"The gold-coated records serve as a cosmic 'message in a bottle' for anyone who might encounter the space probes," NASA said. Once the probes lose the ability to communicate with scientists on Earth, NASA says they will begin their final mission - serving as "ambassadors" of our planet should they ever be found by intelligent life somewhere. NASA expects Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 to run out of power - officially ending their decades-long missions - sometime in the mid-2020s. You can still keep tabs on both probes on NASA's Voyager website. NASA says next year, Voyager 2 will become the second-farthest artificial object from the Earth, surpassing the Pioneer 10 probe launched in 1972. Voyager 2 is more than 12.1 billion miles away. In a sign of the times, they also each carry an eight-track tape player to record and transmit data - about 38,000 times slower than modern 5G Internet speeds.Īs of Friday, Voyager 1 was more than 14.5 billion miles away from the Earth - more than twice the distance between Pluto and the sun.
Upon its exit, Voyager 1 discovered that the bubble-like heliosphere blocks about 70% of cosmic rays or energetic particles created by exploding stars.īoth Voyager probes are powered by radioisotope thermoelectric generators that contain plutonium, which gives off heat that is then converted into electricity to power the equipment. Large geysers emerging from the moon´s surface clued scientists to this fact.ĭecades later in 2012, Voyager 1 reached the boundary of the heliosphere and exited the solar system and Voyager 2 followed in 2018. As Voyager 2 conducted its flybys, Voyager 1 was first to reach the boundary of the heliosphere, the protective bubble created by the sun's magnetic field and the outward flow of solar wind.īoth of the space probes captured stunning images of all the planets beyond the Earth, including many of their moons, and gathered surprising data about a lot of the celestial bodies.įor example, the Voyagers discovered that Enceladus, one of Saturn's moons, has a vast salt-water ocean beneath its surface and likely hydrothermal vents - conditions that are exceptional for creating life.