Here are the top space exploration milestones you can look forward to in 2023, including new rockets, moon missions, astronaut launches and many more planetary and Earth science objectives.
NASA announced Friday that its Voyager 1 spacecraft, which is over 15 billion miles away from Earth, is again fully operational following technical issues that arose in November 2023.
The agency said it partially resolved an issue in April, but it wasn’t until recently that it was able to receive data from all four instruments aboard the probe.
The four instruments study plasma waves, magnetic fields and particles in interstellar space.
Interstellar space is the region beyond the influence of the Sun’s gravitational and magnetic fields and has only been measured by the voyagers.
Voyager 1 was launched by NASA in 1977 and entered interstellar space in 2012, and Voyager 2 crossed into deep space in 2018.
Artist’s illustration of one of the Voyager spacecraft.
(Caltech / NASA-JPL / NASA)
“While Voyager 1 is back to conducting science, additional minor work is needed to clean up the effects of the issue. Among other tasks, engineers will resynchronize timekeeping software in the spacecraft’s three onboard computers so they can execute commands at the right time. The team will also perform maintenance on the digital tape recorder, which records some data for the plasma wave instrument that is sent to Earth twice per year,” NASA said during its latest update.
Voyager 2 has also experienced intermittent issues as aging begins to take a toll on the more than four-decade-old spacecraft.
The probe has exhibited intermittent communication issues and degradation of its control thrusters.
Voyager 2 is about 13 billion miles away from Earth and NASA estimates in about 40,000 years it will approach a star known as Ross 248, which is more than 10 light years away from Earth.
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Both spacecraft have exceeded initial operational estimates, which said that at least one instrument would still be operational through 2025.
Even after instruments cease operations, NASA scientists anticipate years of data analysis from ongoing transmissions.
The voyagers are destined to eternally wander through the Milky Way and even house Golden Records, which contain sounds and images from Earth in case extraterrestrial civilizations encounter the probes.
NASA announced Wednesday the selection of three commercial companies that will help advance the agency’s Artemis program. The space agency said it intends to start using the lunar terrain vehicle during the Artemis V mission, which could blast off as early as 2030.