[9][10] Two years later, Voyager 1 began experiencing a third wave of coronal mass ejections from the Sun that continued to at least December 15, 2014, further confirming that the probe is in interstellar space.

[11] In 2017, the Voyager team successfully fired the spacecraft's trajectory correction maneuver (TCM) thrusters for the first time since 1980, enabling the mission to be extended by two to three years.

It has a 3.7-metre (12 ft) diameter high-gain Cassegrain antenna to send and receive radio waves via the three Deep Space Network stations on the Earth.

[25] The power output of the RTGs declines over time due to the 87.7-year half-life of the fuel and degradation of the thermocouples, but they will continue to support some of its operations until at least 2025.

[20][24] Unlike Voyager's other instruments, the operation of the cameras for visible light is not autonomous, but is controlled by an imaging parameter table contained in one of the digital computers, the Flight Data Subsystem (FDS).

[38] Voyager 1's launch almost failed because Titan's LR-91 second stage shut down prematurely, leaving 1,200 pounds (540 kg) of propellant unburned.

Sulfur, oxygen, and sodium, apparently erupted by Io's volcanoes and sputtered off the surface by the impact of high-energy particles, were detected at the outer edge of the magnetosphere of Jupiter.

[37] The two Voyager space probes made a number of important discoveries about Jupiter, its satellites, its radiation belts, and its never-before-seen planetary rings.

The gravitational assist trajectories at Jupiter were successfully carried out by both Voyagers, and the two spacecraft went on to visit Saturn and its system of moons and rings.

[6] The trajectory Voyager 1 was launched into would not have allowed it to continue on to Uranus and Neptune,[44]: 155  but could have been altered to avoid a Titan flyby and travel from Saturn to Pluto, arriving in 1986.

[8] On February 14, 1990, Voyager 1 took the first "family portrait" of the Solar System as seen from outside,[46] which includes the image of planet Earth known as Pale Blue Dot.

Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientists used the plasma wave experiments aboard Voyager 1 and 2 to look for the heliopause, the boundary at which the solar wind transitions into the interstellar medium.

[58] In a scientific session at the American Geophysical Union meeting in New Orleans on May 25, 2005, Ed Stone presented evidence that the craft crossed the termination shock in late 2004.

[61] It was confirmed on December 13, 2010, that Voyager 1 had passed the reach of the radial outward flow of the solar wind, as measured by the Low Energy Charged Particle device.

[64] Voyager 1 was commanded to change its orientation to measure the sideways motion of the solar wind at that location in space in March 2011 (~33yr 6mo from launch).

After the first roll the spacecraft had no problem in reorienting itself with Alpha Centauri, Voyager 1's guide star, and it resumed sending transmissions back to Earth.

Within this stagnation region, charged particles streaming from the Sun slow and turn inward, and the Solar System's magnetic field is doubled in strength as interstellar space appears to be applying pressure.

[69] Voyager 1 had reported a marked increase in its detection of charged particles from interstellar space, which are normally deflected by the solar winds within the heliosphere from the Sun.

[79][80][81] In March 2013, it was announced that Voyager 1 might have become the first spacecraft to enter interstellar space, having detected a marked change in the plasma environment on August 25, 2012.

The craft is presently less than one-seventh the distance to the aphelion of Sedna, and it has not yet entered the Oort cloud, the source region of long-period comets, regarded by astronomers as the outermost zone of the Solar System.

According to the researchers, this implies that "the density gradient is a large-scale feature of the VLISM (very local interstellar medium) in the general direction of the heliospheric nose".

[91] In May 2022, NASA reported that Voyager 1 had begun transmitting "mysterious" and "peculiar" telemetric data to the Deep Space Network (DSN).

An investigation into what caused the initial switch is underway, though engineers have hypothesized that the AACS had executed a bad command from another onboard computer.

[97] Engineers reported in April 2024 that the failure was likely in a memory bank of the Flight Data Subsystem (FDS), one of the three onboard computer systems, probably from being struck by a high-energy particle or that it simply wore out due to age.

The FDS was not communicating properly with the telemetry modulation unit (TMU), which began transmitting a repeating sequence of ones and zeros indicating that the system was in a stuck condition.

[99] The Voyager team began developing a workaround,[100][101] and on April 20 communication of health and status was restored by rearranging code away from the defective FDS memory chip, three percent of which was corrupted beyond repair.

[111] Some thrusters needed to control the attitude of the spacecraft and point its high-gain antenna in the direction of Earth are out of use due to clogging problems in their hydrazine lines.

The spacecraft no longer has a backup available for its thruster system and "everything onboard is single-string," according to Suzanne Dodd, Voyager project manager at JPL, in an interview with Ars Technica.

Both Voyager space probes carry a gold-plated audio-visual disc, a compilation meant to showcase the diversity of life and culture on Earth in the event that either spacecraft is ever found by any extraterrestrial discoverer.

[125] The project aimed to portray the richness of life on Earth and stand as a testament to human creativity and the desire to connect with the cosmos.