NASA - Voyager 1 and 2 updates

[decle]

A little off topic, but hopefully still of interest.  Today is the 50th anniversary of the launch of the first Command Computer Subsystem (CCS) on Viking 1:

[calex]

Last weekend, I happened upon a soaring, inspiring, folk-rock song about Voyager: NASA's Voyager One, by Adam Sweet.  (Any song about Voyager would be soaring!)  The outro (full lyrics):

So here's to the voyager, forever you'll roam,
A spark of our spirit, the stars are your home.
NASA's proud heart, in the void you still shine,
Voyager 1, through the eons of time.

There's an error in the song, glaring for Voyager fans:

Two-point-five light hours, yet your voice remains clear,
A beacon of hope, through the cosmic frontier.

A lot of on-line stories last year reported the distance as 22.5 light hours, so I imagine Sweet misremembered the distance when he sat down and wrote the song this year.  Not a big deal, but like Katie Melua's "Nine Million Bicycles" getting the size of the universe wrong (Wikipedia), perhaps a little "negative" publicity will gain Sweet more listeners!

You can hear the song at Bandcamp and SoundCloud.

[Star One]

Vintage NASA: Voyager’s 1990 ‘Family Portrait’ News Conference:

[StraumliBlight]

https://twitter.com/NASAJPL/status/1963973393721471448

Happy launchiversary, Voyager 1! 🥳

48 years ago – on September 5, 1977 – Voyager 1 launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, to study Jupiter and Saturn up close.

Today, Voyager 1 is about 15 billion miles (25 billion km) from Earth – and still revealing secrets of the cosmos!

25.14 billion km = 168.05 AU.


Neptune Encounter Operations Plan [Aug 25, 1989]

[StraumliBlight]

50 years in deep space, and Voyager still can't escape budget gravity [Oct 10]

The mission currently costs approximately $5 million per year, although an exact figure is difficult to ascertain, not least because the US space agency has been affected by the federal shutdown.

One source that asked to remain anonymous told The Register: "We're a bit annoyed that Voyager has lost 26 percent of its budget... It's so bloody small... The whole thing is absolutely outrageous."

https://twitter.com/NASAJPL/status/1993726449291825338

Voyager 1 distance check: Currently 15.79 billion miles from Earth. ✅

This time next year, Voyager 1 will be one light-DAY away – meaning it will take light a whole 24 hours to travel between Earth and the spacecraft. For comparison: Mars is usually ~12 light-MINUTES from Earth!

[calex]

50 years in deep space, and Voyager still can't escape budget gravity

Love The Register's title!      Best wishes to JPL - they lost an eighth of their workforce in 2024 and 2025 is not looking good either.

(The JPL Reddit has some depressing but insightful posts about the current turmoil and uncertainty among the employees.)

[calex]

I've seen the April 2024 still photo of the Voyager team cheering the resumption of data from Voyager 1 after the FDS memory anomaly - a zillion times.  So I was surprised to see a video clip of the celebration in an obscure Voyager YouTube video, "Voyager Program", by the Aerospace Information Technology program at a German university.  (The audio is in English.)

The brief clip shows an initially somber Voyager team slowly realizing and reacting to the fact that they're again receiving data from Voyager 1 after 5 months of silence.

(The video begins at 5:28.  NSF strips the start time from the URL - sorry!)

(Tony - I fixed that).  (Thank you! - calex)

[catdlr]

One Light-Day distance coming soon.

https://twitter.com/amsatdl/status/2013590931518185732

AMSAT-DL
@amsatdl
·
In November 2026, Voyager-1 will be one light-day away from Earth (25.9  billion km). Signals will take a full 24 hours to reach earth or 48  hours both ways!  Here is the live signal from today received by our 20m  dish at the Bochum observatory.
@NSFVoyager2
 
@NASAJPL

[djellison]

So I was surprised to see a video clip

It's on the JPL Raw Vimeo Channel (there's a lot of good stuff there)