When Voyager I (and its famous golden record) was launched in September 1977, it was designed to last five years and long ago met the project goals of examining Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune close up. The spaceship, about the size of a subcompact car, also discovered the first extraterrestrial volcanic activity and continues to explore uncharted cosmic regions beyond our solar system.
Voyager - hurtling through space at 38,200 mph (61,500 kmh) - it has now traveled more than 15 billion miles from Earth and is NASA's oldest spacecraft. The ancient plutonium-powered computers onboard Voyager I are still functional and send flight data and information from sensors and science instruments back to JPL in binary code and the communication system hasn’t had a major glitch since 1981.
By any measure, the spacecraft. has done a truly remarkable job - and it's the farthest object humankind has ever communicated with.
The Voyager I spacecraft was built in Pasadena and left our solar system a decade ago on its way to parts unknown. The craft has been in touch with Jet Propulsion Laboratory since it left, but recently started sending back garbled messages. Voyager's calls connect in Altadena, where a tiny crew of engineers and scientists continue to engage with the craft from a small office park next to a McDonald’s.
Every attempt to fix the problem takes days to realize. “If I come in on a Monday morning and I say ‘Hiya Voyager, how you doing?” project manager Suzanne Dodd says in the new documentary It's Quieter in the Twilight. “It’s gonna take me ‘til Tuesday afternoon that I get a response back.” Dodd has been on the mission for 39 years and was one of the senior scientists who tried turning it off and turning it back on, but that didn’t work.
Considering how remarkable Voyager I has proved to be over the decades, the team are still hopeful the problem will be resolved in a few weeks.