Original subtitles

We are reaching the end of the mission.

Hopefully it doesn't...

get lost because of an anomaly.

Uh, but it's, uh it is

uh, yeah, it is...

a lot of pressure.

You don't wanna let down Voyager.

Hello?

Jeff, are you there?

Oh, yeah, yeah, I'm here.

So, what happened?

It's been really wild.

Yeah, um, basically the, um

certain things happened,

unusual things happened during the mag-roll

that should have not happened.

Still, I mean, we do not know we don't know everything.

If we can talk a little bit later,

people here are coming into my office

- and want to know... - Okay.

...what's going on, what's happening?

Have we been able to recover?

Okay, welcome to Voyager.

Put those lights on.

Okay.

Wanna get the blinds open.

We have our library,

I'm not sure what this is on the floor over here.

This is our kitchen area,

offices for the engineers,

and, of course, this is Suzy's office here.

Suzy, take one.

My name is Suzanne Dodd

and I'm the Voyager project manager

here at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

I think, um, being here, um...

you're forgotten here.

Where we are now is a complex called Woodbury,

which is the name of the street it's on.

It's about a mile from JPL, I think.

Next to McDonald's.

NASA management doesn't really think of Voyager,

doesn't really worry about Voyager.

It's out of sight, out of mind kind of thing.

That wasn't always the case.

The mission of Voyager

is the search for knowledge

that will widen the horizons of generations to come.

The whole community, the science community,

the political community,

were really hot to do this mission.

To help you feel

the staggering dimensions of this mission,

it's worth recalling how it got here.

In the late '60s, we learned it was possible

to use the gravity of one planet

to accelerate the spacecraft

and go to another planet.

And then somebody found out

that there's a very unusual alignment in '77.

All four of the giant outer planets,

Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus and Neptune,

would be aligned on the same side of the sun.

That only occurs once every 176 years,

where you can go from Jupiter to Saturn to Uranus to Neptune.

The last time that happened

was during Thomas Jefferson's administration.

In '77, it happens again.

When the Space Age itself is only 20 years old.

As soon as people realize that,

they think we've got to send a mission to do that.

The Voyager Spacecraft

will carry the eyes of men farther than they've ever been

and closer to the very limits of our solar system.

They said, "Okay, what we're gonna do

is we're gonna have two spacecrafts

for redundancies."

Cape Canaveral Florida

sent another unmanned Voyager spacecraft

on its way to Jupiter and Saturn.

That gave us better assurance

that at least one could finish

what's called the Grand Tour of the giant outer planets.

What we know about Jupiter

and Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune

were all achieved by a single mission,

flying breakneck speed through the solar system.

Not since 1969

and man's first footsteps on the moon

has space captured the nation's imagination to this degree.

We are in the process of having completed

the reconnaissance of the solar system.

It's a fantastic historical achievement.

The scientists and friends are here

to celebrate the completion of Voyager's Grand Tour.

There's a strong feeling of elation here

as many continue to ride the crest of a wave

that carried the mission to a monumental success.

And after that,

pretty much everybody thought Voyager was over.

I think we probably had about 1,200 engineers working on it.

I I I you know, I I don't even know I

how many people are working on Voyager right now.

Probably not more than ten or 15.

Today we have 12 people that fly two spacecraft.

They've dedicated their whole career to Voyager.

It's not that we fly by Neptune

and then everything's done.

Voyager has long legs.

As far as continuation of the mission,

we do plan to continue tracking Voyager

for as long as it's possible.

We move into the interstellar mission,

which will be staffed by a much lower staffing level.

This is the next step of exploration for mankind.

The first to interstellar space. We made it.

Hello?

Hello?

Hello?

Hmm.

Hello?

Hey, this is Suzy, I'm on the line.

Hey, Suzy, we're about to walk in,

so stand by.

Okay.

My first job out of college was on Voyager.

Entry level position.

It was doing what we call sequencing.

The small team that I was on

was small, "relative small," it was 30 people.

And I did that for the Uranus encounter

and then also the Neptune encounter.

Since then, I've done several positions.

I was working on Spitzer and Cassini,

raising kids, lots of stuff going on,

so I wasn't paying much attention to Voyager

until they called me and said,

"Would you like to be the Voyager project manager?"

I said, "Sure, is it still going?"

I was surprised when I came back

as a project manager in 2010,

how many people were still on the Voyager.

It's like I had never 20 years had never gone by.

When you joined Voyager,

what year was that?

'73.

I was a spacecraft team chief through mid '81.

Much later in my career, they called me back.

The experience is different from day to day,

but it's still the same goal.

There's a mission to be flown.

We need to put the instruments through their paces,

we need to make observations,

we need to look for things

where we're not sure what we're gonna find.

Just to get the science back.

And that's really the role of of these teams.

Our focus is to make sure

that we get the scientists the data that they want.

No space driver's ever been out this far.

Astrophysicists, they're tickled to death

that both Voyagers have survived

and are taking data in interstellar space.

There's a chance to see something new

or learn something that hasn't been learned or observed before.

My best day is when we have a staff meeting

and Ed Stone is there

and he's talking about what they're seeing.

We're talking with Dr. Edward Stone,

Voyager project scientist.

Dr. Stone is a professor of physics at, uh, CalTech.

Doctor, um, what are the responsibility

your responsibilities here at JPL?

I'm Ed Stone, I'm the chief scientist

for the mission called the Project Scientist

for Voyager.

Dr. Ed Stone.

Ed Stone, the Voyager project scientist,

has joined us again.

The, uh, Voyager project scientist, Dr. Ed Stone.

The one and the only project scientist

that Voyager has ever known.

The one and only.

Voyager was really a pathfinder.

The fact that it lasted 42 years and is still working

is something we could not have imagined

back in those days.

What we're learning is how this the wind of the sun

interacts with the wind from the other stars nearby.

The Voyager 1 entered interstellar space in 2012

and it was in the northern hemisphere

of the heliosphere.

The heliosphere's a huge bubble the sun creates around itself.

Voyager 1 was in the North.

Voyager 2 was in the South.

We were surprised to find that,

in terms of where the heliopause is,

it's almost as far from the sun in the South

as it is in the North.

By measuring the distance to the sun

at two different points,

it helps us model this interaction

between the heliosphere and interstellar space.

It's a very important interaction

because the heliosphere shields Earth.

Over 70% of what's outside can't get in

because of this outward flow of the wind pushing things back.

The size of the heliosphere is really very important

in terms of the radiation environment here on Earth.

We had no good idea

how big the heliospheric bubble was.

That's what the Voyager determined.

It changed our view of the solar system.

What Voyagers have told us are the first hints

of what's in the space between the stars

outside the heliopause, and the scientists there

are fundamentally having to change their models

of of what they thought that space was like.

To find out what's out there,

it's just it's just amazing.

People really thirst for that fundamental knowledge

that's being exposed, uh, by the Voyager spacecraft.

It's about giving people the sense of exploration

and adventure...

and hope.

And that's very important to us.

The science return is there.

If we can keep the spacecraft healthy,

the science takes care of itself and will come back.

There's still discoveries out there.

But it's a lot more challenging now.

For Voyager 1, the one way light-time is 20 hours.

That means the signal coming from Voyager 1

takes over 20 hours to get to Earth.

Moving at the speed of light,

a zippy 186,000 miles per second.

Voyager 2 is not far behind,

it's about 17 light-hours away from Earth.

If I come in on a Monday morning

and I say, "Hey, Voyager. How you doing? Good morning,"

it's gonna take me 'til Tuesday afternoon

that that I get a response back from Voyager

that says, "Hi, I'm doing great."

The other issue is that, um,

we're all older now and that age, uh,

casts a sort of a shadow over the things that we do.

Thi this ship was launched, you know, what,

45 years ago?

Well, people don't know the details

of what is behind it.

What are they now? They're in their 80s and 90s.

I mean, I'm 87.

That's a real issue.

Nowadays, when we're talking about, um,

decisions we're making

in the engineering world on the project,

a lot of it goes way back

to when they built the spacecraft.

What were the specifications on this part?

What was it tested at?

How conservative were they when they put this number

on this piece of paper 40 years ago?

And you go back

and you try to find those original engineers

that wrote the document

and a lot of them are no longer alive.

I read through these documents

that I worked on back in the beginning,

signed by all these people that I had worked with.

Most of those people are gone.

It may be a race between how long we, as individuals live,

versus how long the the spacecraft

can still communicate with us.

There's such a knowledge base

that's in the engineer's head,

that it's critical to have people

who are on the project

and have been on the project a long time,

continue to work on the project as long as possible.

You know, Jeff Hall, Sun, Enrique.

Most of us are single point failures.

Yeah, I'll be 70 next week.

Almost in the old days.

I've been working on Voyager for so long,

I cannot imagine, uh, leaving the project.

They have what you can't get from paper.

They understand the idiosyncrasies

of the spacecraft.

Their whole professional careers are on this mission

and making this mission successful.

It's hard for me to just see this machine,

it's kind of like a part of, uh...

me.

Very proud of what I'm doing,

especially from my background.

I was born and raised in Mexico.

I was born and raised in Korea, South Korea,

in a small farming village.

In Colombia, as a child,

I never, in my wildest dreams,

thought that I would end up

working with this particular project.

That was never in my mind.

I grew up in , Mississippi.

I wanted to get into a technical field,

but during that time segregation was big

and weren't allowed to go to schools

where they offered technical degrees.

So, I went to school in Alabama.

Tuskegee Institute, now Tuskegee University.

I came to the States for a small vacation.

November, 1968.

Then I met my to-be wife.

My guardian angel.

I immigrated to United States

after high school.

But I came in December 1977.

But I didn't know about the Voyager back then.

I came on in '78,

just prior to Jupiter encounter.

After exactly 18 months of flight,

Voyager 1 will reach Jupiter on March 5th.

For Jupiter encounter,

we had to design and and develop

new and different sequences or get pictures

and whatever kind of science it would take.

We didn't know what we were gonna find.

We sort of set up the camera on the spacecraft

and we would just stare at the planet

and we'd take pictures.

And the pictures

would produce movies.

I mean, it was incredible.

We would see something that we can't even describe.

It it appears to be radiating 30% more energy

than it ab absorbs from the sun.

In terms of the foot of the flux tube,

those are the same magnetic field lines

that thread the Taurus, so yes...

We were immersed with one discovery after the other.

The main surprise

was the amount of activity on Io.

You showed us the picture of the volcano there

and that was that was news.

Before Voyager, the only known active volcanoes

in the solar system were here on Earth.

And then we flew by Io,

which is a moon about the size of our moon.

It had ten times the volcanic activity of Earth.

Suddenly, we realized our terra-centric view

of what the planets and solar system were like.

Nature was really doing these incredible things.

It was exciting.

We were all early in our Voyager experience.

That was a long time ago.

There is still a lot more we need to learn

about the solar system.

But the spacecraft isn't all as it was

40 years ago.

I like to think of the spacecraft

as senior citizens.

Over time they've aged differently,

different things have broken,

so they don't behave quite the same today

as they did at launch.

Voyager 2 has more challenges than Voyager 1.

Voyager 2 is colder and has less power margin.

Honestly, we don't really know why it's colder.

It goes back to the fact

that over time these twin spacecraft

have aged differently.

The whole system is cooling down.

In particular, the hydrazine, the propellant

that we use to keep the spacecraft oriented

to point back to Earth.

16 tiny rocket thrusters

fueled by decomposing hydrazine

turn the craft or change its velocity when required.

We're within a couple of degrees

of having that freeze.

As it cools down and eventually freezes,

uh, we can no longer point the spacecraft

and it will just drift off

and that'll be the end of the mission.

One of the other sticky issues on Voyager 2,

the only antenna that can talk to Voyager 2

is DSS, Deep Space Station 43, in Canberra, Australia.

♪

DSS-43 is gonna be down from February of 2020

clear out to about as late as December 2020.

When that antenna is down, we cannot command Voyager 2.

The mammoth electronic ears

of today's deep space network

can and do continuously track and receive data

from probes to the edge of our solar system.

We have stations North of Barstow, California,

others in Madrid,

and another one in Australia in Canberra.

Voyager 2 can only be seen

in the southern hemisphere

because it's so far down

and out of the plane of the planets.

So, it can only be seen

by the Australian Deep Space Center Site

that's located outside of Canberra.

DSN announced

that they were going to be having some big maintenance

that they had to do on the Canberra station,

the 70 meter station.

We'll still get downlight,

we'll be able to look in and view Voyager 2,

make sure it's healthy,

but we don't have uplink capabilities.

So, if there's a problem with the spacecraft,

we can't send something to fix it.

So, we're really kind of, um

scrambling is not the right word,

but we're maybe it's controlled scrambling?

Right now, what we have for Voyager 2

is unsustainable.

Period.

This spacecraft would not survive the downtime.

We have to put enough margin on our power and thermal

at the start of that antenna downtime

to last a year.

Trying to plan how we get through that period

without causing something to freeze.

So, full disclosure,

I've had a lot of trouble with this car this year.

We cannot...

fix it, uh, although we're close.

It's the engine control module, ECM.

I'm trying to think of a way it's kind of like,

as we keep trying to keep Voyager warm,

we think that it's when it's cold it fails,

so I'm thinking of a way to bring a heater in

and maybe go off the battery

and and warm up the engine control module

if it ever fails to uh, to start.

Knock on wood,

it's started for the last three weeks, so...

I'm not that mechanically minded,

surprisingly, for a rocket scientist,

but, uh, I certainly had the opportunity.

My dad is incredibly handy, he can fix anything,

and I could have been out with him

learning all this stuff,

but I I was inside practicing the piano.

Music's like a second career.

I'm in six groups.

♪ I'll never be...

Sometimes it's just running

from one musical rehearsal to the other.

I try to keep them straight.

I just couldn't decide throughout my life,

music or engineering.

I decided just to keep deferring the decision.

I still pinch myself

that these musical dreams of childhood have come true

just as my, uh, JPL dreams came true.

Um, who worked on Voyager in the in the band here?

One, Jeff did.

- No, I didn't. - Everybody's too young, so

My journey to Voyager is a long one.

It began when I was a nerdy kid off in Kansas,

uh, visiting my grandparents.

Thanks a lot.

Uh, can you hear me in the back okay

with the cordless headset mic?

We're good? Wonderful.

Anybody in eighth grade?

When I was in eighth grade,

I had this weird explorer gene

and wanted to go see all of Planet Earth.

Every corner of Planet Earth.

My grandparents, they felt bad,

they're like, you know, "We'd love to take you somewhere

and go exploring.

We can't, we have to farm wheat."

"But I have a magazine that will take you places."

So for the first time

they showed me National Geographic.

And I read five years of back issues,

60 issues cover to cover over two weeks.

This was about 1981.

Right when the Voyager spacecraft

were flying by Saturn.

We're on our way for a very interesting ride

through the Saturn system.

In the course of its journey,

Voyager discovered three new moons

in Saturn's orbit

and relayed baffling photographs of Saturn's rings.

We had estimated that there were hundreds of rings.

What we're finding is we should be saying thousands.

These, uh, places have never been visited before.

Seeing them for the first time

was just this glorious feeling of exploration.

And as soon as I saw those images of the planets,

the dozens of moons, I was hooked.

I just I knew that somehow I wanted to be involved

in the space program.

And in eighth grade I said,

"I don't know anything about this JPL,

what it's like to live in California,

but that's where I want to work.

That's what I want to do with my career and my life."

Took three attempts to get in the door,

but finally, my JPL dreams came true.

-What age are we talking about? -Both both.

- From the '70s? - Yeah, yeah.

You were there and did that

No, I'm not that old, but I'm working it now,

so there's there's only, like, ten of us working it now.

That was my question, is how many there were

-Very few. -And Okay.

And but you're still following it,

it's still out there?

Well, yes, yeah, we're talking to both every day.

It's still out there?

Both are still out there.

Most most distant human object, so...

I did not know that.

We penetrated the bubble.

We're outside now, we're in interstellar space

with both spacecraft.

So, yeah, we're till still talking to both,

trying to keep them alive.

I'm the newest member of Voyager.

You never know when you're the new guy coming in,

how that's gonna work out,

and they've welcomed me with open arms.

I'm living out my childhood dream

in kind of the twilight of my career

and the twilight of the Voyager mission,

helping keep these two beautiful spacecraft going.

So, we're sending up

the CRS command here,

command Saturday?

Yes.

Okay, what's the uh, what's the time...

they go up?

Uh, it's gonna go up around 2:45 a.m.

Saturday morning.

Okay, Fernando,

you probably would already do this,

but can you send out a note when you see, um

Oh, absolutely, yeah,

I will send a, uh, complete report

as to what the, uh, power change, uh, that we saw

and, uh, receiving of the comments.

- Yes. - Okay. Uh...

We're trying to get the whole Voyager 2 all lined up

so we can ride out this antenna downtime.

In order to do that,

we're gonna have to turn off instruments

or at least turn off instrument heaters.

We have five fields and particles instruments

on each spacecraft.

One of those instruments is not working on Voyager 1...

but nine out of ten

are still functional after 40 years.

At some point,

we have to start turning off science instruments.

We lose about four watts of power, uh, generation a year.

So, we have to keep turning things off.

And that's a real Sophie's choice.

How do you decide

which science instruments turn off first?

But one of the beautiful things,

all science instruments have heaters.

So, before you turn off a science instrument,

we'll try to turn off the heater

or even swap heaters through a lower powered heater,

and maybe the instrument survives.

We need to turn off the heaters to save power margin,

to give us the power margin.

Here's the power margin for Voyager 1.

10.1 watts.

Then we go to Voyager 2,

we only have 7.5 watts.

Right now.

Do the math

and we use four watts per year.

The light bulb in your fridge, probably 20 watts.

So, that means

we have a year and change

to do something.

Because we're not gonna have the power to keep going.

That's what we're starting

just within the next week or so.

We're going to be turning off

a heater on the CRS instrument.

The CRS is the Cosmic Ray Subsystem.

Do we turn one on and then one off or

-Yes. -Actually, no, that's How

Sun, what's the what what are the steps in that command?

Well, we turn off bay one heater to gain the power

-Okay. -margin and then turn off

the CRS replacement heater

-and turn on -Okay.

the CRS supplement heater

and then we have two mitigating commands.

-And then we turn on -Okay.

the bay one heater back on.

Okay.

Sun, did you see replacement

or supplemental first?

Uh, we turn up replacement heater

and then turn on the supplement heater.

All right, thank you..

I think we feel there's a 50-50 chance

that the instrument may freeze,

so we don't know.

I'm the early bird.

I can get my coffee.

This is from home, my creamer and my sugar,

because I'm the only one that has sugar.

Everybody's too healthy for that.

I'm not.

What we're doing is turning off heaters.

We're gonna do that with the CRS.

If it works, one more success.

But we'll see.

160, decimal,

Charlie, foxtrot, golf.

Copy all, thank you.

Yeah, all right.

The commands are all issued on board

by the central command computer.

Roughly 14-bit command

that goes to the power subsystem.

The power subsystem decodes it

and it determines

which relay is being asked to be turned on or off.

The power subsystem then executes that command.

What we've noticed is, occasionally,

that command is not executed properly.

If you think of all the set of commands on Voyager 2

as as rows and columns,

if you command a certain command

in a given row or column,

you might inadvertently get another command in that column.

Voyager 2's the only one that has that issue.

We have not figured out, really,

to any level of satisfaction,

what failure is lurking in the power subsystem

that causes this to happen.

So, it might get worse.

By the time you find out

something has happened,

you know, it happened 16 hours ago

or 20 hours ago or whatever.

So, you can't do things very quickly,

so you got to anticipate what the spacecraft is gonna do.

Got kind of cold, but it worked.

It continued to work.

Right now, the CRS is -76 Fahrenheit.

It was we never tested it that cold

because we never imagined

we would be, uh, that cold.

But you see, scientists are smart.

They probably designed their instrument

knowing there might be a an opportunity in the mission

where they'll have to settle for flying without their heaters

because the power will be so precious.

We were able to save that

approximately five watts of power

by turning off, um, the heater

and and still have the instrument work.

That was the first time in 42 years

that the instrument heater has been off.

I keep a trend of the power.

This is the end.

2030.

2030.

Other things might happen

that alter this getting to 2030, I'm sure.

But we'll be content, uh, right here.

2025. Right there.

We're an extended mission, so it's not as prestigious.

Some people decided to do other things,

but I decided to stay.

I like because it's full of challenges.

I never thought

that, uh, programming or reprogramming a spacecraft

was gonna be part of my life.

I joined Voyager for the Uranus encounter.

Uranus is the most distant object from Earth

ever visited by a manmade craft.

I was an assembly language programmer,

the lowest level that you can program.

I was hired with JPL as an independent contractor.

I also joined the Voyager

just before the Uranus encounter.

I went to University of Texas

and JPL came to our school to recruit students.

And I didn't know everybody else was doing

and I didn't know what I was supposed to be doing,

but it was just exciting to see everybody getting excited.

It's been a lot of fun watching them.

They see something they consider interesting,

they're all jumping up and down and shaking hands.

I mean, it's like somebody just had a kid.

The world was looking at Voyager.

The press, if they knew that you were from Voyager,

they wanted the inside scoop.

Voyager 2's approach to Uranus

is now a little more than 16 hours away.

About two minutes ago,

Voyager 2 passed through its closest approach to Uranus.

We were seeing the images

come down bits at a time.

Click, click, click, click.

It was amazing.

We were making history and then from that point on,

and I was just you know, I was just soaring.

Today, they hit the jackpot.

Six hours of information

as Voyager passed in and out of the planet's orbit.

That's it!

All right, to all my friends who made this one possible,

thank you.

Let's see if we get some good data out there.

And after finishing the encounter,

I was hired to stay with Voyager.

Little by little,

as the team got smaller and smaller,

I assumed other tasks.

When the power subsystem guy left,

I I took over that function.

When the propulsion guy left,

I took over that function.

It's amazing how many hats I have.

After the Uranus encounter,

I didn't want to go anywhere else.

I got married on the project and I had my son on the project.

There were so many personal, um,

uh, feelings attached to it.

My family, you know, like, my sons,

they are so familiar with the Voyagers.

My oldest son, he sometimes called

when he was in college

and then he says, like, "Oh, so how's the Voyager?"

You know, it's just like, "How's your grandma, right?"

So, it's just like a part of a our family life.

When did you first build this Lego model?

I was probably elementary school age.

That's I'm gonna say sometimes then.

You have the antenna piece, you have the RTG,

the power generator, that's this piece,

and this is the scan platform with the cameras

as well as some other instruments that were used.

When I first came from Korea after high school,

I didn't really have a plan.

I was young and I wanted to see the world.

So, I joined the military. US Army.

It's, like, one of the best experiences I ever had.

My mom, she had hard life,

and then she wanted us to be educated,

have a better life, so she tried so hard.

She passed away when I was, uh, in the middle school.

I always wanted to honor my mom.

Yeah, I feel like, yeah, she would be proud of my me,

if she could see me now.

So, as long as the Voyager needs me,

I can never, ever not answer.

My schedule keeps changing, my "will retire in"

keeps changing.

People keep moving that. It used to be 2020.

When I see that Voyager,

it doesn't need me,

I will leave

and enjoy the last phase of my life.

Travel. My wife loves to travel.

Visit the kids, the grandkids.

They live in San Francisco. Eli and Lola.

They're in San Francisco.

It's it's a piece of cake to go there.

Well, not really.

As you get older, those seven-hour drive...

you have to stop, twice.

We sort of pick milestones.

I'd kind of like to be here

if and when it makes 50 years.

My personal goal is

is to have the mission last for 50 years.

I'm hoping that, uh, we can make 2027,

so we can say, "Oh, 50 years."

That would be so unique.

For me, that's a technical success.

It's an an achievement.

It's a it's a goal that I'd like to participate in.

♪

We're ready for our downtime. Three months away.

We're building a giant background sequence now

that will carry Voyager through its entire downtime,

early February of 2020,

clear through as late as December of 2020.

I mean, if we do it right,

I'd say we have 95% chance of coming out just fine.

You have to remember,

these spacecraft have been flying for 40 years

and for the last 30 years, they've been pretty unattended.

We don't command the spacecraft very often.

The spacecraft is designed so that it can fly itself.

So, it's been very autonomous and it's

it's worked very well for since we left Neptune.

Good morning and welcome to the five o'clock edition

of Voyager update.

I'm your host, Suzanne Dodd.

Voyager is 510,000 kilometers

above the swirling cloud tops of Neptune.

Well, this is the day.

We've been in an observatory phase for months, seeing Neptune

as a slowly growing dot...

to something filling the television screen.

Beautiful, austere, blue world.

Look at the tire tracks.

The spacecraft entered the Neptune system

and safely made its closest approach

to the giant planet and its unusual moon, Triton.

Triton looks unlike anything we have seen before.

It's got at least three distinct types of terrain.

We're all just amazed.

Could one of you wax philosophical

about how you feel after 12 years

and being here at the last planet?

Now, you know, it's all gonna sink in in the next few days,

that would be the time to ask the question.

Now, it is on toward the vast sea

of interstellar space.

Once it went by Neptune,

people sort of forgot about Voyager.

Frankly, I didn't really know what had become of Voyager,

um, when I left in 1990.

Many of the world's journalists

have broken down, packed up,

and already left the Jet Propulsion Site

here in Pasadena.

Um, I think in 2004,

there was a termination review for Voyager.

We had been going

for more than ten years after Neptune.

There were some questions at NASA

whether or not we were, uh, on a mission

that was anywhere near finishing.

Why would you terminate the mission?

Well, 'cause it costs money and we haven't seen anything.

In 2005 was when we got the first little hints

that we might be closer

to the edge of the heliosphere

because we felt the termination shock.

Once we reached the termination shock,

where the supersonic solar wind abruptly slows down

as it approaches the heliopause,

that told us we were finally getting close.

I think if that hadn't happened,

there's probably a good chance

that they would've canceled Voyager.

If they had terminated it in 2004,

we would've never known the distance of the heliopause,

we would've never known the interaction

of the magnetic field

and what happens at the heliopause.

It's one thing to have a theory about what happens.

The Voyager spacecraft are actually there in situ.

Not only that, that there's two spacecraft.

For a modeler, it's important

because anybody can make a model

that fits one data point,

one Voyager spacecraft,

but when you have two data points

that your model has to fit,

then it becomes much more accurate.

So, it's important to have both spacecraft still flying.

Morning, Jeff.

- Good morning. - How are you?

-Fine, thank you. -All right.

-Morning. -Good morning.

Thank you.

Andrea got us goodies.

-Yep, Andrea's at it again. -Yep.

Okay, guys, uh, let's go ahead and get started. Uh, systems.

Uh, they both look good,

no gaps, no DRs until the.

Uh, this morning we had a antenna foresight calibration.

-Assumed that all went well. -Everything looks good.

By the book.

Uh, just a reminder.

Uh, tomorrow, Todd is giving a presentation on the...

uh, fuel consumption and remaining, yeah?

He will tell us whether we're going to run out of fuel or not.

Slightly important.

We've been waiting all this time.

Yeah, right.

We are going to be...

for Voyager 2, we're going to be in the blind.

We think we're ready.

Yeah, everything seems to be ready and...

double check, triple check,

make sure that everything is ready to go,

and it seems like like that's the case.

There may be some last minute tests that have to be done,

but for the most part, I think we're we're ready to go.

We have made the decision.

The, uh, power that we have provided to the spacecraft

is enough to be able to go

be on the other side of the downtime.

But it's still a 42-year-old spacecraft.

And you're asking it

to become a 43-year-old spacecraft.

We don't know what's in store for us.

Today is a special event.

If we're not ready, we cannot let it go down.

We're under a lot of stress.

There are a lot of uncertainties.

This is the challenge of this job.

Though, I don't understand myself why I'm so into it.

Just kind of feeling you're responsible for it.

We're going to be doing a rotation

of the spacecraft around the Earth line.

It's called a mag-roll.

A magnetometer roll is a calibration we do

for the magnetometer instrument.

And what we do is maneuver the spacecraft in, uh, 360°.

The rotation of the whole spacecraft

is guided by the gyroscope.

The gyros consume a certain amount of power,

which is 14.4 watts.

The the spacecraft doesn't have that kind of power,

so what we do is we turn a heater,

we turn it off,

and that gives us 24 watts.

And then we turn,

almost instantaneously, the gyros on.

Sweeps 360°,

gets the magnetic field in all directions,

and it uses that to calibrate the instruments

and keep them operating properly.

After the whole thing, then we reverse everything

back to what it used to be.

We're expecting to have a very good mag-roll.

If something stops working,

immediately, the power will let us know

that there is something funny.

But that's never been the case.

And hopefully won't happen today.

- 4-3 Voyager ace. - 4-3.

Yeah, I would like to give you a briefing about the mag-roll.

I'm ready.

We're expecting variations in downing.

Please disable con-scan at 0230

and con-scan enable at 0320.

Okay, copy that, so, uh,

fluctuations, uh,

from 023A.

Uh, con-scan disable 0230,

and re-enable at 0320.

That is affirm.

Okay, so things are happening.

The green one is the roll gyro position

and that one will tell us when we start rolling.

And that will be a little bit delayed from

from what, uh,

what we see from the station

because we have that five to six minutes

and I always put a timer

to start looking for this type of signals.

Data control,

Voyager ace on mic on one.

Voyager ace to control.

Yes, I did I do have a, uh, dropout in telemetry.

I was just wondering

if that was between the change from 35 to TSB2.

Yes.

Copy that. Thank you.

Okay.

So, could we turn this off?

When you look things in retrospect,

then you start appreciating the opportunities

that life gave you,

that at the time, you don't really understand

and you don't know what what's going to happen.

I grew up in Bogotá, Colombia.

My ex-father-in-law,

I met him in 1973.

I was, uh, 16 years old.

At that time, he was already a well-established painter.

Armando Villegas.

He opened my eyes to the art of fine art.

It became a big part of my life.

♪

But I knew, as a child,

that I wanted to be an aerospace engineer.

The Moon landing was the major major thing for me.

... command override off.

Copy it down, Eagle.

Looking at the Moon,

there were people on the Moon.

It was unbelievable,

and so inspiring.

I decided I want to be in the space program.

But being in Colombia,

there was nothing, no space program.

So, I had no choice.

I said, "Okay, I'm going to come to the United States."

I knew that probably

I would never go back to Colombia.

Saying goodbye to my family...

that was not easy.

I never saw my father cry.

So, the only time that I saw my father cry was,

um, the night before.

And we were saying goodbye.

And we embraced,

and, uh, that was the very first time that I saw my dad crying.

It's beautiful to remember that, you know?

Seeing that kind of emotion

coming out of your your father that never cried.

So, it wasn't easy, but, uh, I was ready.

I came here June 11, 1991.

I had no prospects of a job

and I was the sole provider.

It was very difficult.

I was able to ask for a hamburger.

I had that much English.

And I had to work in construction.

Actually, it was not construction,

it was destruction.

I didn't have the proper gear.

I was eating dust.

And one day, one of those heavy doors

landed on my foot.

I could barely walk.

But, regardless of the challenges,

I was happy.

I knew that I was on my way to something better.

I got into the University of Texas

for aerospace engineering.

Later, I came to JPL asking for advice.

I came asking for advice,

and at the end he said it was a really nice interview.

I couldn't believe it.

A couple of years later,

after graduation,

in May 16, 1998,

that's when I began to work at JPL.

Voyager ace, 4-3.

4-3, Voyager ace.

Uh, yeah, we just had a telemetry countage.

Uh, would you like the?

Uh, copy that, no, I got it as well.

Thank you.

And, uh, probably we need to turn cameras off.

I need to go and consult with

So, that's it.

So, I might want to check on my phone throughout.

You're gonna have me sit down. Is that the idea?

- Oh, yeah. - Oh, yeah, okay.

So, I can hide I can hide my phone in my pocket.

- Yes. - Okay.

No.

You know, basically...

it didn't go quite as we wanted it to.

So, we're working through what it what did happen

and that's about as much as I can tell you right now.

Correct.

That's, uh, to be determined.

We have to make sure that Voyager 2 is okay

before we take the antenna down.

Hello?

It's been really wild.

Um, basically, the mag-roll did not ex well...

Certain things happened,

unusual things happened during the mag-roll

that should have not happened.

Still, I mean, we do not know

we don't know everything, so we're working overtime.

Everybody's working overtime.

If you're driving a car down the street

and the light changes red, you step on the brake,

and in three-tenths of a second,

the pedal is depressed and you're stopping.

That's because you saw the light change red right away.

If you're on a spacecraft and something goes wrong,

we don't know about that

until the radio signal that detected the problem

gets transmitted back to the Earth.

Which can take hours.

And then you figure out what happened on the Earth

and do something.

But engineers are problem solvers,

that's what they wanna do, they want to solve problems.

The tougher the problem, the more they like it.

We're trying to recover

one step at a time.

This has been the craziest.

I mean, we've had scares,

we have things that we have to react,

but very quickly, I mean,

nothing that has lasted this long.

And we we don't know what's going to happen.

With the heaters off,

it's a race against time.

If the hydrogen freezes,

then the spacecraft starts stumbling

and, uh, we lose the spacecraft forever.

It's a challenge on top of a challenge

because with Voyager 2,

the command frequency changes with temperature.

Since the spacecraft temperature is going down,

we had to figure out the right frequency.

But you don't know how fast the temperature is changing.

We have to make the best guess we can.

It's very stressful.

The time is critical.

Finally, we sent a command.

Turn gyros off and heaters back on.

We were crossing our fingers, uh, hoping for the best.

Everybody's looking at the monitors

waiting for the signal.

It took 35 hours.

But finally it said that the commands were received

by the spacecraft.

It was just amazing. I mean, it's just beautiful.

Phew, the relief that you feel

to see that,

"Okay, we were able to save the spacecraft.

We were just about to put the spacecraft

back into its normal configuration

in terms of temperature.

All of a sudden, they just said,

"Okay, grab everything and go home."

New alarm bells ringing tonight

on the Coronavirus outbreak...

The Governor of Washington

declaring a state of emergency.

Tens of millions of us work from home

while offices sit largely empty

from California to Connecticut...

I've got this thing

that says "an installer"

and it says, "Do you want to move

the Zoom installer to the trash?"

Okay, Beth has the thing installing.

Hey, succeeded in installation.

Hey, I see you.

There. Hi!

We did it.

I can go have a drink.

It was simple.

Okay. Can you hear me okay now?

Yeah, I don't know what's going on with the mic.

For some reason it didn't, uh

I couldn't hear you and you couldn't hear me.

- Sorry. - No, that's fine.

Minky! My wife is coming for the cat.

Basically, I had about a day notice.

So, I grabbed my laptop on the night of March 16th

and headed home

and have not been back to the Voyager area since.

So, it was like, boom, the hammer came down.

We had this anomaly January 25th,

the antenna was actually supposed to go down

February 5th.

NASA got involved and said,

"You need to demonstrate

that Voyager 2 is ready for this downtime

or we won't allow the antenna to go down."

Everybody agreed that the Voyager spacecraft was safe

and it was the right thing to do to take the antenna down.

They started that work March 9th.

Deep Space Station 43 is in pieces,

undergoing major surgery to become a better communicator.

It'll take many months and a few nervous moments.

They started it March 9th and, uh,

we all went into COVID, you know, a week later.

It is it daunting and scary.

People people are wondering when it's all gonna end.

Not a very happy environment.

There's a lot of effort

required to do this right.

And, of course, we don't want to mess it up.

So, we're we're very deliberate,

making sure that we don't do, uh...

anything stupid.

You just have to figure out

everything that has to work right

for it not to fail.

And then you have to do every one of those things

and you have to do every them

each every one of them correctly,

and if you can figure out all the things

that you need to do

and do them all right, you're you're fine.

We may get a chance to actually test

the uplink capability here in October.

Doesn't mean that the antenna would be online,

but if we can at least

do a test with Voyager in October

to say we can send a command to it,

then we know that we're out of the woods

as far as being able to command the spacecraft.

That is the plan. But, uh, who knows?

I mean, you're talking about mid-'70s technology.

The future is not certain.

♪

I'm the only one here team-wise.

The rest of the people that are here right now

are our movers.

I'll show you what the conference room looks like.

Because we've got essential products

and boxes all packed up in there,

there's nothing on the walls anymore.

Remember all our awards?

Big trash bins everywhere.

I thought that we were very well-prepared

for the downtime.

But we had to tweak things

more than we would have

since we were moving the facilities.

NASA made the room for us

to go back over to the laboratory.

We had a lot of things to move, a lot of things to pack.

We've been there for like, uh, gosh, close to 20 years.

It's more than just taking your plant

from one office to the other office.

It was all the operations hardware got moved,

got upgraded because it's old,

so we had to change operating systems.

We had some nightmares

where some low-level engineer

was told to take the network down

and the whole command system that Voyager uses

was offline and damaged,

and it's a bit of the low-tech things

that, uh, can kill a mission.

We struggle, you know?

Different environment, version machines,

but in all the adjustments, the new computers,

the new ways of doing things, that keeps me going.

As you know...

tragedy in the family happened and...

right in the middle of, uh, the pandemic.

She always had issues

with high blood pressure.

When I got home around 6:00, I asked my son,

"Where's your mom?"

He says, "Well, sh she should be at the office."

So, I called her office, nothing.

I asked my son, "Can you go check on her?"

And he went and checked on her

and he found her on the floor.

She had some kind of aneurysm.

It was not possible to operate.

But, uh,

we kept fighting for 17 days and...

and that's when she passed away, on February 2nd.

50-plus years together...

uh...

yeah.

I lost a lot of weight, about 17 pounds.

But, uh, work keeps me busy.

Uh...

I always love Voyager.

It makes me feel that I'm needed someplace.

That I have the expertise to take Voyager,

uh, past 2025.

Maybe longer.

♪

We did have an initial test last night.

We expect it to be successful

and hopefully everything will go back to normal

beginning of next year.

As time progresses,

we're going to do less and less.

Some would say that there are only eight more commands

we have to issue on Voyager.

And those are the ones that gradually turn down

the power consumption

until we're to the point

where we're sitting at 202 watts

and we can't go any lower.

The end is coming.

And the end may take ten years.

It may take two years,

we don't really know, but, um, it's coming.

We're gonna come into the office one day,

expect to see data from this pass,

and we won't see it.

And then we'll try

and get some other antennas and maybe more antennas.

Try and really see if we can find a signal.

And after a week, after a month,

after three months of looking for it...

if we still don't hear anything...

we will declare the mission over.

And so, billions of miles from Earth,

the spacecraft, its instruments dead,

its mission fulfilled,

may end up in orbit about some distant star.

So, one of the one of the things that, uh,

strikes me, uh,

when I think about Voyager in the early days,

there was a time when I was a kid...

and I had a role

in doing something for the very, very, very first time.

Voyager is now on a 105-mile high

parking orbit.

Heading down over the South Atlantic

on a trajectory which will...

As we get to the end of the mission,

it becomes it's special

because it's going to be the last day.

I'm sort of looking back...

describing how...

it feels to fly something that's...

at the time, only a couple of years old,

but in the end,

would be 50 years old.

And...

what it means to lose them.

There are things that are left behind

that are sort of the residue of the work we do.

The good friends we had.

The people who worked on Voyager,

all 1,200 of them...

mostly gone.

Well, it's sad because the mission's ending,

so you're not gonna get the science back,

but I think it's more related to the people.

The people will disperse, you won't see them as much.

It'll be difficult for the people

who are still working on the project.

Many of them have worked on the project,

if not from launch, then shortly after launch.

So, they've put their whole career on Voyager,

and so to have Voyager end will be

it'll be very difficult.

I know it the day is gonna come.

This is like when you see your children grow up

and you kind of you're sad,

but at the same time, you kind of feel like, uh,

wow, you know, "We accomplished something."

When you feel that you've gone the extra mile,

then I think that you can rest and just...

let it go.

We count every day as a blessing, but we've

we've learned not to bet against the spacecraft too.

'Cause it always seems to, uh, find that resilient energy

to keep going and and, uh,

a large part of that is the team,

the the the brilliant engineers and scientists I work

with that have found ways to keep it going

and delivering top-notch science.

The technology is something to behold.

If Las Vegas oddsmakers

would have had to pay off the optimists

that honestly felt as though

this mission would be as successful as it is,

there would be a few rich people walking around NASA today.

The fact is, Voyager beat the odds,

incredible odds,

and although in any mission of this type

there must be a certain degree of luck involved,

the human factor cannot be underestimated.

I've only worked a couple years on Voyager,

but I trying to stand

on the shoulders of those giants,

the people that toiled away in anonymity

keeping these these two spacecraft alive.

Just to be considered, uh,

you know, a cub scout alongside them.

Those long term explorers, I'll take it.

It's an amazing honor and privilege.

The explorers are the Voyagers.

Not us.

We're just the drivers.

It's like Lewis and Clark.

They were explorers.

But let's imagine that they had

a guardian angel...

looking after them.

They were not explorers. They were just guardian angels.

4-3 Voyager ace.

Voyager ace,

station 4-3, I have you.

I read you the same

and we have a command uplink with, uh, Voyager 2.

And I'm ready to copy.

Please turn command mode on

at 194900.

♪

♪