The Year We Lose Voyager — And Every Other Probe in Deep Space

Sometime around the year 2036, a NASA engineer in Pasadena is going to watch a number drop below a threshold. The signal from Voyager 2 will fade into the cosmic background noise. She will write a short memo. There will be no sirens. But for the first time since 1972, humanity will not be in active communication with any of its own creations beyond the solar system. Pioneer 11 went silent in 1995. Pioneer 10 in 2003. Voyager 1 will fade around 2030. Voyager 2 a few years later. New Horizons will run out of usable power somewhere between 2030 and the late 2040s. Five spacecraft. Five different engineers on five different days, each one closing a logbook on a machine that kept going long after anyone expected it to. This is what happens next. Not for years. Not for decades. For billions of years. In this episode of Outbound: — Pioneer 11's final transmission on September 30, 1995, from 44.1 astronomical units away — The Pioneer Anomaly: why both probes slowed down in a way physicists still find uncomfortable — Voyager 1 and 2 passing within 1.6 light-years of distant stars in 40,000 years — New Horizons carrying the ashes of Clyde Tombaugh, the man who discovered Pluto in 1930 — How long a Golden Record can survive in interstellar space (estimate: 500 million to 1 billion years) — What happens to the fleet when the Sun becomes a red giant in 5 billion years — Why Carl Sagan wasn't really sending the Golden Records to aliens This is the fourth episode of OUTBOUND. Each chapter follows a single spacecraft as it disappears into deep space. Sources: — NASA Science: Pioneer 10 Sends Last Signal, January 2003 — NASA Ames Research Center: Pioneer 11 End of Operations, September 30, 1995 — Voyager Mission Status, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Caltech — Bailer-Jones & Farnocchia, "Future stellar flybys of the Voyager and Pioneer spacecraft," Research Notes of the AAS, 2019 — New Horizons Mission, Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory — Frank Drake & Carl Sagan, "Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record" (Random House, 1978) — NASA Deep Space Network operational forecasts #Outbound #Voyager #Pioneer #NewHorizons #DeepSpace #InterstellarSpace #NASA #AudioDocumentary #CarlSagan #GoldenRecord