Voyager

On May 31, Voyager 1 will be the guest of honor at what may be the most exclusive concert in history. To mark the 200th birthday of Johann Strauss II, ESA will beam a live performance of "By the Beautiful Blue Danube" to NASA's deep space probe.

It was race against time as NASA engineers recently raced to fix a thruster problem aboard the vintage Voyager 1 deep space probe. It's hard enough to repair a craft at the edge of the solar system, but this time they faced a potentially deadly deadline.

A pair of extraordinary space missions that have been headed out of the solar system for almost half a century are getting a new lease on life as NASA engineers order the Voyager 1 and 2 deep-space probes to shut down two instruments to save power.

2024 has been a year in space that has seen successes, failures, a clutch of firsts, and some goodbyes – not to mention a long-distance probe rescue, spacesuits on the catwalk, and a couple of cosmic oddities. Let's have a look back.

After almost five decades sailing through space, NASA is trying to squeeze a few more years out of the venerable Voyager 1 deep space probe by swapping a wonky thruster system for a disused secondary one to keep its radio antenna pointing at the Earth.

We have to cut the 47-year-old space veteran some slack – it's faring much better than our 2019 laptops – but Voyager 1's five months of communicating nonsense to Earth may be over, thanks to Mission Control's 15-billion-mile remote IT fix.

NASA engineers have narrowed down the problem with the Voyager 1 deep space probe to a single faulty chip. It may now be possible to work around the corrupted memory and return the 47-year old interstellar spacecraft to an operational condition.

NASA's Voyager 1 deep space probe may get a new lease on life thanks to an unexpected download from one of its onboard computers. After months of sending back gibberish instead of collected data, the craft may have provided a clue to its salvation.

A team of scientists from the University of Oxford has concluded that our popular ideas about the colors of the planets Uranus and Neptune are all wrong. Far from being two distinct shades, they are, in fact, nearly the same shade of greenish blue.

NASA engineers are working to correct a new fault in one of the computers aboard the Voyager 1 deep space probe that is preventing the 46-year-old spacecraft from transmitting any scientific or engineering data back to Mission Control on Earth.

NASA Voyager mission engineers are preparing a software patch that will allow the thrusters aboard the Voyager 1 and 2 interstellar probes to continue operating for another five years, keeping the spacecraft in communications with Earth.

In a dramatic bit of improvisation, NASA' Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, has managed to reestablish communications with the Voyager 2 spacecraft 12.3 billion miles (19.9 billion km) from Earth after losing contact on July 21.