In the old Voyager control room at JPL, the only thing switched on was a large red digital countdown clock. Parts and old computers sat stacked in corners beside boxes of paper. Far beyond the planets, the spacecraft themselves were still working.
I photographed Kareem Badaruddin and Suzanne “Suzy” Dodd there in October 2026. Kareem was Voyager’s mission manager, Suzy its project manager. We spent time in the rooms reserved for their team, among the accumulated belongings of a mission launched in 1977. The conference room held old certificates, proclamations, and spacecraft models. Near a cubicle were designs for a fiftieth anniversary patch.
There was something wonderful and a little melancholy about it. Voyager had helped make JPL famous, bringing distant worlds into view. These rooms held the remnants of those extraordinary years alongside the work of keeping the mission going. Kareem, Suzy, and their colleagues, including JPL alumni who volunteered their expertise, knew the spacecraft would eventually fall silent. They were doing everything they could to postpone that day.
Kareem had joined JPL in 1994, building experience on missions including Cassini and Dawn. His work involved testing spacecraft systems and finding ways through failures in flight. On Voyager, a problem could take days just to reveal itself.
In November 2023, Voyager 1 stopped sending readable information. Its radio signal still reached Earth, and it could receive commands, but the reports on its own condition had become unintelligible. The engineers were trying to diagnose a machine more than fifteen billion miles away that could no longer explain what was wrong.
They traced the failure to a memory chip in the computer that prepared data for transmission. The affected software had to be moved, but no single free stretch of memory was large enough. The team divided the code among separate locations and rewrote the instructions connecting its parts.
In April 2024, they sent the first repair. The command took about twenty-two and a half hours to arrive. Its answer needed another twenty-two and a half hours to come home. When readable engineering data finally appeared, the team could assess Voyager’s condition for the first time in five months.
Keeping the Voyagers alive also means finding ways to live on less electricity. Their power supplies weaken each year. Switching off a heater saves energy but may leave something essential vulnerable to cold. Every choice has consequences elsewhere in the spacecraft. The reward is another measurement of interstellar space, another observation from somewhere no replacement mission can readily reach.
Walking through those rooms, I felt how much affection had become part of the work. Their care was exacting and practical, expressed in calculations, revised commands, and the search for one more workable solution. It felt like attending to an old companion, keeping it warm enough and able to communicate for as long as possible.
I keep thinking of the anniversary patch designs near that cubicle. Even with so much behind them, the team was planning for another year together.
