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How are the Voyager spacecraft able to transmit radio messages so far?

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The two Voyage spacecraft certainly have had an amazing track record. They were sent to photograph planets like Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune and have just kept on going past the outer edge of the solar system. Voyager 1 is currently over 7 billion miles (about 11 billion kilometers) away from Earth and is still transmitting -- it takes about 10 hours for the signal to travel from the spacecraft to Earth!

The Voyager spacecraft use 23-watt radios. This is higher than the 3 watts a typical cell phone uses, but in the grand scheme of things it is still a low-power transmitter. Big radio stations on Earth transmit at tens of thousands of watts and they still fade out fairly quickly.

The key to receiving the signals is therefore not the power of the radio, but a combination of three other things:

• Very large antenna dishes
• Directional antennas that point right at each other
• Radio frequencies without a lot of man-made interference on them

The antenna dishes that the Voyager spacecraft use are big. You may have seen people who have large satellite dishes in their yards. These are typically 2 or 3 meters (6 to 10 feet) in diameter. The Voyager spacecraft has an antenna dish that is 3.7 meters (14 feet) in diameter, and it transmits to a 34 meter (100 feet or so) dish on Earth. The Voyager dish and the Earth dish are pointed right at each other. When you compare your phone's stubby, little omni-directional antenna to a 34 meter directional antenna, you can see the main thing that makes a difference!

The Voyager satellites are also transmitting in the 8 GHz range , and there is not a lot of interference at this frequency. Therefore the antenna on Earth can use an extremely sensitive amplifier and still make sense of the faint signals it receives. Then when the Earth antenna transmits back to the spacecraft, it uses extremely high power (tens of thousands of watts) to make sure the spacecraft gets the message.

Frequently Asked Questions

What role do earth's ground stations play in receiving signals from distant spacecraft like voyager, how has technology advanced to maintain communication with voyager as it moves further away.

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Voyager signal spotted by earth radio telescopes.

The signal of NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft — the most distant human-made object — has been spotted from Earth by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory’s 5,000-mile-wide (8,000-kilometer-wide) Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), which links radio telescopes from Hawaii to St. Croix.

These radio telescopes cannot see Voyager 1 in visible light, but rather “see” the spacecraft signal in radio light. Antennas make up a radio telescope like mirrors and pixels make up an optical one. The telescopes made a special attempt to look for Voyager 1’s signal to test their sensitivity.

Voyager 1’s main transmitter radiates around 22 watts, which is comparable to a typical ham radio or a refrigerator light bulb. Though incredibly weak by the standards of modern wireless communications, Voyager 1’s signal is bright when compared to most natural objects studied by radio telescopes.

The VLBA made this image of Voyager 1’s signal on Feb. 21, 2013. At the time, Voyager 1 was 11.5 billion miles (18.5 billion kilometers) away.

The image is about 0.5 arcseconds on a side. An arcsecond is the apparent size of a penny as seen from 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) away. The slightly oblong shape of the image is a result of the array’s configuration.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., communicates with Voyager 1 practically every day via NASA’s Deep Space Network. The spacecraft, launched in 1977, is currently nearly 12 billion miles (19 billion kilometers) away from the sun.

The Voyager spacecraft were built and continue to be operated by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, Calif. Caltech manages JPL for NASA. The Voyager missions are a part of NASA’s Heliophysics System Observatory, sponsored by the Heliophysics Division of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. 

For more information about Voyager, visit: https://www.nasa.gov/voyager and http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov .

For more on the National Radio Astronomy Observatory’s finding, visit: http://www.nrao.edu .

Image credit: NRAO/AUI/NSF.

Voyager 1 was 15 billion miles from home and broken. Here's what NASA did to fix it.

A scrambled computer signal helped NASA engineers resume data transmission from the distant Voyager 1, a spacecraft that was launched in 1977 and now, 15 billion miles from home, is the farthest a human-made object has traveled from Earth.

Voyager 1 – and its sister craft, Voyager 2 – are robotic space probes that became the first spacecraft to leave our solar system and plunge into interstellar space, 11 billion miles from the sun.

Step by step: Details on Voyager 1 fix .

They were designed to last five years , but have become the longest-operating spacecraft in history. Both carry gold-plated copper discs containing sounds and images from Earth, contents that were chosen by a team headed by celebrity astronomer Carl Sagan .

Voyager 2, now 12.7 billion miles from Earth, is functioning normally. However, a computer problem aboard Voyager 1 on Nov. 14, 2023, corrupted the stream of science and engineering data the craft is sending to Earth, making it unreadable , arstechnica.com reported.

Voyager 1 was able to receive communications from Earth and was still transmitting, but its returning signals were a " monotonous dial tone ,” according to space.com.

Unable to see our graphics? Click here to see them .

What's the problem with Voyager 1?

NASA and Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineers traced the problem to one of Voyager’s three onboard computers, one called a Flight Data Subsystem. The system collects information, including:

◾ Data from science instruments that monitor cosmic rays, solar wind particles, the sun's magnetic field, and other phenomena.

◾ Engineering data on spacecraft operating systems.

The Flight Data Subsystem gives that information to the spacecraft’s Telemetry Modulation Unit. The The unit converts the data to binary code – consisting of zeros and ones, the simplest form of computer code – then transmits that code to Earth, using Voyager's 12-foot antenna dish.

The data is received by NASA's Deep Space Network , giant 112-foot radio antennas placed around the world. The network handles space communications from several missions.

In November, the Telemetry Modulation Unit transmissions became a repeating pattern of zeros and ones " as if it were stuck ," NASA said.

Engineers restarted the Flight Data System in December, but that failed to fix the problem.

Voyager 1 is far away – and it's getting old

Voyager 1 has been in space for more than 46 years. Attempts to fix problems aboard the spacecraft often mean "consulting original, decades-old documents written by engineers who didn’t anticipate the issues that are arising today," NASA says. 

Engineers have consulted archived documents to find solutions to other Voyager problems in the past, wired.com says.

Engineers need time to understand how new commands will affect the spacecraft and to avoid unintended consequences. It's a complicated, time-consuming process.

A long time lag makes solving the problem more difficult. Voyager is moving at about 38,000 mph. It takes 22.5 hours for an Earth radio signal to reach Voyager and another 22.5 hours for the spacecraft’s reply to reach antenna networks on Earth.

That means engineers must wait 45 hours to get a response and learn if a command has been successful.

What was the key computer signal?

The key signal was received after engineers "poked" the spacecraft.

◾ March 1: Teams send a command known as a “poke” to Voyager. In essence, the poke tells the Flight Data System to try different sequences in its software program, in the hope a corrupted portion can be found and bypassed.

◾ March 3: Engineers receive a new signal from Voyager that is different from both the unreadable dial tone and the spacecraft’s original transmission stream.

◾ March 7: Engineers begin decoding the signal.

◾ March 10: A Deep Space Network engineer finishes decoding the new signal and finds it contains a readout of the spacecraft’s entire Flight Data System memory. That includes instructions for the spacecraft when it receives commands or when its operational status changes. 

◾ April 4: Engineers trace the problem to a chip in the FDS but are not sure what caused the problem. It could have been hit by an energetic particle from space or was simply worn out because of age, NASA says.

◾ April 18: Controllers send a command to Voyager to reposition the code.

◾ April 20: Voyager sends a transmission indicating the repositioning has worked.

What happens next?

Engineers will reposition the other sections of the code to allow Voyager to resume transmitting science data.

Voyager 2 was launched first on Aug. 20, 1977. Voyager 1 was launched Sept. 5, 1977. It was put on a faster, shorter trajectory, which took it to interstellar space ahead of Voyager 2.

The Voyagers are the only spacecraft in the interstellar void. NASA's New Horizons probe , launched Jan. 19, 2006, flew past Pluto in 2015 and is expected to enter interstellar space in the 2040s.

SOURCE USA TODAY Network reporting and research; NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory/California Institute of Technology; Reuters

March 14, 2024

10 min read

Voyager 1’s Immortal Interstellar Requiem

NASA is reaching across more than 15 billion miles to rescue its malfunctioning Voyager 1 probe—but this hallowed interstellar mission can’t live forever

By Nadia Drake

An artist's concept of NASA's Voyager 1, the space agency's venerable and farthest-flung interplanetary probe.

Mark Garlick/Science Photo Library/Getty Images

In the fall of last year, one of NASA’s most venerable spacecraft started beaming home nonsense. Its usual string of 1’s and 0’s—binary code that collectively told of its journey into the unknown—became suddenly unintelligible.

Some 15 billion miles from Earth, beyond the protective bubble blown by the sun and in interstellar space, Voyager 1 was in trouble.

“We’d gone from having a conversation with Voyager, with the 1’s and 0’s containing science data, to just a dial tone,” says Linda Spilker , Voyager project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

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Spilker joined JPL in 1977, the same year that NASA launched Voyager 1 and its twin, Voyager 2 , on what, in a way, was an endless odyssey: from Earth, to the outer solar system and ultimately to interstellar infinity . Today there are several billion people on Earth who have never taken a breath without the Voyagers in our sky, people who, like me, have only ever existed in a cosmos shared with these talkative twin spacecraft. But like people, spacecraft get old. They break down .

And all good things—and even great ones—must come to an end. After days, and weeks and then months of nothing but indecipherable binary babbling, Voyager 1’s earthbound stewards had to reckon with the idea that maybe, after more than 46 years, its time had at last run out.

The Voyager 1 team at JPL had traced the problem to the spacecraft’s Flight Data System, an onboard computer that parses and parcels engineering and science measurements for subsequent radio transmittal to Earth. One possibility was that a high-energy cosmic particle had struck Voyager 1 and caused a bit flip within the system’s memory — something that has happened more frequently as the craft navigates the hostile wilds of interstellar space. Normally, the team would simply ask the spacecraft for a memory readout, allowing its members to find and reset the errant bit.

“We’ve recovered from bit flips before. The problem this time is we don’t know where the bit flip is because we can’t see what the memory is,” says Suzanne Dodd , Voyager project manager at JPL, who, like Spilker, began her long career with work on the probes. “It’s the most serious issue we’ve had since I’ve been the project manager, and it’s scary because you lose communication with the spacecraft.”

Yesterday, the team announced a significant step in breaking through to Voyager 1. After months of stress and unsuccessful answers they have managed to decode at least a portion of the spacecraft’s gobbledygook, allowing them to (maybe) find a way to see what it has been trying to say.

“It’s an excellent development on Voyager,” says Joe Westlake , director of NASA’s heliophysics division, which oversees the mission.

In the time it will take you to read this story, Voyager 1 will have traversed approximately 10,000 miles of mostly empty space ; in the weeks it took me to report it, the probe traveled some 26 million miles. And since its communication first became garbled last November, the spacecraft has sailed another 10 light-minutes away from home. Voyager 1 and its twin are slipping away from us as surely as the passage of time itself. Sooner or later, these hallowed space-age icons will fall silent, becoming no more than distant memories.

And even among the space community, which of course loves all of its robotic explorers equally, the Voyagers are special. “They are incredibly important and much beloved spacecraft,” says Nicola Fox , NASA’s associate administrator for science. “Voyager 1 is a national treasure, along with Voyager 2 .”

As envisioned, the Voyager mission would exploit a once-in-175-year alignment of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune to slingshot through the solar system’s sparsely charted hinterlands. Legend has it that NASA’s administrator sold the project to President Richard Nixon by noting that the last time the planets were so favorably arranged, Thomas Jefferson was living in the White House. Outfitted with nuclear power sources, the Voyagers were built to last—in utter defiance of the adage that what must go up, must come down. Neither was ever intended to make planetfall again; instead they were bound for the stars. And now, nearly a half-century later, the pair have become the longest-lived and farthest-flung probes ever dispatched by humankind. (Voyager 1 is the front-runner, with its sibling trailing close behind.)

Spilker was straight out of college when she started working on the Voyagers, eager to see the outer solar system through their robotic eyes as they surfed the rare celestial alignment. “I had a telescope in third grade that I used to look at Jupiter and Saturn,” she says. “I wanted to get up really close and get a look at what these planets look like.”

Between 1979 and 1981, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 zipped by the gas giants , returning stunning images of banded Jupiter and buttery Saturn and their bewildering collection of moons. Voyager 2 went on to scrutinize the ice giants: Uranus in 1986 and Neptune in 1989. These were the first and only times anyone had seen each of these bluish ringed worlds up close.

“They were small little pinpoints of light, and now you’re flying close,” Spilker says. “And you see the cliffs of Miranda”—a bizarre Uranian moon—“and Triton, with active geysers going off.” (Nobody had expected to see an active icy world in orbit around Neptune, and even now Voyager’s 35-year-old image is still the best we have of that strange little moon.)

When the Voyagers left the realm of the known planets, each followed a different path into darkness: Voyager 1 arced up and out of the plane of the solar system, and Voyager 2 looped downward. Spilker also followed her own path: she went to graduate school and earned her doctorate in planetary science using Voyager data—not knowing that several decades later, after leading NASA’s Cassini mission to Saturn, she’d again be part of the mission that started it all.

“The chance came to go back to Voyager,” she says. “And I said, ‘Of course. I’d love to go back.’”

In the interim, as the Voyagers sailed farther from their Earthly harbor, teams shut down many of the onboard instruments, including the cameras. But the pair kept studying the space that they alone were visiting. Their main job was now to characterize the heliosphere—the solar-system-encompassing, cosmic-ray-blocking bubble formed by our sun’s wind and magnetic field. They would document the alien mix of particles and fields that pervade near nothingness. And maybe, if they got lucky, the twins would each escape the protective solar caul entirely to be reborn as true interstellar wanderers.

In 2012 Voyager 1 transcended this boundary , known as the heliopause, where the sun’s influence wanes. Before that scientists could only guess at what lay beyond this barrier and could only model how it shielded Earth from the harshness of the void. Now Voyager 1 could tell us directly about the stuff between the stars. Voyager 2 followed in 2018 , and Fox—then the new chief of NASA’s heliophysics division—was in the midst of the action.

“You’re looking at the cosmic rays going up and the solar wind going down, and it was one of those ‘oh, my god, this is so exciting’ moments,” Fox recalls. “I think of the Voyagers as one mission,” she says. “We’re putting all the data together, but they’re the ones that are out there. They’re the brave spacecraft that have left the protective bubble of the heliosphere and are out exploring interstellar space. It’s hard not to be excited by them.”

This wasn’t the first time Voyager 1 had started speaking an unintelligible language. In 2022, when the probe suffered an earlier bout of garbled telemetry, JPL engineer Bob Rasmussen was shaken out of retirement. The lab wanted to know if Rasmussen, who’d joined the spacecraft’s systems engineering team in 1975, was willing to have a think about the situation.

“I’d been happily retired for a bit more than a year at that point, with plenty else to keep me busy,” Rasmussen says. “But I like solving puzzles, and this was a tough one that I just couldn’t pass up. Cracking it took a few months, but the puzzle stream hasn’t slowed since then.”

Afterward, he stayed on-call. So last November, when Voyager 1 again started transmitting nonsense, Rasmussen was ready for more problem-solving. He was joined by a hand-picked team of specialists, and together they dove into the details for getting the ailing spacecraft back in action.

The problems were at least three layers deep. First, it takes a long time to communicate with Voyager 1. Traveling at the speed of light, the radio signals used to command the spacecraft take 22.5 hours to travel 15 billion miles—and 22.5 hours to come back. Second, the Voyagers are not exactly modern technology.

“Most things don’t last 46 years. Your clock radio and toaster aren’t going to last 46 years,” says Dodd, who started on the Voyager project straight out of school, then worked on other missions and is now back on this one.

Plus, many of the people who built and developed the spacecraft in the 1970s aren’t around to explain the rationale behind the designs.

And third, unluckily enough, whatever had mangled the spacecraft had managed to take out Voyager 1’s ability to send meaningful communications. The team was in the dark, trying to find the invisible source of an error. (Imagine trying to revive a stalled desktop computer with a frozen screen: you can’t see your cursor, and your clicks risk causing more problems—except in this case each input carries a multiday lag and could damage a precious, misbehaving artifact that is more than 15 billion miles away.) Perhaps the most vexing part was the team’s knowledge that Voyager 1 was otherwise intact and functioning as it should be.

“It’s still doing what it’s supposed to be doing,” Westlake says. “It just can’t quite figure out how to send the correct message home.”

Rasmussen and his colleagues set out to understand the spacecraft in as much detail as possible. That meant poring over the original design schematics, now yellowed and pinned to various walls—an effort that resembled “a bit of an archaeology dig,” Dodd says—and studying how past teams had addressed anomalies. That was tricky, Dodd says, because even though the team members could figure out how engineers solved a problem, they couldn’t necessarily discern the rationale behind various solutions. They’d send commands to Voyager 1 about once a week—usually on Fridays—and by Sunday, they’d hear back from the spacecraft.

“There’s suspense after each cautious move, hope with each piece that falls into place, disappointment if our hunches are wrong,” Rasmussen says.

Progress was slow. And as time crept on, the team grew more concerned. But no one was giving up, at any level of leadership.

“I will rely on the Voyager team to say, ‘Hey, Nicky, we’ve done everything , ’” Fox says. “We wouldn’t make any decisions until we knew that every single thing had been tried and tried again because we really do want to get Voyager 1 back talking to us.”

And then, in early March, something changed. In response to a command, instead of beaming back absolute gibberish, the spacecraft sent a string of numbers that looked more familiar. It proved to be a Rosetta stone moment. Soon an unnamed engineer at NASA’s Deep Space Network—the globe-girdling array of radio dishes that relays information from Earth to spacecraft—had learned how to speak Voyager 1’s jumbled language.

After translating that vaguely familiar portion of the spacecraft’s transmission, the team could see that it contained a readout of the flight data system’s memory. Now they face new questions: Can they find and correct the source of the mutated code? Can they learn whether the spacecraft is sending useful science data? Can they restore Voyager 1’s lexicon to its original state—or will they need to continue speaking in the probe’s new postheliopause patois? “The hope is that we’ll get good science data back,” Westlake says. “Thinking about something that’s been a constant throughout my entire career going away is really tough to think about.”

But either by glitch or time’s slow decay of radioactive power sources, the Voyagers will, of course, eventually fade away. Each year they lose four watts of power, and they grow ever colder. “Whether it’s this particular anomaly that gets us or one downstream, or the spacecraft gets old enough and cold enough —one day you’ll go to look for it and it has just stopped working,” Spilker says.

Like silent ambassadors or wordless emissaries, the Voyagers will keep sailing outward, still carrying us with them into the stars—“sort of like a message a bottle,” Spilker says.

Besides their science payloads, a fraction of each spacecraft’s mass was devoted to casting a cosmic message into the interstellar ocean from a lonely island called Earth. Mounted to each probe is a golden record etched with grooves encoding a selection of sights and sounds from our small corner of space and time. An accompanying stylus is positioned to play the record from the beginning, alongside a pictographic and arithmetic instruction manual.

The records are gold because gold is stable for eons, and they’re records because that was the best way to store a lot of information in the 1970s. Should they ever be recovered and decoded, the message will tell the stories of we humans—at least as envisioned (and in some cases performed) by a small group of folks that included my parents ( the late astrophysicist Frank Drake and his surviving spouse Amahl Shakhashiri Drake), astronomer Carl Sagan, documentary producer Ann Druyan and science writer Timothy Ferris. Those stories are imperfect. They’re filled with lopsided optimism and scrubbed of references to war, famine, poverty and most any other Earthly failing—a deliberate decision to hide the defects of our broken world. I know this because my dad, the record’s technical director and a pioneer in the scientific quest to find cosmic civilizations, told me about the hard choices he’d made in selecting the photographs. And I know it because my mom, who recorded the message’s Arabic greeting (“Greetings to our friends in the stars. We wish that we will meet you someday”), helped, too.

For me, as the Voyagers travel through space , they’re not only helping us understand the cosmic context in which we exist; they’re also bearing a memento of my parents into the stars. These spacecraft—and their gleaming paean to Earth—will survive for billions of years. Long after our world, our sun and everything we hold dear becomes unrecognizable, the Voyagers will remain, resolutely speeding ever farther from a home that no longer exists and containing artifacts of a civilization that once was.

That’s why, over nearly half a century, the Voyagers and their interstellar tidings have come to be bigger than the already audacious mission they were designed to accomplish. Their reach is broader. And their inevitable silence will be profound.

“The thought that they’re out there on their own and you can no longer communicate with them—it’s traumatic,” Fox says. “It’s sad. It’s really sad.”

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April 27, 2024

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NASA hears from Voyager 1, the most distant spacecraft from Earth, after months of quiet

by Marcia Dunn

NASA has finally heard back from Voyager 1 again in a way that makes sense.

The most distant spacecraft from Earth stopped sending back understandable data last November. Flight controllers traced the blank communication to a bad computer chip and rearranged the spacecraft's coding to work around the trouble.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California declared success after receiving good engineering updates late last week. The team is still working to restore transmission of the science data.

It takes 22 1/2 hours to send a signal to Voyager 1, more than 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) away in interstellar space . The signal travel time is double that for a round trip.

Contact was never lost, rather it was like making a phone call where you can't hear the person on the other end, a JPL spokeswoman said Tuesday.

Launched in 1977 to study Jupiter and Saturn, Voyager 1 has been exploring interstellar space — the space between star systems — since 2012. Its twin, Voyager 2, is 12.6 billion miles (20 billion kilometers) away and still working fine.

© 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

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How Strong is the Signal from the Voyager 1 Spacecraft When it Reaches Earth?

Question : What is the signal strength in watts received by the VLBA that is transmitted from Voyager 1? I recall that Voyager 1 transmits at 22 watts and is nearly 20 billion km away, so how weak is the signal here?  — Robert

Answer : The answer to your question happens to be included in a story about the VLBA detecting Voyager 1 in 2014.  As you said, the radio strength of Voyager 1 is about 23 watts.  This signal is directed toward Earth, but since Voyager 1 is about 15 billion kilometers from Earth, by the time Voyager 1’s signal reaches us its power is less than an attowatt, or a billionth of a billionth of a watt.

Jeff Mangum

pale blue dot

Voyager 1: How far can it go before we lose contact?

Launched by NASA on September 5, 1977 , to study the outer solar system , the Voyager 1 is the furthest human-made object from Earth. As of October 2022, it is more than 14,749,847,051 miles (23,737,577,852 km) away from our home planet. It is also moving away at a speed of 38,026.77 mph (61,198.15 km/h) relative to the Sun.

Despite that huge distance (even the light covers that distance in almost 22 hours!), thanks to NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN), we can still communicate with it (also with its sister, Voyager 2). But how far can Voyager 1 go before we lose communication?

How long we can communicate with Voyager 1?

Using the Deep Space Network, NASA transmits a 20 kW radio signal from Earth. It takes almost 22 hours for the signal to reach Voyager 1 (so it is almost 22 light hours away from the Earth).

The Deep Space Network (DSN) is a worldwide network of U.S. spacecraft communication facilities, located in the United States (California), Spain (Madrid), and Australia (Canberra), that supports NASA’s interplanetary spacecraft missions. Each complex has a huge 70-meter antenna along with multiple 34-meter antennae which can be combined to pick up signals that are thousands of times weaker than a standard FM signal.

The space probe’s sensitive antenna picks up the signal transmitted from the DSN and replies using a 20-watt signal. It takes another 22 hours to reach the Earth and as the signal travels through space, it weakens. By the time it reaches Earth, it’s barely detectable – but the DSN is able to detect it.

Related: Five space probes leaving the solar system (for now)

Theoretically, there isn’t really a limit on how far we can communicate with objects in space – as long as they reply back to us. With our current technology, we could reliably communicate with the Voyager 1 for thousands of years, even if it’s many light years away from us.

Despite that, we can continue to communicate with Voyager 1 for only a few years more. The reason is: the probe’s nuclear-powered electrical supply weakens each day.

Voyager 1 does not use a nuclear reactor to power itself. It uses three RTG units – (Radioisotope Thermal Generator), which convert the heat from decaying plutonium into electricity using Peltier devices. It is not very fancy, has no moving parts, and is very reliable, but it produces a lot less power than a nuclear reactor.

Voyager 1 and the “Pale blue dot”

Back in 1990, in order to save power, engineers turned off the spacecraft’s camera. But, before that, it was commanded by NASA to turn its camera around and take a photograph of Earth across a great expanse of space, at the request of Carl Sagan.

Taken from a record distance of about 6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles, 40 AU) from Earth, the photo is known as the  Pale Blue Dot . In the photograph, Earth is shown as a fraction of a pixel (0.12 pixel in size) against the vastness of space.

The “Pale Blue Dot” is still the farthest image of Earth we’ve ever taken (as of January 2019).

But the old probe still amazes us: on November 28, 2017, a set of thrusters aboard it successfully fired up for the first time since November 1980, after 37 years without use.

Today, only 4 out of 11 scientific instruments on Voyager 1 are still active. These instruments are being used to collect data on magnetic fields, solar winds, and cosmic rays outside of our solar system .

On August 25, 2012 , Voyager 1 became the first spacecraft to cross the heliopause (see notes 1) (the vast, bubble-like region of space that surrounds and is created by the Sun) and enter the interstellar medium.

Related: NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft has technical problems, it is generating random-looking telemetry data, and as a result, the spacecraft doesn’t know where it is

We can continue to communicate with Voyager 1 until 2025

Voyager 1’s extended mission is expected to continue until around 2025 when its radioisotope thermoelectric generators will no longer supply enough electric power to operate its scientific instruments. At that time, it will be more than 15.5 billion miles (25 billion km) away from the Earth.

Scientists will communicate with Voyager 1 and receive the important information it gathers until it eventually sends its last bit of data and disappears silently into space, never to be heard from again.

Video: How far can Voyager 1 go before we lose contact?

The video published by the Primal Space channel below looks at how we communicate with Voyager and when it will eventually stop receiving our signals.

• The heliosphere is the vast, bubble-like region of space that surrounds and is created by the Sun. In plasma physics terms, this is the cavity formed by the Sun in the surrounding interstellar medium. The “bubble” of the heliosphere is continuously “inflated” by plasma originating from the Sun, known as the solar wind. Outside the heliosphere, this solar plasma gives way to the interstellar plasma permeating our galaxy. Radiation levels inside and outside the heliosphere differ; in particular, the galactic cosmic rays are less abundant inside the heliosphere, so the planets inside (including Earth) are partly shielded from their impact. The word “heliosphere” is said to have been coined by Alexander J. Dessler, who is credited with the first use of the word in scientific literature.
• Voyager Mission Status page on NASA.gov
• Voyager 1 on Wikipedia
• Voyager 1’s Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators (RTG) on NASA.gov
• Heliosphere on Wikipedia
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Join the Conversation

I’m looking at the image of the pale blue dot. How did we ascertain that this dot is, in fact, Earth? Where in this image is everything else? ie: the other planets and Sun. What was used as a point of reference? The cosmos is the only thing that truly puzzles me. Great article.

I am an engineer and a Cornell graduate where Carl Sagan and Tommy Gold were on the faculty and helped get the Voyager programs started. The payoff has been unbelievable. We are still getting data from deep in interstellar space, but I don’t know for how much longer.

Thank you enjoyed reading this, fascinating read.

Time and space, the vastness of the universe it all blows my mind but reminds me just how small our planet is in the great scheme of things.

The electrical supply has lasted for many years, why is it we must put up with inferior systems at home?

When you realize just how vast the universe is you know there is other life out there. Even if there is only one planet per galaxy that would mean there are hundreds of thousands of planets with life. It would be an awful big waste of space otherwise.

Doing a quick bit of math if the nearest star is 4 lightyears away that means it is 23 trillion miles from us (((4 x 365 x 24 x 60 x60 x300,000km/sec)/8) x5)= 23.65 followed by 12 noughts. By the time we lose contact with Voyager 1 at 15.5 billion miles from earth it will not have covered even 1% at this distance. We may have left the house but we aren’t even out of the backyard yet….

I just wanted to reach out and let you know that your content has been quite helpful for me.

My friends from Allthingsaustria recommended your site and I’ve not been disappointed at all 🙂

Cheers, Mihkael Caron

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Past Chronicle

Astrophysicist Claims Voyager 1 Would Be Visible in Deep Space Despite Being Close to 15 Billion Miles From the Sun

Posted: July 12, 2024 | Last updated: July 12, 2024

An astrophysicist has offered a unique perspective on a captivating question: could we see NASA’s Voyager 1 probe if we were to travel alongside it billions of miles away from the Sun in the vastness of space? 

Speaking with Business Insider, he explained that if we flew beside the Voyager 1 craft, there would surprisingly be enough light to observe the craft. The scientist shared his opinion following a considerable debate on Reddit, shedding light on a question that many failed to answer.    

Space Exploration

Over the past century, humanity's fascination with the stars has only grown, and science is now in a position that allows us to explore other regions in our galaxy.

Advancements such as the release of the James Webb Space Telescope in 2021 have allowed researchers to peer further back in time than ever before. Meanwhile, headway in spacecraft capabilities has allowed us to send unmanned craft into the depths of space on reconnaissance missions.  

Voyager 1 Drifts Alone in Space

One such mission saw the Voyager 1 probe embark on a one-way journey into the depths of space in 1977. According to NASA , as of April 2024, the small craft is still sending updates back to Earth.  

Over the past five decades, the probe has ventured deep into our galaxy and is currently recognized as the farthest man-made object from our world. It continues to travel around 15 billion miles from the sun.   

The Achievements of the Voyager Probes

Despite occasional glitches, the Voyager probe has continued its journey into interstellar space, sending back invaluable data to Earth. Its unique achievements stand as a testament to human ingenuity and the spirit of exploration. 

Speaking on the achievements of the Voyager 1 probe and its journey into deep space, Alan Cummings, a cosmic-ray physicist at Caltech, said , "These are the only spacecraft that has been there.”  

NASA’s Voyager Craft

The Voyager craft has provided NASA researchers with compelling images of our solar system, significantly expanding our knowledge of the celestial bodies.     

Despite having an original mission time of only five years, the project continues to help NASA further its understanding of the universe, and its impact is felt to this day.   

Beyond the Magnetic Pull of the Sun

Despite the groundbreaking early images of celestial bodies in our solar system, including the detection of volcanic eruptions on Jupiter's moon Io and the Icy Europa, Voyager has made other landmark achievements. 

One of the most fascinating is that the small craft has ventured beyond the magnetic pull of our sun and is currently around 15 billion miles away from the celestial body that warms our planet.  

Questions for Voyager 1

Anyone who has followed the story of the Voyager's journey cannot help but wonder what it's like out there in the depths of space. What has the probe seen, and how long will it take to report back?   

Others are more interested in its distance from the sun and whether any light exists that far from our star. Could we even see the probe if we floated beside it, or would it be nothing but darkness ?   

Reddit Users Ask Similar Questions

It turns out a user of the popular forum Reddit asked a similar question: “If we were somehow able to stand next to Voyager 1 in space, would we be able to see it?”  

While it's a great question, as the Voyager is at such an unimaginable distance from the sun, many were quick to suggest there would be no light at all. However, this might not necessarily be the case.   

Getting to the Bottom of the Question

To get to the bottom of the question, Business Insider employed the help of Michael Zemcov, an experimental astrophysicist and professor at Rochester Institute of Technology,   

Zemcov first acknowledged the fascinating question, stating , "Oh, gosh, that's, so this is a really interesting question.”    

Photons in Deep Space

The astrophysicist followed it up by suggesting that even in the depths of space where Voyager is currently floating, it's still relatively bright.   

Researchers have suggested there are several reasons behind this, the most obvious being that there are many sources of photons, the particles that makeup rays of visible light. But would there be enough to visibly see the Voyager 1 craft?   

Astrophysicist Breaks Down Question With Math

The astrophysicist broke the question down and proceeded to apply maths to the equation, which enabled him to come up with an answer to the highly debated question.  

According to Zemcov, you first take Voyager's distance and compare it with the distance between the sun and Earth.    

Astrophysicist Uses Calculations to Gauge Level Light in Space

Zemcov continued by explaining that this distance can be used to calculate the amount of light there would be for objects as far away from the sun as Voyager 1.      

Despite the enormous distance that separates the Voyager craft and the sun, he emphasized that scientists still don’t know if there's a limit to how far light can travel.     

How Much Light Would There Be?

So, according to Zemcov’s maths, there would still be a sufficient level of light even that deep in space. 

“This leaves you with an estimate of about 25,000 times fainter than the brightness during the day on Earth. That's still about 15 times brighter than the light Earth gets during a full moon on a clear night,” he said .  

Light in the Depths of Space

So, if we take into account everything that Zemcov has suggested, if you were floating in the depths of space alongside Voyager 1, there's a good chance you would see the craft.    

While this seems surreal to many, as remember the probe is currently close to 15 billion miles away from our sun and Earth, it is certainly plausible that the Voyager craft would be visible if you were floating beside it. 

Catching a Glimpse of the Voyager

According to Zemcov, it doesn’t mean it would light up like a Christmas tree; however, there would be enough light present to catch a glimpse of it.      

“In that much light, you would definitely be able to see the side of the probe facing the sun in detail, though you might not be able to see all of its colors,” he said .    

Voyager Will Remained Illuminated for a Long Time

The Voyager probe will continue traveling across our galaxy for quite some time unless something unfortunate occurs, and thanks to the sun's sphere of influence, it will remain illuminated.

Zemcov explained the probe will continue to shine under the sun's light for hundreds and, quite possibly, thousands of years.    

A Lot Further to Go

While the astrophysicist admits the probe has traveled a staggering distance over the past decades, in terms of the size of the universe, it has traveled very little. 

"The point is, in terms of that distance, like Voyager has hardly gotten anywhere,” said Zemcov, speaking on the vastness of our universe and its sheer size.  

A Better Understanding of Interstellar Space

Shortly before Voyager 1 left Earth in 1977, a twin probe, Voyager 2, launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida. 

 It was initially directed towards Saturn and Jupiter and even flew by Neptune and Uranus, making it the only spacecraft to visit the ice giants.   

Voyager Probes Complete Their Missions

Voyager 1 and 2 completed their primary missions several years after they were initially launched. 

They continue to send home data as they journey through interstellar space, but certain problems have occurred over the years, putting the craft in jeopardy. Most recently, NASA researchers spent five months trying to re-establish communication with the probe.    

Problem Detected in November

Reports suggest a problem with the Voyager 1 craft appeared in early November of last year. While NASA claimed to still be in contact with the craft at the time, the information was unreadable.  

This kicked off what would become a five-long effort to solve the problem. Yet, troubleshooting problems on a craft that is 15 billion miles away isn’t exactly easy. However, the NASA engineers were able to solve the problem in the end.     

Voyager Probe Phones Home

After five long months of limited contact, NASA researchers arrived at work this past April to the news that their nomadic probe had finally called home, per NBC News .   

For those involved in NASA’s longest-running space mission, the call brought a huge sigh of relief, and joy spread throughout the office.  

NASA Researchers Over the Moon With News

Linda Spilker, the project scientist for the Voyager 1 mission at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said “That Saturday morning, we all came in, we’re sitting around boxes of doughnuts and waiting for the data to come back from Voyager.”   

She continued , “We knew exactly what time it was going to happen, and it got really quiet and everybody just sat there and they’re looking at the screen.”

Celebrations in the Room

As the call came through, Spilker said the entire room erupted into a celebration. 

“There were cheers, people raising their hands,” she said . “And a sense of relief, too — that OK, after all this hard work and going from barely being able to have a signal coming from Voyager to being in communication again, that was a tremendous relief and a great feeling.”  

Voyager 1 Continues to Explore the Universe

Voyager 1 will continue to venture farther from Earth as it goes where no craft has ever been before.   

While Spilker admits it will be a sad day when the mission ends, the Voyager craft will live on as “our silent ambassadors” and will be remembered as pioneers of interstellar space exploration.  

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NASA’s Planetary Radar Tracks Two Large Asteroid Close Approaches

The Goldstone Solar System Radar, part of NASA’s Deep Space Network, made these observations of the recently discovered 500-foot-wide (150-meter-wide) asteroid 2024 MK, which made its closest approach — within about 184,000 miles (295,000 kilometers) of Earth — on June 29.

Because close approaches by asteroids the size of 2024 MK are relatively rare, JPL’s planetary radar team gathered as much information about the near-Earth object as possible. This mosaic shows the spinning asteroid in one-minute increments about 16 hours after its closest approach with Earth.

The Deep Space Network’s Goldstone planetary radar had a busy few days observing asteroids 2024 MK and 2011 UL21 as they safely passed Earth.

Scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California recently tracked two asteroids as they flew by our planet. One turned out to have a little moon orbiting it, while the other had been discovered only 13 days before its closest approach to Earth. There was no risk of either near-Earth object impacting our planet, but the radar observations taken during these two close approaches will provide valuable practice for planetary defense, as well as information about their sizes, orbits, rotation, surface details, and clues as to their composition and formation.

Passing Earth on June 27 at a distance of 4.1 million miles (6.6 million kilometers), or about 17 times the distance between the Moon and Earth, the asteroid 2011 UL21 was discovered in 2011 by the NASA-funded Catalina Sky Survey, in Tucson, Arizona. But this is the first time it has come close enough to Earth to be imaged by radar. While the nearly mile-wide (1.5-kilometer-wide) object is classified as being potentially hazardous, calculations of its future orbits show that it won’t pose a threat to our planet for the foreseeable future.

These seven radar observations by the Deep Space Network’s Goldstone Solar System Radar shows the mile-wide asteroid 2011 UL21 during its June 27 close approach with Earth from about 4 million miles away. The asteroid and its small moon (a bright dot at the bottom of the image) are circled in white.

Using the Deep Space Network ’s 230-foot-wide (70-meter) Goldstone Solar System Radar , called Deep Space Station 14 (DSS-14), near Barstow, California, JPL scientists transmitted radio waves to the asteroid and received the reflected signals by the same antenna. In addition to determining the asteroid is roughly spherical, they discovered that it’s a binary system: A smaller asteroid, or moonlet, orbits it from a distance of about 1.9 miles (3 kilometers).

News from Infinity and Beyond

“It is thought that about two-thirds of asteroids of this size are binary systems, and their discovery is particularly important because we can use measurements of their relative positions to estimate their mutual orbits, masses, and densities, which provide key information about how they may have formed,” said Lance Benner, principal scientist at JPL who helped lead the observations.

Second Close Approach

Assembled into this animation, observations from NASA’s Goldstone Solar System Radar show the tumbling asteroid 2024 MK shortly after it made closest approach with our planet on June 29. The 150-meter-wide asteroid’s orbit was slightly altered by Earth’s gravity as it passed.

Two days later, on June 29, the same team observed the asteroid 2024 MK pass our planet from a distance of only 184,000 miles (295,000 kilometers), or slightly more than three-quarters of the distance between the Moon and Earth. About 500 feet (150 meters) wide, this asteroid appears to be elongated and angular, with prominent flat and rounded regions. For these observations, the scientists also used DSS-14 to transmit radio waves to the object, but they used Goldstone’s 114-foot (34-meter) DSS-13 antenna to receive the signal that bounced off the asteroid and came back to Earth. The result of this “bistatic” radar observation is a detailed image of the asteroid’s surface, revealing concavities, ridges, and boulders about 30 feet (10 meters) wide.

Close approaches of near-Earth objects the size of 2024 MK are relatively rare, occurring about every couple of decades, on average, so the JPL team sought to gather as much data about the object as possible. “This was an extraordinary opportunity to investigate the physical properties and obtain detailed images of a near-Earth asteroid,” said Benner.

The asteroid 2024 MK was first reported on June 16 by the NASA-funded Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) at Sutherland Observing Station in South Africa. Its orbit was changed by Earth’s gravity as it passed by, reducing its 3.3-year orbital period around the Sun by about 24 days. Although it is classified as a potentially hazardous asteroid, calculations of its future motion show that it does not pose a threat to our planet for the foreseeable future.

The Goldstone Solar System Radar Group is supported by NASA’s Near-Earth Object Observations Program within the Planetary Defense Coordination Office at the agency’s headquarters in Washington. Managed by JPL, the Deep Space Network receives programmatic oversight from Space Communications and Navigation program office within the Space Operations Mission Directorate, also at NASA Headquarters.

More information about planetary radar and near-Earth objects can be found at:

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/asteroid-watch

News Media Contact

Ian J. O’Neill

Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

818-354-2649

[email protected]

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How to Watch England vs. Netherlands TV Channel, Time, Live Stream - UEFA Euro 2024

In one of the 2024 UEFA European Championship semifinals, on July 10 at 3:00 PM ET, England will play the Netherlands .

Interested in watching the game between England and the Netherlands? You can do so on FOX.

Keep up with every Euro 2024 match on FOX Sports .

How to Watch England vs. Netherlands

• Match Day: Wednesday, July 10, 2024
• Match Time: 3:00 PM ET
• Venue: Signal Iduna Park
• Location: Dortmund, Germany
• TV Channel: FOX
• Streaming: FOX Sports

England's Roster

The netherlands' roster, england player insights.

• In five matches for England in UEFA Euro, Harry Kane has netted two goals without an assist.
• Jude Bellingham has netted two goals with zero assists in five matches for England in UEFA Euro.
• In UEFA Euro (five matches), Bukayo Saka has put up one goal and one assist for England.
• Ivan Toney has registered one assist for England in UEFA Euro with zero goals.

The Netherlands Player Insights

• In UEFA Euro, Cody Mathes Gakpo has three goals (in five matches) and one assist for the Netherlands.
• In five UEFA European Championship matches, Xavi Simons has failed to score a goal but has registered two assists (second in the 2024 UEFA European Championship).
• In five UEFA European Championship matches, Memphis Depay has recorded one goal with one assist.
• Wout Weghorst has contributed one goal and one assist in UEFA Euro.

England's Euro 2024 Performance

• England has scored five goals in five matches in this tournament (seventh in UEFA European Championship), and the Netherlands has allowed five goals in five matches (12th in tournament).
• England is fifth in UEFA Euro in goal differential at +2.
• Saka, in the match against Switzerland , scored a goal.
• Last time out, England won 1-1 against Switzerland, taking 12 shots and outshooting Switzerland by one.

The Netherlands' Euro 2024 Performance

• Offensively, the Netherlands is third in UEFA Euro (nine goals, 1.8 per match). And defensively, England is fourth (three goals conceded, 0.6 per match).
• The Netherlands is third in UEFA Euro in goal differential at +4.
• In its last game, the Netherlands recorded a 2-1 victory over Turkey on July 6, even though it was outshot 15 to nine.
• Stefan De Vrij netted one goal (on one shot) to lead the Netherlands in the match.

FOX Sports created this story using technology provided by Data Skrive and data from Sportradar.

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We finally know why NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft stopped communicating — scientists are working on a fix

The first spacecraft to explore beyond the solar system started spouting gibberish late last year. Now, NASA knows why.

NASA engineers have discovered the cause of a communications breakdown between Earth and the interstellar explorer Voyager 1. It would appear that a small portion of corrupted memory exists in one of the spacecraft's computers. 

The glitch caused Voyager 1 to send unreadable data back to Earth, and is found in the NASA spacecraft's flight data subsystem (FDS). That's the system responsible for packaging the probe's science and engineering data before the telemetry modulation unit (TMU) and radio transmitter send it back to mission control. 

The source of the issue began to reveal itself when Voyager 1 operators sent the spacecraft a "poke" on March 3, 2024. This was intended to prompt FDS to send a full memory readout back to Earth.

The readout confirmed to the NASA team that about 3% of the FDS memory had been corrupted, and that this was preventing the computer from carrying out its normal operations.

Related: NASA finds clue while solving Voyager 1's communication breakdown case

Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 became the first human-made object to leave the solar system and enter interstellar space in 2012. Voyager 2 followed its spacecraft sibling out of the solar system in 2018, and is still operational and communicating well with  Earth.

After 11 years of interstellar exploration, in Nov. 2023, Voyager 1's binary code — the computer language it uses to communicate with Earth — stopped making sense. Its 0's and 1's didn't mean anything anymore.

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"Effectively, the call between the spacecraft and the Earth was still connected, but Voyager's 'voice' was replaced with a monotonous dial tone," Voyager 1's engineering team previously  told Space.com .

The team strongly suspects this glitch is the result of a single chip that's responsible for storing part of the affected portion of the FDS memory ceasing to work.

Currently, however, NASA can’t say for sure what exactly caused that particular issue. The chip could have been struck by a high-speed energetic particle from space or, after 46 years serving Voyager 1, it may simply have worn out.

—  Voyager 2: An iconic spacecraft that's still exploring 45 years on

—  NASA's interstellar Voyager probes get software updates beamed from 12 billion miles away

—  NASA Voyager 2 spacecraft extends its interstellar science mission for 3 more years

Voyager 1 currently sits around 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, which means it takes 22.5 hours to receive a radio signal from it — and another 22.5 hours for the spacecraft to receive a response via the Deep Space Network's antennas. Solving this communication issue is thus no mean feat.

Yet, NASA scientists and engineers are optimistic they can find a way to help FDS operate normally, even without the unusable memory hardware.

Solving this issue could take weeks or even months, according to NASA — but if it is resolved, Voyager 1 should be able to resume returning science data about what lies outside the solar system.

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: [email protected].

Robert Lea is a science journalist in the U.K. whose articles have been published in Physics World, New Scientist, Astronomy Magazine, All About Space, Newsweek and ZME Science. He also writes about science communication for Elsevier and the European Journal of Physics. Rob holds a bachelor of science degree in physics and astronomy from the U.K.’s Open University. Follow him on Twitter @sciencef1rst.

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• jcs Funny timing for this article, when I am streaming an old Star Trek movie. So, surely this didn't cause a 3 byte glitch removing the O, Y and A from Voyager's name buffer? Get it? Reply
• bwana4swahili It is quite amazing it has lasted this long in a space environment. Reply

bwana4swahili said: It is quite amazing it has lasted this long in a space environment.

• HankySpanky So now we know even better for next time. Perhaps a spare chipset that is not redundant but is ready to take over, stored in a protective environment. A task NASA can handle. We'll find out in 100 year or so - if humanity still exists. Reply

HankySpanky said: So now we know even better for next time. Perhaps a spare chipset that is not redundant but is ready to take over, stored in a protective environment. A task NASA can handle. We'll find out in 100 year or so - if humanity still exists.

• Classical Motion I'm afraid it might self repair. And download galactic knowledge, then decide we are a danger. And turn around. Reply

Classical Motion said: I'm afraid it might self repair. And download galactic knowledge, then decide we are a danger. And turn around.

• jcs ROFLOL! And a hot bald chick delivering the bad news! Reply
• View All 8 Comments

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• Frequently Asked Questions
• Q & A with Ed Stone

golden record

Where are they now.

• frequently asked questions
• Q&A with Ed Stone

Did You Know?

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.

It must come as no surprise that there are many remarkable, "gee-whiz" facts associated with the various aspects of the Voyager mission. These tidbits have been summarized below in appropriate categories. Several may seem difficult to believe, but they are all true and accurate.

Overall Mission

The total cost of the Voyager mission from May 1972 through the Neptune encounter (including launch vehicles, radioactive power source (RTGs), and DSN tracking support) is 865 million dollars. At first, this may sound very expensive, but the fantastic returns are a bargain when we place the costs in the proper perspective. It is important to realize that:

• on a per-capita basis, this is only 8 cents per U.S. resident per year, or roughly half the cost of one candy bar each year since project inception. the entire cost of Voyager is a fraction of the daily interest on the U.S. national debt.
• A total of 11,000 workyears was devoted to the Voyager project through the Neptune encounter. This is equivalent to one-third the amount of effort estimated to complete the great pyramid at Giza to King Cheops.

A total of five trillion bits of scientific data had been returned to Earth by both Voyager spacecraft at the completion of the Neptune encounter. This represents enough bits to fill more than seven thousand music CDs.

The sensitivity of our deep-space tracking antennas located around the world is truly amazing. The antennas must capture Voyager information from a signal so weak that the power striking the antenna is only 10 exponent -16 watts (1 part in 10 quadrillion). A modern-day electronic digital watch operates at a power level 20 billion times greater than this feeble level.

Voyager Spacecraft

Each Voyager spacecraft comprises 65,000 individual parts. Many of these parts have a large number of "equivalent" smaller parts such as transistors. One computer memory alone contains over one million equivalent electronic parts, with each spacecraft containing some five million equivalent parts. Since a color TV set contains about 2500 equivalent parts, each Voyager has the equivalent electronic circuit complexity of some 2000 color TV sets.

Like the HAL computer aboard the ship Discovery from the famous science fiction story 2001: A Space Odyssey, each Voyager is equipped with computer programming for autonomous fault protection. The Voyager system is one of the most sophisticated ever designed for a deep-space probe. There are seven top-level fault protection routines, each capable of covering a multitude of possible failures. The spacecraft can place itself in a safe state in a matter of only seconds or minutes, an ability that is critical for its survival when round-trip communication times for Earth stretch to several hours as the spacecraft journeys to the remote outer solar system.

Both Voyagers were specifically designed and protected to withstand the large radiation dosage during the Jupiter swing-by. This was accomplished by selecting radiation-hardened parts and by shielding very sensitive parts. An unprotected human passenger riding aboard Voyager 1 during its Jupiter encounter would have received a radiation dose equal to one thousand times the lethal level.

The Voyager spacecraft can point its scientific instruments on the scan platform to an accuracy of better than one-tenth of a degree. This is comparable to bowling strike-after-strike ad infinitum, assuming that you must hit within one inch of the strike pocket every time. Such precision is necessary to properly center the narrow-angle picture whose square field-of-view would be equivalent to the width of a bowling pin.

To avoid smearing in Voyager's television pictures, spacecraft angular rates must be extremely small to hold the cameras as steady as possible during the exposure time. Each spacecraft is so steady that angular rates are typically 15 times slower than the motion of a clock's hour hand. But even this was not steady enough at Neptune, where light levels are 900 times fainter than those on Earth. Spacecraft engineers devised ways to make Voyager 30 times steadier than the hour hand on a clock.

The electronics and heaters aboard each nearly one-ton Voyager spacecraft can operate on only 400 watts of power, or roughly one-fourth that used by an average residential home in the western United States.

A set of small thrusters provides Voyager with the capability for attitude control and trajectory correction. Each of these tiny assemblies has a thrust of only three ounces. In the absence of friction, on a level road, it would take nearly six hours to accelerate a large car up to a speed of 48 km/h (30 mph) using one of the thrusters.

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. This is equivalent to the number of automobile crankshaft revolutions during a trip of 2725 km (1700 mi), about the distance from Boston,MA to Dallas,TX.

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.

The tape recorder aboard each Voyager has been designed to record and playback a great deal of scientific data. The tape head should not begin to wear out until the tape has been moved back and forth through a distance comparable to that across the United States. Imagine playing a two-hour video cassette on your home VCR once a day for the next 33 years, without a failure.

The Voyager magnetometers are mounted on a frail, spindly, fiberglass boom that was unfurled from a two-foot-long can shortly after the spacecraft left Earth. After the boom telescoped and rotated out of the cannister to an extension of nearly 13 meters (43 feet), the orientations of the magnetometer sensors were controlled to an accuracy better than two degrees.

Each Voyager used the enormous gravity field of Jupiter to be hurled on to Saturn, experiencing a Sun-relative speed increase of roughly 35,700 mph. As total energy within the solar system must be conserved, Jupiter was initially slowed in its solar orbit---but by only one foot per trillion years. Additional gravity-assist swing-bys of Saturn and Uranus were necessary for Voyager 2 to complete its Grand Tour flight to Neptune, reducing the trip time by nearly twenty years when compared to the unassisted Earth-to-Neptune route.

The Voyager delivery accuracy at Neptune of 100 km (62 mi), divided by the trip distance or arc length traveled of 7,128,603,456 km (4,429,508,700 mi), is equivalent to the feat of sinking a 3630 km (2260 mi) golf putt, assuming that the golfer can make a few illegal fine adjustments while the ball is rolling across this incredibly long green.

Voyager's fuel efficiency (in terms of mpg) is quite impressive. Even though most of the launch vehicle's 700 ton weight is due to rocket fuel, Voyager 2's great travel distance of 7.1 billion km (4.4 billion mi) from launch to Neptune resultsed in a fuel economy of about 13,000 km per liter (30,000 mi per gallon). As Voyager 2 streaked by Neptune and coasts out of the solar system, this fuel economy just got better and better!

The resolution of the Voyager narrow-angle television cameras is sharp enough to read a newspaper headline at a distance of 1 km (0.62 mi).

Pele, the largest of the volcanoes seen on Jupiter's moon Io, is throwing sulfur and sulfur-dioxide products to heights 30 times that of Mount Everest, and the fallout zone covers an area the size of France. The eruption of Mount St. Helens was but a tiny hiccup in comparison (admittedly, Io's surface-level gravity is some six times weaker than that of Earth).

The smooth water-ice surface of Jupiter's moon Europa may hide an ocean beneath, but some scientists believe any past oceans have turned to slush or ice. In 2010: Odyssey Two, Arthur C. Clarke wraps his story around the possibility of life developing within the oceans of Europa.

The rings of Saturn appeared to the Voyagers as a dazzling necklace of 10,000 strands. Trillions of ice particles and car-sized bergs race along each of the million-kilometer-long tracks, with the traffic flow orchestrated by the combined gravitational tugs of Saturn, a retinue of moons and moonlets, and even nearby ring particles. The rings of Saturn are so thin in proportion to their 171,000 km (106,000 mi) width that, if a full-scale model were to be built with the thickness of a phonograph record the model would have to measure four miles from its inner edge to its outer rim. An intricate tapestry of ring-particle patterns is created by many complex dynamic interactions that have spawned new theories of wave and particle motion.

Saturn's largest moon Titan was seen as a strange world with its dense atmosphere and variety of hydrocarbons that slowly fall upon seas of ethane and methane. To some scientists, Titan, with its principally nitrogen atmosphere, seemed like a small Earth whose evolution had long ago been halted by the arrival of its ice age, perhaps deep-freezing a few organic relics beneath its present surface.

The rings of Uranus are so dark that Voyager's challenge of taking their picture was comparable to the task of photographing a pile of charcoal briquettes at the foot of a Christmas tree, illuminated only by a 1 watt bulb at the top of the tree, using ASA-64 film. And Neptune light levels will be less than half those at Uranus.

Through the ages, astronomers have argued without agreeing on where the solar system ends. One opinion is that the boundary is where the Sun’s gravity no longer dominates – a point beyond the planets and beyond the Oort Cloud. This boundary is roughly about halfway to the nearest star, Proxima Centauri. 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. This is the heliopause, which is the boundary area between the solar and the interstellar wind. When Voyager 1 crosses the solar wind termination shock, it will have entered into the heliosheath, the turbulent region leading up to the heliopause. When the Voyagers cross the heliopause, hopefully while the spacecraft are still able to send science data to Earth, they will be in interstellar space even though they will still be a very long way from the “edge of the solar system”. Once Voyager is in interstellar space, it will be immersed in matter that came from explosions of nearby stars. So, in a sense, one could consider the heliopause as the final frontier.

Barring any serious spacecraft subsystem failures, the Voyagers may survive until the early twenty-first century (~ 2025), when diminishing power and hydrazine levels will prevent further operation. Were it not for these dwindling consumables and the possibility of losing lock on the faint Sun, our tracking antennas could continue to "talk" with the Voyagers for another century or two!

The 7 Best RC Boats for Racing Around Lakes, Riding Upstream, and Ripping Through Waves

Like sailing or speedboating, but tiny.

Gear-obsessed editors choose every product we review. We may earn commission if you buy from a link. Why Trust Us?

RC boats come in lots of shapes, sizes, and styles, but the best models can shred water from afar without becoming sinking ships. We’ve rounded up the best remote-control boats for beach visits, lakefront races, poolside entertainment, and some advice on picking the best RC boat for you.

Stay in play and check out our picks for the best magnetic toys , remote-control trucks , and remote-control planes .

The Best RC Boats

• Best Overall: ALPHAREV RC Boat with Case R308
• Best for Beginners: DEERC RC Boat with LED Light
• Most Well-Rounded: Altair Aerial AA102 RC Boat
• Best Value: Force1 Velocity H102
• Best Sailboat: PLAYSTEAM Voyager 400 RC Sailboat

What to Consider

While you can likely get away with using a larger RC boat on a pond or lake, you may want to stick to a smaller model if you’ll be floating yours in a backyard swimming pool or need to pack something tiny. RC boats can be up to two feet long, so make sure to consider the journey to the water, too, especially if the boat you’re eyeing doesn’t come with a carrying case.

Weight and Speed

The RC boat’s weight helps determine how fast it can move. Heavier boats are better equipped to move at high speeds without capsizing, whereas lighter boats can be speedy using less power, a.k.a., slower acceleration. Think of it like torque on a car (or a full-sized boat, for that matter)—the more power the boat gets from the battery, electric, or gas motor, the faster it can accelerate.

Speed is also dependent on the type of hull—some boats are shaped for optimal turning and curves, while others are built for picking up speed while driving in a straight line.

The priciest models can reach speeds of up to 50 miles per hour. We mostly recommend recreational, battery-powered RC boats that reach speeds up to 30 miles per hour, since the more powerful, expensive models are meant for hardcore hobbyists and professional racers.

Capsize Recovery

Many RC boats have anti-capsize, or capsize recovery, functionality to prevent them from flipping over (and staying overturned). Flipping an RC boat is extremely easy, especially if you lack experience, and can lead to a sinking ship. If you’re new to RC boating, consider grabbing one with capsize recovery, making your boat rebalance and flip back over if it tips.

How We Selected

We researched each model’s speed, customer rating, durability, and unique features. We also consulted buying guides from several top hobbyist publications. We’ve picked options for every type of RC boat customer, whether you’re a casual hobbyist, buying a first boat for your kids, or you’re a dedicated RC enthusiast.

ALPHAREV RC Boat with Case R308

This boat features capsize recovery, so if it tips over or gets hit by a wave, it’ll flip back over to recover. It also has LED lights installed to make it easy to see when it’s dark. Thanks to the autopilot mode that loops the boat into a figure-eight shape, children can easily use it, too.

The R308 comes with two batteries and a charger, with users reporting approximately 20 minutes of power (counting both batteries) when operating the boat at full speed. It has a 400-foot signal range for distance driving and tops at 20 miles per hour. With its carry case, the R308 is a solid RC boat for most users.

DEERC RC Boat with LED Light

This is an excellent option for anyone eager to get into RC boating but unsure of their prowess on the water. It features two autopilot modes, so there’s plenty of opportunity to learn how to use it. It also has an extended playtime of 30 minutes, giving you plenty of time to practice.

With features like capsize recovery, double hatch design, and low-battery and signal alarms, this boat is pretty much goof proof, making it the perfect boat for beginners on their way to becoming enthusiasts.

Altair Aerial AA102 RC Boat

If you need a well-rounded RC boat, this one has ample protection, zippy speeds, and excellent customer service, all in one attractive package. Its anti-capsize feature prevents it from tipping over, while several users say its nose bumper saved their boats from getting totaled through crashing.

It has an extra battery for more playtime, and several users say it provides up to 20 minutes of action after swapping it. Users who experienced issues with their boats were able to find replacement parts and products thanks to the company’s customer service help. Others say that it’s a terrific value, though the lack of a carry case is disappointing.

Force1 Velocity H102

This boat reaches speeds of 20-plus miles per hour, making it great for anyone who wants their toy to fly on the water. This boat features a capsize recovery mode, a water-cooled engine, and a double-hatched body, making it easier to control on waves. The charge time is a little long, three to four hours, but it can ride for up to 15 minutes at full power.

Customers say this boat reaches top speed fairly quickly, though some report that the controller is difficult to use and not very responsive. Still, it handles well on the water and is a super speedy boat.

PLAYSTEAM Voyager 400 RC Sailboat

If sailing is your preference, the Voyager 400 is the way to go. Rather than rely on an electric motor to push it forward, the Voyager 400 can sail in any body of water via wind power. Its remote controls the rudder and the propulsion, and just in case wind isn’t in the forecast, it comes with a detachable motor to help propel it.

Customers say it’s easy to use, and everything is sealed to keep interior components dry when it tips over. Its rechargeable remote battery can work for up to one hour, which puts most RC speedboats to shame. A drawback, however, is that if it gets stuck at sea without the motor attached, you’ll have to wait for it to wash ashore.

Cheerwing RC Racing Boat

Cheerwing RC boats are fantastic if you’re looking for an affordable toy to race with your friends. This boat can hit up to 15 miles per hour and has some great features, including capsize recovery and automatic yaw correction, which rebalances your boat. It also signals when the battery is low or starts to lose signal, giving you peace of mind.

If you want to try RC boating without spending much, this is a solid buy. Its biggest downside is in its battery life—just six to eight minutes per charge—and it doesn’t come with the option to buy a second battery, so it requires frequent recharging.

VOLANTEXRC Brushless RC Boat

If you need speed and don’t mind investing more money into your hobby, this boat is fantastic. The fastest model on this list, this boat has a top speed of 40 miles per hour, a range of up to 656 feet, and a water-cooled system that prevents the motor from overheating.

It also has safety features to prevent damage from the high speeds, like waterproofing and a one-piece hull to prevent cracks.

The biggest flaw is its lack of capsize recovery, and several users say their boats flipped in action, causing them to swim out to retrieve their toys. It also only comes with one battery.

Kevin Cortez is an editor for Runner's World, Bicycling, and Popular Mechanics covering reviews. A culture and product journalist for over ten years, he’s an expert in men’s style, technology, gaming, coffee, e-bikes, hiking, gear, and all things outdoors. He most recently worked as the Style Editor for Reviewed, a top product recommendation site owned by USA TODAY. He also helped with the launch of WSJ's Buy Side commerce vertical, and has covered the music and podcast industries for Mass Appeal, Genius, Vulture, Leafly, Input, and The A.V. Club. Equally passionate about leisure as he is his penmanship, Kevin dedicates his spare time to graphic novels, birding, making cold brew, and taking long, meandering walks.

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Prime Day is a great time to upgrade your home network — 7 early mesh Wi-Fi system deals I’d shop right now

Say goodbye to Wi-Fi dead zones once and for all with these deals

Quick Links

• Mesh router deals

Although the big Prime Day sales will start in earnest next week, there’s already some great deals to be had right now. While you might be looking for a new gaming laptop , a new MacBook or even a new tablet , there’s one upgrade that everyone in your household can benefit from regardless of which type of device you’re using.

You can already get some of the best mesh Wi-Fi systems at a steep discount on Amazon. These include many of the best Wi-Fi routers , the best Wi-Fi 6 routers and even one of the best Wi-Fi 7 routers .

We’ll likely see even more Prime Day mesh Wi-Fi system deals (and steeper discounts) during Prime Day (July 16 and 17). However, if you can’t wait until then, you should check out these incredible mesh router deals right now.

• TP-Link Deco XE75: was $449 now $290
• Wyze Mesh Router: was $180 now $106
• Asus ZenWiFi ET8: was $329 now $299
• Google Nest WiFi Pro: was $399 now $319
• Netgear Orbi WiFi 6 (RBK852): was $624 now $390
• Eero 6: was $199 now $150
• Linksys Velop Pro 7: was $899 now $599

Best Early Prime Day Mesh Wi-Fi System Deals

TP-Link Deco XE75: was $449 now $290 The TP-Link Deco XE75 is an affordable, Wi-Fi-6E-powered mesh Wi-Fi system that can cover up to 5,500 square feet with a strong wireless signal if you opt for the three-pack. Each unit can act as either a satellite or a router and on the back, you’ll find three gigabit Ethernet ports. In our TP-Link Deco XE75 review , we praised this mesh router’s 100 foot range and easy setup process. Price check: $399 @ Best Buy  

Wyze Mesh Router: was $180 now $106 The Wyze Mesh Router is a compact Wi-Fi 6-powered mesh Wi-Fi system that supports over 100 connected devices. A two-pack can cover up to 3,00 square feet and each unit has two gigabit Ethernet ports. The Wyze Mesh Router only comes in white but the Wi-Fi 6E-powered Wyze Mesh Router comes in black. You can get either version in a two-pack, a three-pack or as a single unit but only the two-pack is currently on sale. Not sure about which one to get? Check out our Wyze Mesh Router vs Wyze Mesh Router Pro comparison. 

Asus ZenWiFi ET8: was $329 now $299 The Asus ZenWiFi ET8 is a Wi-Fi 6E-powered mesh Wi-Fi system that’s only available in a two pack. Each unit has a range of 100 feet and three gigabit Ethernet ports. However, there’s also a 2.5 gigabit WAN port to connect to your cable modem for multi-gig internet . In our Asus ZenWiFi ET8 review , we were really impressed by its customization options and Asus’ built-in AIProtection security software. Price check: $299 @ B&H Photo  

Google Nest WiFi Pro: was $399 now $319 The Google Nest WiFi Pro is a Wi-Fi 6E-powered mesh Wi-Fi system with a stylish design. While you can get units in other colors besides white including yellow, teal and light pink, only the white version is currently on sale in a three-pack. Each Nest WiFi Pro device has a range of 2,200 square feet, has two gigabit Ethernet ports and you can control your whole network right from the Google Home app. In our Nest WiFi Pro review, we highlighted its built-in Matter support for connecting smart home gadgets and its smaller size compared to Netgear’s larger Orbi devices. Price check: $399 @ Google  

Netgear Orbi WiFi 6 (RBK852): was $624 now $390 The Netgear Orbi WiFi 6 is an expensive, yet powerful Wi-Fi 6-powered mesh Wi-Fi system. A two-pack can cover around 5,000 square feet with a strong wireless signal and each satellite comes with four gigabit Ethernet ports while the unit designated as the router has four too along with a gigabit WAN port. In our Netgear Orbi WiFi 6 (RBK852) review , we called it the fastest Wi-Fi 6 mesh kit and praised its excellent wall and ceiling penetration. Price Check: $399 @ B&H Photo  

Linksys Velop Pro 7: was $899 now $599 The Linksys Velop Pro 7 is a Wi-Fi 7-powered mesh Wi-Fi system that’s much more affordable than similar offerings from TP-Link, Netgear and Amazon’s own eero. Each unit has a 2.5 gigabit WAN port along with four gigabit Ethernet ports and a range of 95 feet. In our Linksys Velop Pro 7 review , we said it may not be the fastest Wi-Fi 7 mesh kit but is one of the most affordable and it comes with built-in security software. Price Check: $599 @ Best Buy  

Eero 6: was $199 now $150 The eero 6 is a Wi-Fi 6-powered mesh Wi-Fi system in a very compact size. It has since been replaced by the newer eero 6+ mesh kit but for $150, this is still a great deal. The eero 6 can cover up to 4,500 square feet with a strong wireless signal and supports more than 75 connected devices. Another great thing about eero’s mesh routers is that you can use an Echo Dot as a mesh extender to push your network’s coverage even further. Keep in mind though that once Prime Day arrives, many of the eero’s newer mesh kits will also be on sale, so it might be worth waiting until then to pick up the eero 6+ or even the Wi-Fi 6E-powered eero Pro 6E .  

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Anthony Spadafora is the security and networking editor at Tom’s Guide where he covers everything from data breaches and ransomware gangs to password managers and the best way to cover your whole home or business with Wi-Fi. Before joining the team, he wrote for ITProPortal while living in Korea and later for TechRadar Pro after moving back to the US. Based in Houston, Texas, when he’s not writing Anthony can be found tinkering with PCs and game consoles, managing cables and upgrading his smart home. 

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• extreme weather

Why Beryl’s ‘Unprecedented’ Timing Is a Sign of Climate Change’s Impact on Extreme Weather

T his week, Hurricane Beryl became the earliest hurricane in history to reach the Category 5 level in the Atlantic Ocean, battering the Caribbean and killing at least six —and experts say that climate change is making it much more likely for extreme weather events like this to occur.

The National Hurricane Center said Tuesday that Beryl is “expected to bring life-threatening winds and storm surge to Jamaica on Wednesday and the Cayman Islands Wednesday night and Thursday.” The hurricane isn’t the only extreme weather event that has occurred around the world over the past few days—fierce storms led to flooding in Switzerland and Italy; and wildfires raged in Greece and Arizona . While research hasn’t proven that climate change is the direct cause of each specific extreme weather event, it has shown that climate change can make some of these disasters more intense and more frequent .

“It’s important to remember there was extreme weather before climate change,” Alex Hall—a professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)—tells TIME. “The climate is variable, the weather is variable; we expect there to be extremes. But it’s just that the likelihood of extremes has changed, and the likelihood of these types of events occurring is greater.”

Hurricanes rely on a warm ocean to form. Because of that, hurricane season usually runs from  June through November, when oceans are warm enough for a hurricane to develop, says Marcus C. Sarofim, a physical scientist in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Climate Science & Impacts Branch. But Beryl is “unusual” and “unprecedented,” Hall adds, because it’s happening so early in the hurricane season, before the warmest ocean temperatures are usually seen.

“Climate change is stacking the dice in favor of events like that,” Hall says. “The fact that we’re seeing this event, that is unprecedented, occurring is entirely consistent with climate change.”

Read More: How Hurricane Beryl Is Shattering Storm Records

Current research indicates that while the warming climate will likely lead to less frequent Category 1 and 2 storms, it will lead to more frequent intense storms, like Category 4 and 5 hurricanes, Sarofim says.

Warmer temperatures also allow the Earth’s atmosphere to hold more water in it, which can lead to heavy rainfall, says Steve Vavrus, director of the Wisconsin State Climatology Office. Intense rainfall often leads to flooding, which can overwhelm existing stormwater systems, he adds.

“A lot of our infrastructure was built for a different climate than we’ve seen today,” Vavrus says. “We really need to take stock of how to prepare for the changing climate as we face it in the future.”

On the other hand, because the atmosphere can hold more moisture, that can demand more evaporation, which can lead to drier conditions on land, according to Vavrus. Along with record-breaking heat , these dry conditions can bring an increased risk of wildfires. According to a new EPA report released Tuesday, the extent of the area that wildfires have burned in the U.S. has risen since the 1980s. The report found that the 10 years with the largest acreage burned by wildfires all occurred since 2004—coinciding with some of the warmest years recorded.

Some extreme weather events can also have “cascading effects,” Hall says. In 2023, smoke from wildfires burning in Canada traveled to New York City, transforming the sky into an orange haze and affecting the air quality.

Extreme weather events often affect human health, Vavrus says. Beryl has caused power outages on several Caribbean islands. The storms in Switzerland and northern Italy have left at least four people dead .

In addition to the toll on human health, there are financial consequences of climate change, such as rebuilding or repairing the damage caused by flooding or wildfires, Vavrus says.

Sarofim says there are many ways people can reduce their greenhouse gas emissions , including using more efficient appliances, turning off lights when they leave a room, and taking public transit or driving more efficient cars. In the U.S., greenhouse gas emissions decreased by about 1.9% in 2023, according to estimates released in January by the independent research firm the Rhodium Group .

“The best strategy to reduce the likelihood of these types of extremes is to reduce our emissions of greenhouse gases,” Hall says. “We need to slow climate change down and ultimately reverse it.”

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