Explore Voyager

Position over time

Follow the trajectory from 1977 and return to live mode with one button.

Golden Record

Learn how to play the record, read its time marker and locate the Sun in the Galaxy.

Gallery

Locally stored images with full credits and links to the originals.

Instruments

What each experiment measured and which instruments still operate.

Frequently asked questions

Answers about the Voyager mission, positions, communication, power and future journeys, with clear explanations and NASA/JPL sources.

How Voyager communicates with Earth

How NASA sends commands to Voyager and receives data through the Deep Space Network, radio bands, data rates and signal delay.

Voyager’s onboard computers

The six onboard computers, CCS, FDS and AACS, their memory, assembly language, fault protection and spacecraft time.

Voyager power and RTGs

How Voyager converts radioactive heat to electricity, why it has no solar arrays and how NASA budgets every watt.

The heliosphere and interstellar space

Termination shock, heliosheath and heliopause, how the Voyagers detected the crossing and why they have not left the entire Solar System.

Voyager discoveries at the planets

Volcanoes on Io, Saturn’s rings and Titan, Uranus’s moons and magnetic field, Neptune and Triton.

How Voyager navigation works

Reference trajectories, DSN Doppler and ranging, attitude control, trajectory corrections and gravity assists.

The Voyager Grand Tour

The outer-planet alignment, gravity assists and different Voyager 1 and 2 trajectories that enabled four giant-planet encounters.

Where the Voyagers are heading

Escape trajectories, directions, future stellar approaches, the Oort Cloud and the uncertain future of communications.

Io: a volcanic plume beyond Earth

Voyager 1 photographed an eruption on Jupiter's moon Io in 1979. The image helped establish the first observed active volcanism beyond Earth.

Triton: plumes above an icy moon

A sequence of Voyager 2 images from 1989 captured an active dark plume on Triton, Neptune's largest moon.

Pale Blue Dot: Earth from Voyager 1

Voyager 1 looked back in 1990 and recorded Earth as less than a pixel. The familiar version shown here is a 2020 reprocessing of those data.

What does interstellar space sound like?

Hear Voyager 1 plasma-wave data and learn what the rising tones revealed beyond the heliopause.

How NASA repaired Voyager 1 from Earth

The 2023–2024 flight computer fault: unreadable data, damaged memory, relocated software and the return of science measurements.

Voyager for schools: worksheet

Four printable exercises using the live tracker: distances, astronomical units, signal delay and the spacecraft's different routes. Answers included.

What cosmic rays revealed at the heliopause

Read an original NASA graph comparing Voyager 1 and 2: galactic cosmic rays increased while lower-energy particles from inside the heliosphere decreased.

The people behind the Voyager mission

Four roles behind the spacecraft: Ed Stone, Linda Morabito, Linda Spilker and Don Gurnett, with links to their NASA accounts.

Voyager's power-saving decisions over time

A dated timeline of instrument shutdowns and engineering changes from 2024 to 2026, showing how the mission protects its remaining science.

Voyager distances on a human scale

Imagine one astronomical unit as one metre: Earth is at 1 m, Neptune near 30 m, and one light-day is about 173 m on this model.