voyager 1 photo saturn

Voyager 1: Snapshots From the Journey

After 35 years spent journeying through the solar system, Voyager 1 is now, officially, an interstellar spacecraft. Here are some of its more elegant photos

Saturn, taken by Voyager 1 in November 1980. After reconnoitering the Saturnian system, Voyager 1 swung up and away above the plane of the solar system. Voyager 2 continued on to barnstorm Uranus and Neptune as well.

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Voyager 1 to Take Pictures of Solar System Planets

NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft, having completed its mission along with Voyager 2 to explore the outer planets, will use its cameras February 13-14 to take an unprecedented family portrait of most of the planets in our solar system.

The collection of images will be from a unique point-of-view -- looking down on the solar system from a position 32 degrees above the ecliptic plane in which the planets orbit the Sun. No other spacecraft has ever been in a position to attempt a similar series of photos of most of the planets.

Voyager 1, launched in 1977, is now about 6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles) from Earth. The Voyager spacecraft are controlled by and their data received at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

"This is not just the first time, but perhaps the only time for decades that we'll be able to take a picture of the planets from outside the solar system," said Voyager Project Scientist Dr. Edward C. Stone of Caltech. No future space missions are planned that would fly a spacecraft so high above the ecliptic plane of the solar system, he said.

Starting shortly after 5 p.m. (PST) on Feb. 13 and continuing over the course of four hours, Voyager 1 will point its wide- and narrow-angle cameras at Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Earth and Venus. Mercury is too close to the Sun to be photographed by Voyager's cameras, and Pluto is too far away and too small to show up in images taken by the spacecraft. Beginning with the dimmest of the targets - Neptune -- and working toward the Sun, Voyager 1 will shutter about 64 images of the planets and the space between them.

The constellation Eridanus (The River), stretching behind the planets from Voyager 1's perspective, will provide the backdrop for the images.

Due to the schedules of several spacecraft being tracked by NASA's Deep Space Network (DSN), the images will be recorded on board Voyager 1 and played back to DSN receivers on Earth in late March. The Voyager imaging team estimates that processing the images to reveal as much detail as possible will take several weeks. Most of the planets will appear as relatively small dots (about one to four pixels, or picture elements, in the 800-by-800 pixel frame of one Voyager image).

The enormous scale of the subject matter makes it unlikely that the entire set of images can be mosaicked to produce for publication a single photograph showing all the planets. Even an image covering the planets out to Jupiter would easily fill a poster-sized photographic print. At the least, imaging team hopes to assemble a mosaicked image composed of the frames showing Earth, Venus and perhaps Mars together.

Voyager 1, rather than Voyager 2, received the solar system photo assignment largely because of Voyager 1's improved viewpoint of the planets.

Voyager 1 completed flybys of Jupiter and Saturn in 1979 and 1980, respectively. Voyager 2 flew past Jupiter in 1979, Saturn in 1981, Uranus in 1986 and Neptune last August. Both are now on missions that will take the spacecraft to the boundary of our solar system and into interstellar space.

According to Voyager engineers and scientists, the only potential damage from pointing the cameras toward the Sun is that the shutter blades of the wide-angle camera might warp. There are no plans, however, to use Voyager 1's cameras after the solar system photo series is completed.

The Voyager mission is conducted by Caltech's JPL for NASA's Office of Space Science and Applications.

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Saturn approach.

The Voyager 1 and 2 Saturn encounters occurred nine months apart, in November 1980 and August 1981. Voyager 1 is leaving the solar system. Voyager 2 completed its encounter with Uranus in January 1986 and with Neptune in August 1989, and is now also en route out of the solar system.

The two Saturn encounters increased our knowledge and altered our understanding of Saturn. The extended, close-range observations provided high-resolution data far different from the picture assembled during centuries of Earth-based studies.

Here is a summary of scientific findings by the two Voyagers at Saturn: SATURN Saturn's atmosphere is almost entirely hydrogen and helium. Voyager 1 found that about 7 percent of the volume of Saturn's upper atmosphere is helium (compared with 11 percent of Jupiter's atmosphere), while almost all the rest is hydrogen. Since Saturn's internal helium abundance was expected to be the same as Jupiter's and the Sun's, the lower abundance of helium in the upper atmosphere may imply that the heavier helium may be slowly sinking through Saturn's hydrogen; that might explain the excess heat that Saturn radiates over energy it receives from the Sun. (Saturn is the only planet less dense than water. In the unlikely event that a lake could be found large enough, Saturn would float in it.)

Subdued contrasts and color differences on Saturn could be a result of more horizontal mixing or less production of localized colors than in Jupiter's atmosphere. While Voyager 1 saw few markings, Voyager 2's more sensitive cameras saw many: Long-lived ovals, tilted features in east-west shear zones, and others similar to, but generally smaller than, on Jupiter.

Winds blow at high speeds in Saturn. Near the equator, the Voyagers measured winds about 500 meters a second (1,100 miles an hour). The wind blows mostly in an easterly direction. Strongest winds are found near the equator, and velocity falls off uniformly at higher latitudes. At latitudes greater than 35 degrees, winds alternate east and west as latitude increases. Marked dominance of eastward jet streams indicates that winds are not confined to the cloud layer, but must extend inward at least 2,000 kilometers (1,200 miles). Furthermore, measurements by Voyager 2 showing a striking north-south symmetry that leads some scientists to suggest the winds may extend from north to south through the interior of the planet.

While Voyager 2 was behind Saturn, its radio beam penetrated the upper atmosphere, and measured temperature and density. Minimum temperatures of 82 Kelvins (-312 degrees Fahrenheit) were found at the 70-millibar level (surface pressure on Earth is 1,000 millibars). The temperature increased to 143 Kelvins (-202 degrees Fahrenheit) at the deepest levels probed - - about 1,200 millibars. Near the north pole temperatures were about 10 degrees Celsius (18 degrees Fahrenheit) colder at 100 millibars than at mid-latitudes. The difference may be seasonal.

The Voyagers found aurora-like ultraviolet emissions of hydrogen at mid-latitudes in the atmosphere, and auroras at polar latitudes (above 65 degrees). The high-level auroral activity may lead to formation of complex hydrocarbon molecules that are carried toward the equator. The mid-latitude auroras, which occur only in sunlit regions, remain a puzzle, since bombardment by electrons and ions, known to cause auroras on Earth, occurs primarily at high latitudes.

Both Voyagers measured the rotation of Saturn (the length of a day) at 10 hours, 39 minutes, 24 seconds.

Iconic Image

Voyager 1's pale blue dot.

This iconic image of the Earth, dubbed 'Pale Blue Dot', is a part of the first ever 'portrait' of the solar system taken by Voyager 1.

What is the Pale Blue Dot?

The Pale Blue Dot is an iconic photograph of Earth taken on Feb. 14, 1990, by NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft.

Voyager 1 was speeding out of the solar system — beyond Neptune and about 3.7 billion miles (6 billion kilometers) from the Sun — when mission managers commanded it to look back toward home for a final time. It snapped a series of 60 images that were used to create the first “family portrait” of our solar system.

The picture that would become known as the Pale Blue Dot shows Earth within a scattered ray of sunlight. Voyager 1 was so far away that — from its vantage point — Earth was just a point of light about a pixel in size.

The Family Portrait

In addition to Earth, Voyager 1 captured images of Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter, and Venus. A few key members didn’t show up in the shot: Mars was obscured by scattered sunlight bouncing around in the camera, Mercury was too close to the Sun, and dwarf planet Pluto was too tiny, too far away and too dark to be detected.

The images gave humans an awe-inspiring and unprecedented view of their home world and its neighbors. Like Earth, each planet appears as just a speck of light (Uranus and Neptune appear elongated due to spacecraft motion during their 15-second camera exposures).

Finding a way to display the images and capture the sheer scale of Voyager’s accomplishment proved challenging. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory — which built and manages the Voyager probes — mounted the entire mosaic on a wall in its Theodore von Kármán Auditorium and it covered over 20 feet.

Members of the Voyager imaging team said in a 2019 research paper that the image of Earth had to be replaced often because so many people touched it.

The family portrait remains the first and only time a spacecraft has attempted to photograph our home solar system. Only three spacecraft have been capable of making such an observation from such a distance: Voyager 1, Voyager 2 and New Horizons.

Sagan’s Dream Shot

Sagan played a leading role in the U.S. space program. The prominent planetary scientist was a consultant and adviser to NASA beginning in the 1950s. He briefed the Apollo astronauts before their flights to the Moon.

In his role as a visiting scientist at JPL, Sagan helped design and manage the Mariner 2 mission to Venus; the Mariner 9, Viking 1 and Viking 2 trips to Mars; the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 missions to the outer solar system and the Galileo mission to Jupiter.

Sagan also was a member of the Voyager Imaging Team. He had the original idea in 1981 to use the cameras on one of the two Voyager spacecraft to image Earth. He realized that because the spacecraft were so far away the images might not show much. This was precisely why Sagan and other members of the Voyager team felt the images were needed — they wanted humanity to see Earth’s vulnerability and that our home world is just a tiny, fragile speck in the cosmic ocean.

On Feb. 13, 1990, Voyager 1 warmed up its cameras for three hours. Then the spacecraft’s science platform was pointed at Neptune and the observations began.

After Neptune, it took images of Uranus, Saturn, Mars, the Sun, and then Jupiter, Earth and Venus. The Earth images were taken at 04:48 GMT on Feb. 14, 1990, just 34 minutes before Voyager 1 powered off its cameras forever.

It took until May 1, 1990 — and four separate communications passes with NASA's Deep Space Network — for all the image data to finally arrive back on Earth. Voyager 1 had captured images of six of the seven planets targeted as well as the Sun.

About the Photographer

Voyager 1 was launched Sept. 5, 1977, just days after its twin — Voyager 2 — on Aug. 20. Because it was on a faster route to the mission's first encounter, at Jupiter, Voyager 1 overtook Voyager 2 on Dec. 15, 1977. (This was the reason for the order of their naming.)

Voyager 1 flew past Jupiter on March 5, 1979, and Saturn on Nov. 12, 1980.

After snapping the Pale Blue Dot and other “family photos,” — at 05:22 GMT, Feb. 14, 1990 — Voyager 1 powered off its cameras forever. Mission planners wanted to save its energy for the long journey ahead.

In August 2012, Voyager 1 entered interstellar space . It’s now the most distant human-made object ever.

The image was processed by JPL engineer and image processing enthusiast Kevin M. Gill with input from two of the image's original planners, Candy Hansen and William Kosmann.

Pale Blue Dot - Original (1990)

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Pale Blue Dot - Revisited (2020)

(tiff) (29.85 MB)

Pale Blue Dot - Poster

(zip) (40.23 MB)

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Voyager 1 Saturn

Voyager 1 image of saturn and its ring taken four days after closest approach to saturn, from a distance of 5,300, 000 km (3,300,000 miles). this viewing geometry, which shows saturn as a crescent, is never achieved from earth. the black strip within the rings is the cassini division, which contains much less orbiting ring material than elsewhere in the rings.   image number: pia00335 date: november 16, 1980.

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Encounter with Saturn: Voyager 1 imaging science results

As Voyager 1 flew through the Saturn system it returned photographs revealing many new and surprising characteristics of this complicated community of bodies. Saturn's atmosphere has numerous, low-contrast, discrete cloud features and a pattern of circulation significantly different from that of Jupiter. Titan is shrouded in a haze layer that varies in thickness and appearance. Among the icy satellites there is considerable variety in density, albedo, and surface morphology and substantial evidence for endogenic surface modification. Trends in density and crater characteristics are quite unlike those of the Galilean satellites. Small inner satellites, three of which were discovered in Voyager images, interact gravitationally with one another and with the ring particles in ways not observed elsewhere in the solar system. Saturn's broad A, B, and C rings contain hundreds of "ringlets," and in the densest portion of the B ring there are numerous nonaxisymmetric features. The narrow F ring has three components which, in at least one instance, are kinked and crisscrossed. Two rings are observed beyond the F ring, and material is seen between the C ring and the planet.

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August 1981 – voyagers encountered saturn.

Voyager 2 came within 101,000 kilometers (63,000 miles) of Saturn. Voyager 2 noticed changes in Saturn’s atmosphere since the Voyager 1 encounter and took more detailed images of the planet’s rings. Voyager 2 was downlinking at a rate of 44.8 kilobits per second. After its encounter with Saturn, Voyager 2 headed to Uranus.

› Voyager – The Interstellar Mission › SCaN History of the 1980’s

See amazing images from James Webb Space Telescope's 1st year gazing deep into the cosmos (photos)

Humanity's most powerful eye in the sky has spent a year at work and captured some remarkable images.

The universe has never looked this gorgeous.

The first images from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) were released July 12, 2022. In the year since then, the deep-space imaging probe has captured some of the most remarkable stellar photography humanity has every laid eyes on. 

As the James Webb Space Telescope celebrates one year of science, we've collected some of the most breathtaking images of the universe produced by the revolutionary instrument.

Related: The James Webb Space Telescope wraps 1st year peering across the universe. What has it discovered so far? Read more: James Webb Space Telescope celebrates 1st year of science with jaw-dropping view of cosmic nursery (photo)

JWST's 'selfie'

At a cursory glance, JWST's selfie is nothing special - just a black and white image of the telescope's mirrors. But this photo is was a big deal when it was taken, helping to ensure scientists that the telescope was ready for science.

JWST's near-infrared camera (NIRCam) contains a special lens which allows mission operators to inspect and align sections of the telescope's primary mirror. 

Instruments aboard the spacecraft are so sensitive that the heat and electricity from any type of onboard observational cameras would have created interference. So, aside from the image of a folded-up JWST floating away from its launch vehicle's payload bay, these black and white mirror selfies are our only images of the telescope in space. 

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JWST gazes at Jupiter and Europa

This is another one of Webb's early images. Infrared yellow-brown hued bands of storms layering Jupiter's atmosphere are seen alongside the planet's famous Great Red Spot shining in white, alongside Europa , one of the gas giant's several moons. It's not the most vibrant photo of Jupiter we have seen, but it's another picture with some significance: The image was captured during JWST's commissioning period, while the telescope's systems were being calibrated. 

As for Europa, the little moon to Jupiter's left in the image is getting a probe of its very own. NASA's Europa Clipper is expected to launch next year aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. The moon is believed to harbor vast underground oceans, and could contain potential conditions suitable for the development of life. 

JWST reveals Saturn's rings

Saturn is pictured here with several of the planet's numerous moons. It was created over the span of a 20-hour imaging campaign, and captured three of the planet's moons: Enceladus , Thethys and Dione . 

At last count, the ringed-planet has 145 moons . Like the Jupiter photo, this image of Saturn was created during JWST's calibration campaign in June of 2022, which managed to capture the stunning bright light reflected off Saturn's rings. 

Enceladus is another of the outer planets' active moons catching the eyes of scientists. The James Webb Space Telescope revealed geysers spewing from Enceladus's surface , which can shoot up into space, higher than the diameter of the moon itself.

Webb uncovers the colorful Tarantula Nebula

This image was captured by JWST in September 2022, and features the Tarantula Nebula , a stellar nursery located about 161,000 light-years from Earth.

The mind-boggling image of the nebula shows an area measuring 340 light-years across. The gaseous span shows the birthplace of thousands of star systems, with galaxies lighting up the background. 

JWST eyes Neptune's rings

JWST's NIRCam captured this picture of Neptune in July 2022, and is the first clear image of the icy planet's rings since the Voyager 2 probe snapped a pic in 1989. 

Thanks to Webb's considerable technology boost compared to the interplanetary Voyager probe, scientists were able to image fainter, dusty rings around the planet for the first time. Instead of the planet's usual blue atmosphere , the telescope's near-infrared wavelength lights up Neptune's high altitude clouds.

JWST gazes into mesmerizing Phantom Galaxy

JWST saw the Phantom Galaxy in a new, eerie light. Messier 74, or M74, a spiral galaxy with nearly symmetrical swirling arms, is not a newly discovered celestial object, nor was its imaging by JWST a novel event. 

However, the telescope's enhanced capabilities compared to its predecessors lends its images levels of detail unprecedented in other space telescopes. 

JWST looks upon the Pillars of Creation

The unimaginably high stretch of the Eagle Nebula's Pillars of Creation were captured by JWST in the greatest detail ever . 

Webb's ability to peer through the clouds to see stars shrouded from view has reshaped models for stellar nursery activity, and revealed thousands of stars of different ages within the pillars' columns. Of the Eagle Nebula's span, which can reach as far as 70 light-years across, the Pillars of Creation account for about 5 light-years, making just that part of the nebula larger than the distance between our sun and the nearest other star, Proxima Centauri .

The JWST Deep Field

This was JWST's first "real" image, the first publicly revealed picture used to demonstrate the telescopes tangible capabilities. Lest you mistake this picture for a smattering of random twinkles, this picture should, in fact, blow your mind. Those twinkling dots aren't stars. They're galaxies . Each tiny point of light across the blackness of space in the photo is an entire galaxy of hundreds of thousands of stars, captured from just a pinhole selection of the night sky. 

The curvature that bends the light in some of the galaxies shown is precisely what JWST was built to study. This bending phenomenon is known as gravitational lensing , which occurs when the mass of colossal objects warps the light of objects behind them. This effect can help JWST peer closer into the very beginning of the universe itself.

Webb sees Uranus like never before

Uranus does not get enough love. It's literally the coolest. 

The lopsided ice giant has the most erratic orbit of any planet in the solar system, and a ring system that might rival of Saturn's if it were close enough for better viewing. 

This image from JWST captures the stunningly blue Uranus, hung sharply in the center of its glowing rings, with 27 moons shining in shades of blue and orange in their orbits around the icy world. 

Webb amazes with the Carina Nebula 

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This was another of JWST's first released images and arguably its most well-known.

The Carina Nebula is 7,600 light-years from Earth, and spans over 300 light-years. This spectacularly colorful image shows the birthplace and death knells of thousands and thousands of stars. The dusty storms of these Cosmic Cliffs produce entire solar systems across the millennia. 

Like other nebula under Webb's watchful eye, the telescope's infrared capabilities revealed hundreds of stars previously hidden behind the clouds, including some protostars emitting jets !

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Josh Dinner is Space.com's Content Manager. He is a writer and photographer with a passion for science and space exploration, and has been working the space beat since 2016. Josh has covered the evolution of NASA's commercial spaceflight partnerships, from early Dragon and Cygnus cargo missions to the ongoing development and launches of crewed missions from the Space Coast, as well as NASA science missions and more. He also enjoys building 1:144 scale models of rockets and human-flown spacecraft. Find some of Josh's launch photography on Instagram and his website , and follow him on Twitter , where he mostly posts in haiku.

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July 9, 2024

The Head of NASA Science Spent a Whole Weekend Building a LEGO Rocket

Scientific American sat down with Nicola Fox, head of NASA science, to talk about her LEGO-building hobby, the agency’s massive Space Launch System rocket and the NASA science she’s most excited about

By Meghan Bartels

Nicola Fox, Associate Administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, seen in October 2023.

NASA/piemags/Alamy Stock Photo

Early on a recent Monday morning, the head of NASA’s science division shared to social media a triumphant photograph of a massive LEGO rocket. Scientific American called Nicola Fox, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, and she revealed that she bought the LEGO set —a mini version of the agency’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket —as a gift for herself. The kit includes 3,601 pieces and stands more than two feet tall when fully constructed. In comparison, the real rocket stands more than 300 feet tall. That rocket saw its first launch in 2022, when it flew Artemis I, an uncrewed test mission around the moon and the first step in the agency’s Artemis program to return astronauts to the lunar surface later this decade.

Scientific American talked with Fox about her LEGO hobby, the recent spate of high solar activity and upcoming NASA science to get excited about.

[ An edited transcript of the interview follows. ]

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Being head of all things science at NASA must give you a different perspective when assembling the LEGO version of a NASA rocket. What was that like?

It’s my stress relief; it’s something that I’ve always done. This time, I won’t say I was in a competition with another person at NASA, but I came home from my international travel on the Friday, and it was waiting for me. I didn’t start it because I was really tired, but because I was jet-lagged, I woke up at four o’clock in the morning, and so I started it. And as I checked social media, I saw a colleague had started theirs. It was fun to build because there were a lot of people from NASA building it that weekend, and so we were all sort of chatting with one another. Like I asked one of them, “Why is there a pink LEGO brick in the base? Is this some secret thing about Artemis that I don’t know?” And she was like, “No, it’s just there so that you know which way to orient the set.”

Did you assemble the entire rocket in one weekend?

I did do it all in one weekend. I built a lot on the Saturday and finished it on the Sunday.

This is very nosy, but I had seen that the post with the photograph was time-stamped 5 A.M. Did you pull an all-nighter to finish it?

Really? Oh, that’s strange. I thought I did it the night before. It’s one of the benefits of jet lag: it gives you more time. But I did not pull an all-nighter, I swear it.

Did you get to see the Artemis I SLS launch?

I did not, unfortunately. I took my son down for the first attempt and stood with I don’t know how many tens of thousands of people waiting for it to go, but unfortunately that launch was scrubbed. I’d already kept him out of school for one day to do that, so I had to get him home. I watched it, of course, but I didn’t see it in person.

Who do you think had an easier job: you putting together the LEGOs or the NASA folks getting that launch off?

Definitely me putting together the LEGOs. I’m sure that was much easier.

Have you gotten the LEGO rocket to your office yet?

It’s still sitting on the dining room table: no one has been able to use the dining room table. I’ve figured out how to get it there. The base is going to go in a box; the actual rocket will have to go separately because there’s no way that thing is coming in the car. The bigger problem is actually figuring out where to put it in the office so that it doesn’t get damaged. I have many, many fantastic spacecraft models in here. [ Fox points behind her .] That’s the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope there that we’re building right now, which is an astrophysics mission. And we have NEO Surveyor [a proposed asteroid-detection mission] and Dragonfly [a quadcopter bound for Saturn’s moon Titan] also in here—not LEGO.

LEGOs aside, as science administrator, what's exciting to you about SLS?

Obviously taking crew to the moon is just huge. But every time we do a launch, we put NASA science on that launch. With Artemis I [the uncrewed moon-orbiting mission in 2022], inside the Orion capsule we had some great biological and physical sciences experiments. We’re preparing for things like sustainability and adaptability for humans in space, and so we flew seeds and yeast and algae and fungi in carefully controlled containers, looking at gene expression and the way things are adapting to space.

This was the first time we were able to take those samples outside low-Earth orbit, because normally we do our experiments on the International Space Station. That is absolutely fabulous. It gives us microgravity and the ability to do things that we can’t do here on Earth. But with Orion we were able to look at not just microgravity but also the radiation environment that our astronauts will experience on the moon. It was a fantastic opportunity for us to do that. We also launched some CubeSats on Artemis I as well.

We’re excited about the type of science that we can do on the future Artemis missions. We just selected the tools that the astronauts will take down to the surface with Artemis III [currently targeting a 2026 launch, this will be the first mission to land humans since Apollo 17 in 1972], including some really cool science experiments. Every time we launch, we’re looking at the science we can do.

For Artemis II , which is due to launch next year and will carry humans around the moon but not land, do you plan to carry another group of CubeSats or just experiments inside the capsule itself?

We’re still finalizing exactly what will be on Artemis II. We certainly have a list of things that we’re ready to put on; we’re just waiting to see exactly what they can accommodate for us. So stay tuned.

What’s a particularly exciting launch that’s coming up?

We will launch Europa Clipper in October on a Falcon Heavy, in fact, and using the same boosters that we used to launch the Psyche mission to a metal asteroid last October. Europa Clipper is going out to Europa, the moon of Jupiter, which we believe to be another water world or ocean world. When the Clipper gets there, it will do about 50 close flybys of that moon. We’re hoping to fly through some of the plumes that we see coming out of the moon and maybe see things that, at some point, may have sustained life. We’re looking at the building blocks of life and what our planet might have been like before life started.

The past few months have been wild for the sun, with enormous solar flares that triggered auroras as far south as Florida in the U.S. Given your background as a heliophysicist, what’s it been like to watch this solar activity?

It’s been wonderful. You don’t want any of your spacecraft to be impacted by it, obviously. But really it’s just been amazing. And it happened just after a total solar eclipse where millions of people were able to actually see the corona, and there was some solar activity on the sun the day of the total solar eclipse . I feel like everybody’s got more of a relationship with the sun this year than normal because of seeing that. It’s a great time to be a heliophysicist.

While I have you, I did want to ask about the Voyager spacecraft. What it was like to get Voyager 1 back into normal operations after such a hard communications glitch ?

Oh my goodness, it was so amazing. And I cannot give enough credit to the team that did this. People came out of retirement. They got code that was literally written in the 1970s and upgraded it. They had to write new code. It was just incredible. The amount of people that just poured their heart and soul into it—I will tear up in a minute.

Voyager 1 is so far away that you send a command, and you wait a long, long time for a response to come back. And if you do anything big, you can actually do harm. You have to gently, gently, gently bring this spacecraft back. I got this text: We think we’ve got communication. And it’s like, “Do we? Do we have it? I need to know!” And you have to wait another couple of days, and then you stabilize the spacecraft; then you start bringing back the instruments. To have it back in science mode is just incredible.

In a historic first, all six radio frequency antennas at the Madrid Deep Space Communication Complex, part of NASA's Deep Space Network (DSN), carried out a test to receive data from the agency's Voyager 1 spacecraft at the same time on April 20, 2024.

ZUMA Press, Inc./Alamy Stock Photo

I personify spacecraft. And Voyager, you feel like they’re so brave, and they’re so lonely, and they’re so far out there, that I think it’s a real personal thing—oh that poor spacecraft, and I can’t even go get it, because it’s so far away. There’s a wonderful image from Madrid, from the Deep Space Network station that’s out in Madrid. It’s the first time they’ve ever done this, but they turned all six dishes and made an array out of the six dishes, and all of them are talking to Voyager. They’re all trying to ping Voyager, and it’s beautiful. They’ve got these great big dishes, and they’re all kind of going, “Hello! Talk to me. Talk to me.” So it was a huge team effort. And the Voyager team deserves an Olympic medal or something like that. They were so amazing.

What do you hope is next for the Voyager spacecraft?

It’s going to be decades until we can get another spacecraft out there, just because of the distances. [Voyager 1 is currently 15 billion miles away from Earth; Voyager 2 a mere 12 billion miles away.] So they are going to continue to just send us information about an area that we’ve never been to before and that it’s going to take us a long time to get to again.

Is there anything else you want people to know about regarding what the NASA science team is up to these days?

NASA science is wonderful. We have more than 140 missions in various stages and various sizes. And we just keep doing great science. We deliver science every second of every day of every year.