The tin can that smashed through the final frontier: Voyager 1, launched in 1977, is now losing contact after soaring billions of miles and sending back stunning images… Yet it will sail on into eternity, witnessing wonders that no human eye can see

Incredible as it may seem today, the computers on the Voyager 1 spacecraft, which were considered state-of-the-art back in 1977 – the year Elvis left the building for the last time – have 240,000 times less memory than an iPhone.

The radio antenna, protruding from the central circular dish like the antenna of a robotic insect, is as archaic and puts out as many watts as a refrigerator light bulb.

As for the built-in tape recorder, which is constantly on, it is not much different from that of a typical 1970s car, such as a Ford Cortina.

Incidentally, the reason the machine whines permanently is because the small amount of heat it generates is enough to keep the nearby fuel line from freezing.

Today, after nearly 50 years of exploring the cosmic unknown and incredible and against all expectations clocked up at 15 billion miles, this little tin can – about the size of a small car – still walks and communicates with ground control on Earth.

Think about it for a moment when you can’t get a signal on your mobile or the Wi-Fi is interrupted.

But in one respect, Voyager 1 (well, really, the Nasa handlers of the craft) has embraced the digital age and used X (formally Twitter) to tell its story.

“There’s just something about the vastness of space that really makes you consider your place in the universe,” NASAVoyager wrote, philosophically, in a recent tweet.

However, Voyager has begun to show signs of aging and has thus far ceased to transmit effectively.

The usable data it sends back in binary code has no meaning since last year. However, Nasa engineers are optimistic that they can solve this problem, which originates from a single computer chip.

But even when Voyager’s nuclear batteries (using electricity generated from heat produced by the decay of the lump of plutonium that powers Voyager) die in the next few years and the umbilical cord with Earth is cut forever, the spacecraft will continue to soar through universe forever, regardless of what fate befalls humanity.

Long after the pyramids have crumbled into the desert, the seas have boiled over, if indeed they do, and the last breath of humanity has been extinguished, Voyager, not withstanding an unforeseen disaster, will still move on its great journey to infinity and beyond, a silent ambassador for our existence in the Milky Way.

On board is a record of what life was like on Earth: a gilded copper disc that looks like a vinyl LP, complete with a stylus, intended for any alien civilization Voyager might encounter during this odyssey into the future.

Compiled by legendary astronomer and planetary scientist Carl Sagan, the ‘compilation album’ features everything from Azerbaijani bagpipes to the sounds of humpback whales. The music includes Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, gospel blues singer Blind Willie Johnson and Chuck Berry.

The choice of Beethoven’s Cavatina has particular synergy. While researching the project, the composer’s diaries were accidentally found in the New York Times archives, in which he had written: ‘Will they like my music on Venus? What will they think of it on Uranus?’

But there is no Elvis Presley, who died in 1977, or The Beatles.

Sagan and his team wanted to follow the example of Voyager’s predecessors, Pioneer 10 and 11, which famously had a nude man and woman emblazoned on plaques attached to their sides, but politicians found them too dirty, so only a silhouette of a man and woman was set on ‘the golden disk’ to depict an ‘essential part of human nature’. How attitudes have changed.

As part of NASA’s mission in the summer of 1977, two spacecraft, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 – identical in every detail – were launched within 15 days of each other.

Voyager 2 was launched first on August 20 on a slower and longer orbit than its sister probe. It is now more than 12 billion miles from Earth. Voyager 1 was launched on September 5.

It now takes more than 22 hours for a message to reach Voyager 1 and 22 hours for a reply to come back (at least that’s what happened before it was hit by recent technical problems).

The liftoff dates were chosen to take advantage of a rare alignment of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune – something that only happens once every 175 years – allowing the probes to visit all four planets.

One of the many extraordinary facts about the project is that both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were built primarily for a four-year mission.

“Nasa didn’t want anyone to spend time or money on anything that went beyond the basic mission,” said engineer Chris Jones, who began working on the craft four years before their launch. ‘That was all we were allowed to charge for.’

Yet, 46 years on, the mission is still in its infancy. The second nearest star to the Sun is more than 40,000 years away, which puts this statement into perspective.

Of all the images sent back to us over the years, perhaps the most iconic – and humbling – is the one taken on Valentine’s Day 1990, when Voyager 1, then 3.7 billion miles from the Sun, turned its cameras around and took an image of Earth distilled to a single pixel that became known as the ‘light blue dot’ and the most distant image ever taken of home.

You cannot look at the light blue dot, initially mistaken for a speck of dust, without being struck by how fragile and small our place is in the cosmos.

Furthermore, to quote lead project scientist Ed Stone, ‘few expeditions in human history have achieved as many scientific achievements as the two Voyager probes.’

The spacecraft might be frozen in 1970s technology, but as he pointed out, Voyager 1 was the first computerized spacecraft ever launched, and it still flies itself, it drives itself, it checks itself, and it can switch back -up systems by themselves’.

During the 1980s, it provided new insights into the red spot on Jupiter as well as the famous rings around Saturn and the fact that these planets, unlike Earth, have many moons.

Where exactly are the Voyagers now? They passed through the ‘heliosphere’ a few years ago, which is considered by some to be the edge of the solar system, the cosmic equivalent of the standstill, where the high-speed solar winds have died down and where nothing earthly has gone before.

“The goal is to keep them flying as long as possible,” said one program manager.

‘You can imagine they are twins. . . one has lost his hearing, the other cannot see so well, so we have to be very careful’.

Among the messages on the ‘golden disc’ is one from the late Jimmy Carter, who was US president at the time.

“This is a gift from a small, distant world,” he wrote, “a sign of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are trying to survive our time so that we can live in your.’

These words seem particularly relevant in our age of nuclear brinkmanship – but will there be anyone out there to read them?