Voyager

The 45-year-old Voyager 1 deep space probe is showing its age as NASA engineers try to determine why it is sending back invalid telemetry data from its attitude control system as it hurtles through interstellar space, never to return.

More than 40 years after launch, Voyager 1 is still making new discoveries. The latest achievement by the craft is the detection of a faint, plasma “hum,” indicating that there may be more activity in interstellar gas than previously thought.

New Horizons currently has a lot of time on its hands as it coasts towards interstellar space. The probe has just passed a new milestone distance, celebrating by taking a snap of its predecessor Voyager 1 – or at least, the patch of sky where it is.

It's been remarkable year for space exploration, marked by a line up of ambitious new interplanetary missions, industry firsts, and the reemergence of the US in the field of human spaceflight.

After almost eight months of silence, NASA has sent radio commands to the Voyager 2 spacecraft. On October 29, the DSS43 radio antenna in Australia sent a signal to the 43-year-old probe, which returned a confirmation signal.

The radio antenna that acts as Earth’s sole transmitter to Voyager 2 will soon undergo important upgrades, so for the next 11 months we won’t be able to send commands to The Little Spacecraft That Could.

After shutting itself down into a safe mode last week, the 42-year-old Voyager 2 spacecraft has begun collecting scientific data beyond the edges of the solar system again, making clever use of its dwindling nuclear power supply.

Voyager 2 has been going strong for over 40 years, but it’s beginning to show signs of its age. NASA is reporting that a fault has caused the spacecraft to lock itself down in safe mode, as engineers work to get it back up and running again.

If you are a space agency hoping to visit the planets of our solar system, there may be no better time to do it than when the orbits of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto bring them into a tight and neat formation. This rare planetary alignment occurs only once every 175 years, and as NASA embarked on a new chapter of space exploration under President Richard Nixon in the 1970s, it was presented with a unique opportunity. The result was the Voyager mission, humankind’s most epic astronomical adventure to date.

NASA engineers are conducting an extremely long-range reconfiguring of the space agency's two 42-year-old Voyager deep-space probes to extend their service lives by cutting back and reallocating heating resources.

Reset your interplanetary watches because data from NASA's Cassini probe has finally answered the question of how long a day on Saturn is. Using the planet's giant rings as a natural seismograph, a team of scientist calculated that Saturn rotates once every 10 hours, 33 minutes and 38 seconds.

Saturn's rings may not only vanish in 100 million years, but they may have only been around for as little as 10 million years. Using data gathered in the last days of NASA's Cassini mission, a team has concluded that the rings may have been created sometime between 10 and 100 million years ago.