The Little Probe That Could: Why Voyager 1 Matters, and Why NASA Just Switched Part of It Off

NPR Science LISTEN & FOLLOW NPR App Apple Podcasts Spotify Amazon Music iHeart Radio YouTube Music RSS link Science The Little Probe That Could: Why Voyager 1 Matters, and Why NASA Just Switched Part of It Off April 19, 20261:40 AM ET By  Willem Marx FILE - This illustration provided by NASA depicts Voyager 1. NASA/AP hide caption toggle caption NASA/AP Nearly half a century ago, a spacecraft roughly the size of a small car set off from the Florida coast atop a rocket to begin what was supposed to be a five-year journey. This week, NASA announced it had shut down one of that spacecraft's remaining science instruments — not because the mission has failed, but to keep it alive a little longer. Voyager 1, the most distant human-made object ever built, is running out of power. And the engineers who tend to it, from offices at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, are doing everything they can to delay the inevitable. Sponsor Message A spacecraft built for five years that has lasted nearly fifty Voyager 1 is a robotic space probe, launched on September 5, 1977, from Cape Canaveral aboard a Titan-Centaur rocket. It weighs about 1,797 pounds — roughly the mass of a mid-size sedan — and carries a 12-foot-wide dish antenna that keeps it pointed toward Earth so it can send and receive signals. It was built at JPL, a federally funded research center managed by the California Institute of Technology. And it has been operating ever since, almost without interruption, for nearly 49 years. Its mission's origins lie in an astronomical coincidence: In the late 1960s, engineers and scientists recognized that the outer planets — Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune — were drifting into a rare alignment that would not repeat for roughly 175 years. That configuration made it possible for a spacecraft to use each planet's gravity as a kind of slingshot, gaining speed and redirecting course without burning extra fuel, in a technique known as gravity assist. N...