How much power does Voyager 1 have left?

As of July 1, 2022, Voyager 1 has 70.17% of the plutonium-238 that it had at launch. By 2050, it will have 56.5% left, far too little to keep it functional.

How long will Voyager 1 battery last?

Voyager 1 is expected to keep working until 2025 when it will finally run out of power. None of this would be possible without the spacecraft's three batteries filled with plutonium-238. In fact, Most of what humanity knows about the outer planets came back to Earth on plutonium power.

How much fuel does Voyager 1 have left?

NASA estimates that the Voyagers' fuel efficiency is upwards of 30,000 miles per gallon of hydrazine. Voyager 1 has enough hydrazine to keep going until 2040, while Voyager 2's juice can keep it hurtling along until 2034.

What will happen when Voyager 1 runs out of power?

Voyager 1 is escaping the solar system at a speed of about 3.5 AU per year, 35 degrees out of the ecliptic plane to the north, in the general direction of the solar apex (the direction of the sun's motion relative to nearby stars). Voyager 1 will leave the solar system aiming toward the constellation Ophiuchus.

How is Voyager 1 still powered?

(Voyager 1 is powered by a radioisotope thermoelectric generator, or RTG. RTGs convert to electricity the heat generated by the radioactive decay of plutonium-238.)

How far can Voyager 1 go before we lose contact?

Will Voyager 1 leave the Milky Way?

It is doubtful that the spacecraft will ever be able to leave the Milky Way, as they would have to attain a velocity of 1000 kilometers/second, and unless they get a huge, huge, huge velocity boost from something unexpected, they will probably end up being in the Milky Way's rotation forever.

Can Voyager 1 come back?

Nope. They have small amounts of hydrazine fuel left and have no possible way to slow down and head back. They are traveling very fast (Voyager 1 is at 38,088 mph or 17.027 km/s relative to the sun) and have very little ability to change speed now.

Will Voyager ever hit anything?

The probability of Voyager colliding with any matter any time soon is unknown, but likely small. We have no way of detecting small outer solar system objects, because they are small and far away.

Will Voyager 1 slow down?

Voyager 1 is moving away from our solar system so fast that it could make it from the Sun to the Earth - a 93 million mile trip - in 3 months and a week. Both spacecraft are slowing down, but this is because they're still escaping the gravitational pull of our Sun.

How long would it take Voyager 1 to reach Andromeda?

... and even if we ignored that - it would need 3.3 billion years for the journey at the current distance. And that's just 3,299,999,980 years after the power supply ran out.

Can Voyager 1 still take pictures?

There will be no more pictures; engineers turned off the spacecraft's cameras, to save memory, in 1990, after Voyager 1 snapped the famous image of Earth as a “pale blue dot” in the darkness. Out there in interstellar space, where Voyager 1 roams, there's “nothing to take pictures of,” Dodd said.

Will Voyager reach Alpha Centauri?

Neither Voyager is aimed toward Alpha Centauri, but if one of them were – assuming it maintained its current rate of speed – it would take tens of thousands of years to get to get there. Eventually, the Voyagers will pass other stars.

How long will it take Voyager 1 to travel a light year?

Now, Voyager 1 is travelling at 17 kilometers per second. That's 61,200 kilometers per hour, and as far as I can tell about 536,112,000 kilometers per year. A light-year is 9.5 trillion kilometers. By division, that means it's going to take Voyager 17,720 years to travel ONE light year.

Where will Voyager end up?

Voyager will venture near enough to that star, which is 46.9 light-years from the sun, to possibly break into its Oort cloud (the blur of cosmic objects a star is surrounded by past its planets). That would be a hypothetical Oort cloud, since we don't know if that star actually has one.

Is Voyager 1 nuclear powered?

The Voyager 1 & 2 spacecraft, like Pioneer 10 & 11 and various other spacecraft before them, and New Horizons and many other spacecraft after them, are powered using nuclear fission. Specifically, they use radioisotope thermoelectric generators.

Does Voyager 1 have solar panels?

The Voyagers travel too far from the Sun to use solar panels; instead, they were equipped with power sources called radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs).

How far can Voyager go before we lose contact?

For example, the Voyager 1 spacecraft is a little over 2×10^(10) km, or 130 astronomical units, from the Earth and we still receive signals from it. Eventually we will lose contact with Voyager 1 when its instruments run out of energy to send signals to Earth.

Has Voyager reached the Oort Cloud?

No missions have been sent to explore the Oort Cloud yet, but five spacecraft will eventually get there. They are Voyager 1 and 2, New Horizons, and Pioneer 10 and 11. The Oort Cloud is so distant, however, that the power sources for all five spacecraft will be dead centuries before they reach its inner edge.

What is the temperature of Voyager 1?

It is now operating at a temperature below minus 79 degrees Celsius (minus 110 degrees Fahrenheit), the coldest temperature that the instrument has ever endured.

Will Voyager 1 ever crash?

There the gravity will be intense enough that it will get pulled into something, and even if it doesn't it will keep oscillating through the core until it hits something. That being said, it will most likely sail for thousands of years before it even has a chance of hitting anything else.

Will Voyager 1 hit a star?

It will approach the orange-red star HIP 117795 in the constellation of Cassiopeia at a distance of 0.231 parsecs. Then, in 303,000 years, Voyager 1 will pass a star called TYC 3135-52-1 at a distance of 0.3 parsecs. And in 900,000 years, Pioneer 11 will pass a star called TYC 992-192-1 at a distance of 0.245 parsecs.

Can we see Voyager 1 with telescope?

Just as with the Apollo landing sites, actually seeing or imaging the interstellar probes is impossible: the spacecraft are simply too small (the transmitter dish on the Voyagers, for example, is only about 12 feet in diameter) and their distance from us too great, for any telescope to resolve them.

How long will the golden record last?

The golden records are designed to keep their data intact for a billion years — longer than humanity will likely exist.

Will there be a Voyager 3?

A third Voyager mission was planned, and then canceled.

Has Voyager 1 found anything?

Voyager 1 is the first human-made object to venture into interstellar space. Voyager 1 discovered a thin ring around Jupiter and two new Jovian moons: Thebe and Metis. At Saturn, Voyager 1 found five new moons and a new ring called the G-ring.