating beyond the heliopause. Over the past few years the twin probes also found that the solar wind and its particles do not arrive at the outskirts of the solar system as was believed before. Altogether, based on the received data from both orbiting observatories, scientists could contrast and illustrate the differences as well as confirm the data about the divide between the solar system and interstellar medium.

When Will Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 Die?

To this date nearly 40 years after their launching, NASA has been communicating with the Voyager probes. However, The New York Times noted that the space agency has suspended getting messages from Voyager 2 as they try to fix and upgrade one of the three antennas of the Deep Space Network that supports communication with the probes. It is a dangerous operation, and it is possible for Voyager 2 not to respond when the receivers are activated.

However, Earth continues to speak with Voyager 1. And the discoveries are not over yet. Mission planners expect to be able to communicate with the spacecraft until they go offline or run out of power. Both should be able to maintain at least one scientific equipment running up to 2025.

Nonetheless, NASA still intends to gather more engineering data from the probes up to 2035 at which time their distance limit surpasses the DSN antennas. Unfortunately, the so-called interstellar mission will be unable to explain to us what they see once they get there.

A Golden Record of the Journey

In fact, NASA was planning for this day right from the time the missions were not even initiated. For some astronomers this was an irresistible ticket out of the solar system. Carl Sagan was so enthralled with the idea that he assisted NASA with creating a complete cultural package for the mission in case interstellar beings — or future humans — were to stumble upon one of the Voyager spacecrafts.

Inside each of the spacecraft, there is a gold-plated disk with Earth resources selected by the committee, which was headed by Sagan. These messages to the sky include images from the space shuttle, pictures and sounds from planet earth, music from over thirty countries and greetings in 55 different languages.

Therefore, even if we no longer receive signals from the Voyager probes, it may not be the last transmission they make during their journey towards the stars. Sagan stated, “Billions of years from now, our Sun, then a distended red giant star or a white dwarf, will have turned this Earth into an afire charcoal. ”“But the Voyager record will still be largely intact, in some other distant part of the Milky Way galaxy, a whisper of a long-dead civilization that once bloomed maybe before realizing the potential of performing greater feets and shifting to other planets including the planet earth.

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