Gallery: Thirty-five years of Voyager
Timeline: Thirty-five years of Voyager

LA CANADA FLINTRIDGE - For 35 years, the twin Voyager missions - traveling in opposite directions - have pushed toward deep space staying in touch with mission control at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.


Its three-and-a-half decades aloft represent a blip within the billions of years the spacecraft could spend moving through the galaxy and universe beyond.

On Earth, where technology has already moved light years beyond Voyager's 1970s computing power, 35 years is long enough for JPL to gather the graying scientific minds that developed the mission in celebration of the discoveries Voyager has made - and the ones yet to come.

"We knew we were doing this as citizens of a planet, and not just one tiny part of it," said Ann Druyan, the wife of late astronomer Carl Sagan.

Druyan and Sagan were part of the team that produced the Golden Record, a collection of sounds and images of Earth carried by each Voyager



Whether they ever reach intelligent life is literally a shot in the dark.

JPL hosted two days of talks about Voyager last week, covering the beginnings of the mission as a tour past Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune; its present as the first probe to reach the edge of our solar system; and its potential future as a contact point for distant extraterrestrials.

Scientists know both spacecraft will get within approximately 1.5 light years from another star in about 400,000 years, but neither probably will never get as close to a star as both are to the sun today.

Regardless, Voyager 1 is on the cusp of a breakthrough. Soon, it will become the first man-made object to entirely escape the solar system, entering interstellar space.

"This is exploration. It could be a matter of days, it could be a matter of months, it could be a matter of years," said Ed Stone, Voyager's project scientist. "We really don't know. Nothing has ever been there before. Our models do not really tell us what we're seeing. We're seeing something different than the models."

In the meantime, JPL is learning all it can about the heliosphere, the bubble around the sun where particles are pulled around by its gravitational field.

Both Voyager spacecraft are in the heliosheath, the outer fringes where solar winds bump against interstellar space. JPL continues to gather data about the winds, the sun's magnetic field, ions trying to escape and cosmic rays trying to get in.

"We listen every day," Stone said. "They transmit 24-7, and we listen four to eight hours each day to each spacecraft."

Once the twin Voyagers depart the solar system, they won't be in communication with Earth much longer.

Both are depleting the plutonium they use for power, via radioactive heat converted to electricity, and JPL will have to shut off its first scientific instrument by 2020, Stone said.

By 2025, both Voyagers will be dark, hurtling through space carrying their message in a bottle as a final task.

The collection of sounds and images on the record - made of gold-plated copper, with diagrams showing how to play it - were carefully selected to present the idea of life on Earth. It includes greetings in 55 languages, a whale call, 90 minutes of music from around the world and the brain waves of Druyan, who had just fallen in love with Sagan.

It was important, she said, because the record could represent a time capsule of human life billions of years in the future, when humankind could very well be extinct.

"Our earliest ancestors the first thing that we did when we got over the initial post-traumatic stress of the invention of agriculture, was to figure out ways that we could live forever, ways that we could be remembered," Druyan said. "Thanks to the people here, the people of JPL and NASA, the most audacious and ambitious attempt ever made at being remembered ... is on that spacecraft, bound for a future that we can only dream about."

The discoveries Voyager made closer to home, in its planetary encounters within the solar system, could also prove to be touchstones for finding extraterrestrial life.

Scientists already knew Jupiter and Saturn are inhospitable gas giants, and both Voyagers provided some of the details, including the nature of the Great Red Spot on Jupiter as a massive storm.

The visits to Uranus and Neptune, also gas giants, were even more revelatory. Voyager 2 showed Uranus' strange, twisted magnetic field and Neptune's stormy winds, the strongest among all planets in the solar system,

However, the greatest discoveries might have come from the moons of those planets.

On Jupiter's Europa, Saturn's Titan and Enceladus and Neptune's Triton, scientists began to realize the potential for water, and the ingredients for life, though none have oxygen.

Other moons provided fascinating revelations, such as Jupiter's Io, the only place other than Earth where active volcanoes were seen.

"Time after time, what Voyager did was really teach us that the solar system was much more diverse than we could have imagined just sitting here on Earth," Stone said.

With all of the mission's accomplishments and potential, it's worth noting that Voyager 1 ran into trouble right after its launch, some of its engineers said last week.

NASA used a new type of fuel tank to launch Voyager, which wound up consuming 1,200 pounds of extra fuel to get into space, former mission planner Charley Kohlhase said.

"There were only three and a half seconds of propellant left in the Centaur tanks," he said. "We're here celebrating, but it was close."


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