What is Voyager 1 ?

Voyager 2 launched on Aug. 20, 1977, and Voyager 1 launched about two weeks later, on Sept. 5.

The Voyager missions were intended to take advantage of a special alignment of the outer planets that happens every 176 years.

Recognizing that the Voyagers would fly out of the solar system, NASA authorized the production of two records to be placed on board the spacecraft. Sounds ranging from whale calls to the music of Chuck Berry were placed on board, as well as spoken greetings in 55 languages.

Voyager 1 almost didn't get off the ground at its launch, as its rocket came within 3.5 seconds of running out of fuel on Sept. 5, 1977.

Voyager 1's first pictures of Jupiter beamed back to Earth in April 1978, when it was 165 million miles away.

NASA's surprise, in March 1979 Voyager 1 spotted a thin ring circling the planet. It found two new moons as well — Thebe and Metis. Additionally, Voyager 1 sent back detailed pictures of the Galilean moons

Voyager 1 sent back ephemeral pictures of Europa showing a smooth surface broken up by lines, hinting at ice and maybe even an ocean underneath.

Voyager 1's closest approach to Jupiter was on March 5, 1979, when it came within 174,000 miles of the turbulent cloud tops. Then it was time to aim for Saturn

One of Voyager 1's targets was the F ring, a thin ring discovered only the year previously by Pioneer 11

Voyager's higher-resolution camera spotted two new moons, Prometheus and Pandora, whose orbits keep the debris in the F ring in a defined orbit. It also discovered Atlas, and a new ring (called the "G" ring), and took images of several other Saturnian moons.

Voyager 1's official departure from the solar system occurred in August 2012; the discovery was made public in a study published in Science the following year.

The results came to light after a powerful solar eruption was recorded in Voyager 1's plasma wave instrument between April 9 and May 22, 2013.

Researchers then backtracked through Voyager 1's data and nailed down the official departure date to sometime in August 2012

February 2018, Voyager is roughly 141 astronomical units (sun-Earth distances) from Earth. That's roughly 13.2 billion miles, or 21.2 billion kilometers. You can look at its current distance on this NASA website.

Voyager 1 sent back valuable information about conditions in this zone of the universe. Its discoveries include showing that cosmic radiation is very intense, and demonstrating how charged particles from the sun interact with those of other stars, said project scientist Ed Stone in a September 2017 interview.

Voyager's last planetary flyby of Saturn. Since then, Voyager used its standard attitude-control thrusters to swing the spacecraft in the right orientation to talk with Earth.

The Voyager spacecraft each celebrated 40 years in space in 2017, prompting celebrations from NASA and celebrities such as "Star Trek" star William Shatner. In September 2017, Shatner read out a message to the spacecraft originally crafted on Twitter, by Oliver Jenkins: "We offer friendship across the stars.

Voyager 1 has left the solar system , has already crossed the heliopause (the region of space beyond the Sun's magnetic field where the solar wind is stopped by the interstellar medium) , and is moving in interstellar space , but it is still definitely inside the Milky Way Galaxy

Traveling at speeds of over 35,000 miles per hour, it will take the Voyagers nearly 40,000 years, and they will have traveled a distance of about two light years to reach this rather indistinct boundary. But there is a more definitive and unambiguous frontier, which the Voyagers will approach and pass through.

The Voyager mission was officially approved in May 1972. Through the dedicated efforts of many skilled personnel for over three decades

The Voyagers have returned knowledge about the outer planets that had not existed in all of the preceding history of astronomy and planetary science. The Voyager spacecrafts are still performing like champs.

The Voyager spacecraft can point its scientific instruments on the scan platform to an accuracy of better than one-tenth of a degree

Voyager's television pictures, spacecraft angular rates must be extremely small to hold the cameras as steady as possible during the exposure time

The Voyager scan platform can be moved about two axes of rotation. A thumb-sized motor in the gear train drive assembly (which turns 9000 revolutions for each single revolution of the scan platform) will have rotated five million revolutions from launch through the Neptune encounter.

The Voyager gyroscopes can detect spacecraft angular motion as little as one ten-thousandth of a degree. The Sun's apparent motion in our sky moves over 40 times that amount in just one second.