16 Facts About Voyager 1

Voyager 1 studied the weather, magnetic fields, and rings of the two gas giants and was the first probe to provide detailed images of their moons.

Radio communication system of Voyager 1 was designed to be used up to and beyond the limits of the Solar System.

When Voyager 1 is unable to communicate directly with the Earth, its digital tape recorder can record about 67 megabytes of data for transmission at another time.

Voyager 1 has three radioisotope thermoelectric generators mounted on a boom.

Voyager 1 finished photographing the Jovian system in April 1979.

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Voyager 1 found that about seven percent of the volume of Saturn's upper atmosphere is helium, while almost all the rest is hydrogen.

The trajectory Voyager 1 was launched into would not have allowed it to continue on to Uranus and Neptune, but could have been altered to avoid a Titan flyby and travel from Saturn to Pluto, arriving in 1986.

Voyager 1 was commanded to change its orientation to measure the sideways motion of the solar wind at that location in space in March 2011 .

Voyager 1 was expected to enter interstellar space "at any time".

Voyager 1 had reported a marked increase in its detection of charged particles from interstellar space, which are normally deflected by the solar winds within the heliosphere from the Sun.

Ed Roelof, space scientist at Johns Hopkins University and principal investigator for the Low-Energy Charged Particle instrument on the spacecraft, declared that "most scientists involved with Voyager 1 would agree that [these two criteria] have been sufficiently satisfied".

However, the last criterion for officially declaring that Voyager 1 had crossed the boundary, the expected change in magnetic field direction, had not been observed, which suggested to some that the nature of the edge of the heliosphere had been misjudged.

In 2013 Voyager 1 was exiting the Solar System at a speed of about 3.

In May 2022, NASA reported that Voyager 1 had begun transmitting "mysterious" and "peculiar" telemetric data to the Deep Space Network .

Use of the TCM thrusters will allow Voyager 1 to continue to transmit data to NASA for two to three more years.

The Voyager 1 spacecraft benefited from multiple planetary flybys to increase its heliocentric velocities, whereas New Horizons received only a single such boost, from its Jupiter flyby.