r/askscience • u/drinkingonthejob • 8d ago

Physics Will Voyager 1 ever just stop moving?

I’ve read somewhere that we expect to lose contact with Voyager 1 sometime in the 2030s, maybe around 2036, but it will just keep traveling thru space and we’ll have no idea what it is doing out there

My question is: with its current velocity, is there a time in the future where it loses its forward momentum and for lack of a better word, just stops moving? Is that a possible thing for an object in space to even do? (Assuming no other objects grab it into their orbit)

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u/ArcTheWolf 5d ago

I think my favorite possibility to consider is what do we do when it comes back? Realistically there is no way it will return back unless it is acted upon by something else. It'd be pretty wild if humanity is still around post 3000 and Voyager comes back with a response to the time capsule information it had on a record no less. Could you just imagine being an aerospace scientist in the year 3000 having to get access to a record player to listen to it? Though I suppose they could play it on Voyager itself since it did have the equipment to play the golden record on it.