Voyager 1, the Farthest Thing People Ever Made, Falls Silent at 58
It visited two planets, photographed home from six billion kilometers away and kept talking for decades on 69,632 bytes of memory and the warmth of a little plutonium.
PASADENA, Calif. — Voyager 1, the spacecraft that carried a golden record, a stylus and instructions for both farther than anything else people have ever made, fell silent on [DATE TK], 2036, about 31 billion kilometers from home. It was 58 [CHECK AGE]. The cause was a long decline in power.
It was born at Cape Canaveral, Fla., on Sept. 5, 1977, 16 days after its twin, and was named first anyway because it was going to reach Jupiter first. It did. In March 1979 it found volcanoes erupting on Io, the first seen anywhere but Earth. At Saturn it swung close past the moon Titan, a detour that flung it up and out of the plane of the planets. It never visited another world, and it never seemed to mind.
On Feb. 14, 1990, six billion kilometers out, it turned around and photographed Earth, a pale blue dot smaller than a pixel. Thirty-four minutes later it switched off its cameras. It never looked at anything again.
It kept listening. It became the most distant human-made object in 1998 and, in August 2012, the first to reach interstellar space. It did all of it with 69,632 bytes of memory, on power that faded by about four watts a year. When a memory chip failed in 2023, engineers a light-day away rewrote its code around the hole. In 2025 it went back to roll thrusters that had been given up for dead in 2004. It was, by any measure, hard to kill.
In its last years it gave up its senses one at a time to stay warm and awake: its cosmic ray telescopes in 2025, its particle detector in 2026 and, eventually, the rest.
It is survived by its twin, Voyager 2, which left home 16 days earlier and is still, somehow, not as far away; by the record it carries, with greetings in 55 languages, a kiss, a humpback whale and Chuck Berry; and by several generations of engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. It was predeceased by its cousins Pioneer 11, in 1995, and Pioneer 10, in 2003.
It is not stopping. In about 40,000 years it will pass within 1.7 light-years of a star called Gliese 445, still carrying the record and the needle to play it.
In lieu of flowers, the family asks that you look toward Ophiuchus, the Serpent Bearer, where it was last heard from. Its final message went out at 160 bits per second and took more than a day to arrive.