Muse

when the system crashes when the first responders can't respond when you're left all alone what do you do for the next four weeks on snap judgment we're sharing stories of people trying to think their way out of situations where no help is coming a deep space probe a teenage driver a surf legend, the father of the bride, all of them. You're just going to have to figure it out. Because this July on Snap Judgment, it's all systems down. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. You're listening to this podcast so I know you've got a curious mind. Here's a helpful fact you might not know yet. Drivers who switch and save a Progressive save over $900 on average. Pop over to Progressive.com, answer some questions, and you'll get a quick quote with discounts that are easy to come by. In fact, 99% of their auto customers earn at least one discount. Visit Progressive.com and see if you can enjoy a little cash back. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company & Affiliates, national average 12-month savings of $946 by new customers surveyed who saved the Progressive between June 2024 and May 2025. Potential savings will vary. We begin in the cold. The brand new Snap Judgment series all sets us down when everything is falling apart. What do you do? We're headed out to a land called Fargo. Actually, West Fargo. A place where winter is coming, the roads get slick, and every now and then, something strange comes roaring out of the snow. But Snaps, this is not just another Fargo story. This one is true. The events took place in West Fargo, North Dakota in 2024. The names have not been changed. The voices are not altered. This is how it went down. Snap producer Bo Walsh brings us the tale. Snap Judgment.

katherine dutcher and her 18 year old son sam were out running errands on a tuesday evening in september she needed to pick up dinner so katherine asked sam if she could drop him off at the auto repair shop to get the family car we had gotten a call earlier that day

that they wanted us to pick up the Honda and take it home.

Their pilot had been acting quirky, but the mechanic told Catherine that it was good to go.

They had driven multiple hours and a considerable amount, and it was fine and nothing was found with it, that it probably was okay. And it was less than 10 minutes to get to her house from there. We figured it was a very short drive and that it should be just fine.

What could happen in 10 minutes?

Sam got behind the wheel, adjusted the seat and mirrors, and pushed the power button. The engine started no problem. All systems normal. He pulled off the lot and started the 10-minute drive home.

It was still relatively bright out. The sun was starting to go down, but it wasn't dark at all. I drive probably half a mile, and there's some farmland on my right side. Left side, there's houses.

About a mile from his parents' house, driving on a two-lane road in Cass County, the speed limit switched from 40 to 55.

Sam accelerated, then eased off the gas. I backed off to 55. It kept going, so then I took my foot off completely, and then it kept going. When I realized this wasn't slowing down, I was just focused on getting it stopped. This Honda Pilot wasn't interested in stopping. It was speeding up. Initially, I tried holding the brake and then holding it and hitting the e-brake. Then I tried pumping the brakes. Then I tried putting it into neutral, and nothing happened. Then after that, I just tried, park, reverse. And at that point, I realized this thing's not going to stop. The car's computerized system ignored everything he did.

It was calling the shots. Finally, he hit the power button and held it in. The car just kept going faster.

I'm watching the road, thinking, I don't know what to do, I can't get stopped. The only thing I had control over was steering.

Now moving at 80 miles per hour, Sam didn't want to take his eyes off the road to dial 911 on his phone. So he tried to place the call through voice commands.

My phone said, that number's not in your contacts. So I called my mom. She was in the Hardee's drive-thru when I called her, saying, hey, it's happening again.

And when he said that it was happening again, I knew exactly what he was talking about.

The car had accelerated on its own once before. That's why they'd taken it in.

And I thought it was maybe going to stop because it stopped very, very quickly the first time.

You know, we talked through, like, where are you? Can you get it to stop?

And then I explained to her that the brakes aren't working.

We have a Life 360 app on our phones, so I was able to look and see, like, where he was at and how fast he was going at that point in time.

At that point, she knew it was only going 80. I know I can control a car at that speed.

The car was racing east on a rural road that didn't have traffic lights in the northern Fargo area, approaching the Minnesota state line. Sam wasn't just afraid of crashing into another car or careening off the road.

His big concern was that if a law enforcement officer were to see him, they would think that he was fleeing them.

Because on that road, I do know that there's a sheriff that drives back and forth.

And at that point, I told him that I was going to get off the phone and I would call 911 and notify them. So I quickly hung up and called 911 and informed them of what was going on.

Well, this is going to sound absolutely crazy. So we've been having problems with my car. We took it to the shop because we had an incident where the accelerator stopped and it wouldn't stop. We managed to get it stopped. They have had the car for, like, a week. They said it's just fine. Well, my son is driving the car currently because I'm in the motor car. And he is going down County 17, can't get the car to slow down or stop, and he's going about 80 miles an hour.

They probably thought I was crazy.

He's worried they're going to try to pull him over because he can't stop. He truly cannot. Okay. No, I understand.

It was just so surreal that I think initially it was like, even though we knew it was happening, it felt like it was such a weird dream that I really didn't feel anything much at all other than, oh, I better, like, let them know this.

Okay, it looks like we did let an officer, my partner here, let an officer in the area know already. so I'm going to advise you to not call your son back in case we here try to get a hold of him or the officer tries to call him directly to give him directions, okay?

My mom called me back. She wasn't supposed to, but she did.

I called him very briefly just to explain they're calling you. They're going to tell you what to do. You need to answer them. And basically said I loved him and I hung up because I didn't want to interfere with our call, but I also wanted him to know that it's very important that you do answer them.

Saying goodbye was kind of scary in the sense of I didn't know what was happening next.

The pilot was now on 90th Avenue, the straightest road in the area.

It was pretty quiet. For the most part, there were a few cars, but it's not a big roadway. It was just beat trucks, pretty much several on the road, some of them semis.

But it was only two lanes. And soon, Sam started to overtake cars and trucks that were going much slower than him.

It's really narrow, only wide enough for two cars. People realize something's not right. A lot of it, there was a good chunk of oncoming traffic, so I was passing on the shoulder. Not nicely by any means, but it was enough for us.

to get around the vehicle. That was scary because going around on the shoulder where it's pretty much loose gravel, the tire starts spinning and losing traction.

The only thing to his right off of the shoulder were 20-foot ditches.

It was terrifying because those ditches were steep, so I would have just rolled. Not pleasant.

The pilot was now going over 90 miles per hour, and every maneuver put Sam at risk of losing control.

There was a turn there that wasn't nice to make at that speed. I was really close to spinning out there. It was difficult to keep the wheel straight at that speed. I was really tensed up. My hands were locked on that wheel, not really letting go of it. As long as I kept control, the vehicle didn't spin out.

Catherine Dutcher had given her son's cell phone number to the 911 operator, who transmitted it from the dispatch center.

10-4, just advising I also attempted to call Sam.

I'm on the phone.

10-4.

Within moments, Sam was on the phone with a Clay County deputy.

He asked me, hey did you try hitting the power button, did you try the e-brake, did you try neutral, which the answer to all those was yes.

I've had him try and shift it to neutral drive and I've tried to tell it so it's a push button to stop it but it's not allowing it to shift or turn it off.

After he went through those steps, I think he might have been a little stumped on, like, what to do next. I could hear, like, the resonance of the radio and that buzz that the radio makes. I didn't like that that they were going back and forth

I knew it was

very serious it's to the point where it's not just one or two officers it's multiple and they're trying to figure out what they want to do about it and really I didn't think they exactly knew what to do in this situation because this stuff doesn't happen very often my only thought was

like if no one can get this car to stop if he can't you know do emergency brakes if he can't turn it off if he can't jam it how in the world are they going to get this car to stop i had hoped that it'd be like kind of a replay of that very first brief situation where it was able to just be stopped quickly. So I think on some level, like, my denial kicked in, and it's like, well, you know, this will probably be okay. They'll figure out what to do.

As Sam blew through the intersection at Highway 75, the officers on the radio moved on to the next option.

They told me directly, here's what we're going to do. We're going to put spike strips out and you're going to drive over it to pop the tires.

And then let them know I'm going to push the sticks out. At least take the tires off. So that should slow them down and make sure it hits them, I guess.

When those tires pop, you lose traction. And most of the time, we'll spin out. Like even if just one blew at that speed.

But first, someone would need to get ahead of Sam to lay down the strips with metal spikes.

I'm going to try to get the sticks out there, but I don't think I'm going to get there, Sam.

What I was told on the phone was, we can't do that. We can't get far enough ahead of you.

No breaks on this ride, Snappers. How long can Sam keep his eyes on the road and his hands on the wheel? Find out when Snapchat returns.

This is Tanya Mosley, co-host of Fresh Air. You'll see your favorite actors, directors, and comedians on late-night TV shows or YouTube. But what you get with Fresh Air is a deep dive. Spend some quality time with people like Billie Eilish, Questlove, Ariana Grande, Stephen Colbert, and so many more. We ask questions you can find.

You won't hear asked anywhere else. Listen to the Fresh Air podcast from NPR and WHYY.

Welcome back to Vroom. From Snap Judgment's All Systems Down, before the break, Sam Dutcher picked up his family's Honda Pilot from the repair shop. It was supposed to drive at home, but then the car started accelerating on its own. The brakes were not working. The car would not shut off. And now, with police racing to catch up, Sam is trapped behind the wheel of a vehicle that keeps gaining speed. Snap Judgment.

It's going to be a 2022 Honda Pilot, white in color, going about 80 miles per hour. The complainant's son is going through the one driving, reaching speeds of 90 to 100 miles per hour. It cannot slow down or stop the vehicle.

Shortly after 5 p.m., Minnesota State Trooper Zach Groover was on his way to turn in a receipt for an oil change he'd gotten earlier that day on his department-issued Dodge Charger when he heard the dispatcher relay the call on the radio.

We're right on the border of Fargo and Moorhead, so North Dakota, Minnesota. So I was about 20 miles into Minnesota. It was kind of just a, hey, we've got a runaway car, and it's coming into Minnesota.

Can you see if Becker or anybody would be in the area to hopefully help us on the county line if we get there?

Hey, I'm about 20 miles in front of this thing, and probably about 7 or 8 miles to the east of kind of the next major intersection that that car's coming at. So I figured I can go a little bit faster than 80 miles an hour with my lights and sirens on, and we'll see if I can get up there and get this bike strip set down. He wasn't going to bother to ask anyone if he should get involved. Our policy states that we have to be requested, but then something like this poses a very major traffic safety issue when you've got a car that can't stop going through intersections at 80 miles an hour. So it really does kind of become a life and death thing, because if you get T-boned at 80 miles an hour, It's not going to be good.

Groover hit the gas and came up Highway 9, but couldn't quite get to the intersection ahead of Sam. He saw the lights of Cass County police cars in pursuit of the pilot zoom by as he approached from the south.

I hadn't seen Sam go by. I just saw the red and blues go by. So at that point, it was kind of just a race to who was going to get to the intersection faster. The officers were driving larger cars, Chevy Tahos. They were doing about 80 miles an hour. That's not going to really work. And then that's kind of when it switched in my head, like, okay, we're going to try to get in front of them.

You've got a trooper behind you, and then you've got one of the clay deputies. We're going to try to send that trooper in front

Groover's Charger had a 300-horsepower engine and could go a lot faster than the Tahoe's. So we came up behind them and floored it.

Once we got up to the road that they were on, I believe it took me about a minute to catch up to the Cass County deputy. My top speed on that road was around 130. and then I went around him and that was kind of the moment where it's like there's no car here where is this car?

When he passed the other officers in the left lane the pilot was nowhere to be found. Sam was going so fast that he had pulled away from the police cars in pursuit. Groover went as fast as the charger would let him.

You know just kind of going pedal to the metal and I could see taillights up ahead and then finally when I was able to I hit my front radar and once I was able to get a speed on him he was doing 113 and it was kind of like a oh okay he's not doing 80 miles an

hour I saw in my mirrors the red and blue flashing lights knowing they were there definitely brought a little bit of peace of mind because it means that they have caught up to me.

He was quite a ways ahead of me,

so I really wasn't directly behind him for very long.

I remember him going around me on the side with the lights on. At that point, I passed him just before we got into the town of Hitterdahl.

Two 90s in front of him were just sitting in Hitterdahl. No more center.

Before he could think about getting far enough ahead of Sam to drop the stop sticks, Groover realized they were coming up on the intersection with Highway 32 in the town of Hitterdahl.

It's a very busy intersection. It might be worth you shooting in front of him. and I'm just blocking it so I can continue straight through it.

It turned from, like, we're going to get in front of him and put sticks down to I need to get up there and block this intersection so he doesn't T-bone a car coming through at 113.

37 there, Clay County, 90th Avenue North, 50th Street, East Mountain, 90 miles an hour, no brakes.

I didn't know what was happening. I didn't know what was going on. I didn't know what was going to happen next. But what I did know was up until the end of the road, or until I lost control, it was going to continue driving.

By now the sun had set. Visibility was getting worse. To further complicate things, Sam was headed for an intersection where the oncoming cross traffic didn't have a stop sign.

It's an uncontrolled intersection going north and south. After you go through that intersection is a set of railroad tracks that's pretty frequently blocked by trains.

Central Coffee just advising they're going through stop signs eastbound along 90th Avenue.

Sam barreling east could potentially T-bone another vehicle at high speed.

I mean, my thought wasn't what's safest for me. It's what is safest for other drivers. I was honestly more worried about hurting other people than myself. I would have thrown the vehicle off the side of the road before I would have let it hit anyone.

Groover slowed down at the intersection with his lights flashing to stop the cross traffic on the highway.

I felt like I had a pretty good distance on him and was like, okay, we can get here, get this intersection blocked, and then he just kind of came out of nowhere.

Kind of take a deep breath because of those cars on the side of the road. I don't have a lot of room.

He was doing at least 112 miles an hour through that intersection.

Very scary, because it's still a speed that if you make one mistake, things will go wrong.

Yeah, that was kind of a oh-crap moment, just watching him go flying by. I remember I had to swerve around a car at the stop sign. And he had to do a pretty good jerk around me just so he didn't rear end me, thankfully. So kind of had a bit of a win there.

I felt relieved that I got past there, but I also didn't know what was ahead.

Sam's pilot flew by Groover in a blur, but now the officer had to catch up and pass Sam again.

He was a ways in front of me, but I don't think it took me too horribly long to get caught back up to him. Kind of a minute or so, I was able to just put the pedal to the floor and go. My max speed was 141 miles an hour.

Groover was still on the radio with the Clay County deputies. One who was on the phone with Sam, and another who was also driving the next closest car in pursuit.

As the officer spoke, they crossed from Clay County into Becker County

and realized that they had about three or four miles before the paved road would end.

the pavement came to a t and then on the other side of the t was a gravel road and once that gravel road ended it turns into a dirt field but it was slightly offset from the gravel

I kept glancing over the GPS map. That road ended. I knew, this road's going to a T. What's going to happen?

Doing 113 on the gravel would have been scary enough, and I don't think he would have been able to negotiate that little curve.

It was a steep slope at the end that I would just crash into.

It was becoming a race against the clock, And three to four miles wasn't a lot of ground to cover going speeds of more than 100 miles per hour.

after watching him go through hit it all it was we're gonna have to be a ways ahead of him to be

able to get out and get those stop six down i knew i wasn't gonna have time to you know stop

my squad get out of my squad run to the trunk get my stop sticks down and get them thrown out on the ground. So it was kind of, it shifted from putting stop sticks down to how else can we get this car

stopped? 18-year-old Sam Dutcher knew the road ahead of him was coming to an end, and the cops would not be able to drop the spike strips to slow him down, and his car was still gaining speed.

It was slowly accelerating. I think it topped off at 125. Not a nice speed to drive at. It was almost like a roller coaster. That's the closest I can compare it to. Controlling it got difficult because I was starting to get tired. It was just that my brain was rushing, just pumping adrenaline. I started questioning, how much longer can I keep doing this?

Sam was deep into this nightmare. One slight jerk of the steering wheel, one little pothole on the road, and anything could happen.

My thought was, there's no way I'm making it through this. I'm going to die. I prayed saying, please let me make this through this.

He tried to stay focused on the road and not imagine the worst.

I don't feel there was really room to think about what could happen. I just needed to focus on what is going on and staying in control because if I start focusing on other things, there's a good chance at that speed you are losing control and dying. I was just in a state of mind of this is what's going on. I need to deal with this right now. Nothing else right now really matters.

Back at home, his mother Catherine was trying to get updates from the 911 operator.

I'm the same mom that called about my kids just a little bit ago. Okay, here it is, the reckless driver. Oh, right, except his accelerator sucks. Oh, okay.

It was scary knowing that I couldn't be there. And so I called just to follow up and like, do you guys know where the officers are at? Have they found them? Have they been able to do anything? What are they doing? So it was more of a sense of me wanting to know what happened.

They're on the phone with him now. We have officers from all over and medical all coming to him, okay? Okay, and my husband and I are driving out there, too. Yes, and I can understand. It's got to be extremely stressful. We have, but they are talking with him directly, okay? So they're trying to help him get this taken care of in the safest way possible, and we've got officers and troopers and all sorts of people going towards him, okay?

And when they said that, I think that was the first time I really panicked and thought, like, oh, my God, I think my kid's going to die. The whole idea that they had all these people going towards them made me feel like they were anticipating the worst and planning for it.

We've got people that are getting there as fast as they can. I know. All right. Okay. Okay, we're all keeping our fingers crossed for him. Okay, thank you. You're welcome.

I felt pretty sick to my stomach. It felt like time was so slow. I had to just sit and wait and trust that they were doing everything that they could do.

We are 300 Street, just hitting Becker County, 90th Avenue North.

Out on the road, it was time for a desperate last-ditch effort to prevent a tragedy.

At 113 miles an hour, we had about 53 seconds before we hit the T. We were not far. We were running out of time, we were running out of road, and running out of options.

The first option was to do a pursuit intervention technique, a pit, where officers chasing vehicles will nudge the other car from behind to make it spin out. What?

Groover doubted it could be done on such a narrow road, at speeds in excess of 113 miles per hour.

We don't train at those speeds, so it was kind of just a, we don't really know what's going to happen. And obviously, you know, we don't want to try to do a pit on him and then have him go into the ditch sideways and roll a bunch of times. because that's, I would say that's just as dangerous as him going off the tee at 113 and seeing what happens.

Do you have any other ideas about getting us mixed up before we hit that tee? Getting out in front of it and trying that route.

We were kind of just radioing things, so it was kind of a, you know, we're all talking through each other. Copy. State units, go to LTAC 1, so everybody's on the same channel. We were bouncing ideas off of each other just to kind of try to see what we could get done. Then Groover had an idea. Just get in front of him and kind of match his speed, let him kind of just make soft contact and just ride the brakes down until we got stopped.

290, if that's your plan, you don't have much room left before T's, so if you can do it, go for it.

There was kind of a little bit of a thought of, Obviously, I'm driving kind of a mid-sized car, and he's in a larger SUV. So, you know, if he starts pushing me, we go sideways into the ditch. This probably isn't going to end to the best.

Groover, doing about 130 miles per hour, got ahead and passed Sam.

I noticed him going in front of me. I didn't know what he was doing. I was in front of Sam. I started slowing down, and it hadn't been relayed to Sam yet to run into the back of me. 37 is still on the phone with him.

I didn't know what was going on because they never told me, hey, this is what we want you to do. In my mindset at the time, he just pulled in front of me. Oh shoot, I don't want to hit him, so I'll go around him.

He actually gets up next to me

and it was kind of at that moment where it was like, uh oh if he gets in front of me I don't know if I'm going to get back in front of him

37, have him go in the back of this car We were kind of neck and neck, both speeding up.

The deputy on the phone with Sam told him what the plan was.

He told me, so I want you to hit the car that's going to pull up in front of you. You want me to... What? I repeated that to him. So you want me to hit the cop car that's pulling in front of me? That's not something I really care to do. My thought was this could not end well.

He's going to allow the person to hit him in the back.

Once I got in front of him and started slowing down, something started to slow the car down as well.

it was weird because collision automatic braking started kicking on i think it felt like we were probably slowed down to 80 the vehicle was making itself engine brake why did every other safety feature on this vehicle fail but that one worked it was kind of a okay hey this is this is

going really well, and we were slowing down, slowing down, slowing down, and he wasn't hitting me, and I was kind of thinking, hey, this might actually work. I think the forward collision isn't letting him hit me. We're slowing down. 10-4.

I was starting to think, hey, it's not going to hit the vehicle. That's nice.

I was watching him in my driver's side mirror, and I'm like, okay, he's coming up, but he's not hitting me. He was really close. I remember seeing the back of his car. We're slowing down, and I think I was down to about 20 miles an hour, and I lost his headlight.

in the driver's side mirror. It felt like time slowed down, and then...

Smack.

Hold him, hold him.

When he hit me, I think that I was doing about 20 miles an hour, and once he hit me, I just dynamited the brakes.

Car stop.

After he hit me, we came to a pretty immediate stop. My squad was enough to just keep his car from moving still.

I was just sitting there frozen kind of in shock when they came to my passenger side door opened it up saying get out of the car the wheels were still spinning when I got out it was still

running trying to go are we good I've never been rear-ended before I know my head smacked the headrest and uh it was a pretty good jolt that hit hard that was like it was slowing down slowing down and then it wasn't yeah i'm glad you guys went in the area it's a good thing we had a charger i don't know because i mean he was doing 113 when i caught up to him he was yeah 114

I got out of the car then I went to send the grass and just sat there and just kind of zoned out for I don't know how long. My brain kind of just broke. I was kind of just in a sensory overload.

He was cool, calm, and collected. He was kind of just standing in the ditch.

Groover will say I was calm. I wouldn't say I was calm. I'd say I shut down, but I'm part of that also I'm on the spectrum so don't really show emotions as much I mean I was in the mindset of I want to go home I want to go to bed I wanted my day to be over

he called me himself when they got the vehicle stopped and he got out and he's like mom someday. I'm out of the car. I'm okay. And then I just wanted to see him to know it was actually like real. I mean, it was amazing, but it also felt like it wasn't real. I was like, how could you like run into the back of a lawn for his big car at the speed that you're going to get stopped and not even be injured? Like it didn't make any real sense till I actually saw him. I was like, And God, like, you know, thank you, God, for not killing my kid. Thank you for keeping him safe.

It felt like a miracle, very much so.

It's kind of a sigh of relief, knowing that we were able to get it stopped and not have to watch him, you know, go off of a tee at 113 miles an hour. You don't really realize kind of what you did until after the fact, And it's kind of like, okay, this is pretty cool. So when you got home that night, did you tell your wife what happened? Absolutely not.

The thing that I was even more floored about that I found out that next week during this whole thing was that his wife was like seriously pregnant at the time, ready to give birth to his very first son. and to think about that he put his life on the line to save my son knowing that he had his first son on the way. Like, that was even more, like, amazing to me. I remember him walking up to me, sticking out his hand like he was going to shake my hand, and I'm like, seriously, can I hug you? I mean, you saved my kid's life. I don't really feel like a handshake is, like, doing justice.

A huge thank you to Sam Dutcher and his mother, Catherine Johnson Dutcher, along with Minnesota State Trooper Zach Groover, for sharing their story with the SNAP. Sam is currently a student at the North Dakota State College of Science, where he's studying to become an auto mechanic. Very special.

thanks to Lieutenant Mike Lee of the Minnesota State Patrol as well. The original score for that piece was by Renzo Gorio, was edited by Anna Sussman, was produced by Bo Walsh. After the break, we're blasting off to outer space. Stay tuned. Welcome back to the Vroom episode from SNAP's All Systems Down series. My name is Glenn Washington. Next up, how do you solve a problem that is 12 billion miles away?

A lot of us think we're the center of the universe, like Glenn Washington, for instance, thinks he's the center of the universe, but actually here, I'm here in the center of the universe, where all the data comes in from all the spacecraft.

Not too long ago, we decided to launch Snap Judgment producer John Facile into outer space. at least as close to outer space as possible.

I'm in a room above mission control at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory looking down on, you know, like what you imagine, mission control in movies. I don't know why I'm whispering. I feel like I need to whisper while I'm up here.

John went to NASA's West Coast Brain Center, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, to talk to scientist Suzanne Dodd.

What are your worst fears on this job? Like, what keeps you up at night?

Um, that's pretty easy, actually. My, for Voyager, my worst fear is we send a bad command. And it ends the life of a spacecraft. This is over here, just full-scale model.

Susie Dodd is showing me a model of the Voyager spacecraft. It takes up half of one side of this auditorium, about the size of an RV. It's got a squat metal body with a white satellite dish on top and two metal arms hung with all kinds of electronic equipment.

This is over here. These are all the pointing instruments, so cameras, ultraviolet spectrometers.

And the golden record is really mounted on the side here like this?

And the gold part is actually a cover.

There are two Voyager spacecraft, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, And each of them has a golden record, like a vinyl record, with recordings of greetings in different languages and a selection of music, everything from Bach to Chuck Berry. It's an audio postcard to any aliens who might encounter these spacecraft on their long journey across the cosmos.

Jupiter and Saturn, these giant planets and the moon surrounding them will be looked at close up by two 1,800-pound spacecraft loaded with cameras and scientific instruments. A mission that allows scientists to go back in time...

Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were launched in 1977 and sent out on their own to explore the outer planets of our solar system, Places we'd never been able to send a probe before. And Susie Dodd has been with them almost her whole career.

You know, I like to describe them as twin sisters. At launch, they were identical. But over the years, different things have broken on them. And so one doesn't have very good hearing. The other one lost its sense of touch. They're my parents, grandparents. I think of them as senior citizens, yeah. You want them to have a good, full life.

Good morning, and welcome to the 5 o'clock edition of Voyager Update. I'm your host, Suzanne Dodd. At 5 o'clock a.m. Pacific Daylight Time, Voyager is 510,000 kilometers, or 317,000 miles, above the swirling cloud tops of Neptune.

Susie joined the Voyager program when she was just out of college. It was the late 80s, and the Voyagers had accomplished nearly everything they'd set out to do. They visited and collected data from Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and their last stop, the last planet in our solar system, was Neptune, almost 3 billion miles away. And Susie led the team of scientists sending commands via satellite to Voyager 2 as it flew by the icy blue planet.

took pictures.

You're in the first group of people to see any images of Neptune.

Absolutely. That's what makes it the best. There was a giant blue spot, similar to Jupiter's giant red spot. This was a blue spot, a big storm.

A hurricane the size of Earth.

One of my favorite pictures is actually when we were leaving Neptune and we turned around and looked at the planet. And it's the crescent of Neptune with the crescent of Trident. So you've got the blue Neptune crescent, and then you also have the brownish-orange sort of crescent of its moon.

After Neptune, the Voyager mission was technically over, and the scientists at JPL partied.

I distinctly remember Chuck Berry on the steps right here at JPL playing Johnny B. Goode live after the Neptune flyby.

The Voyagers were still going, heading deeper into space, sending back their data. NASA expected them to freeze or run out of power, but that didn't happen, which was kind of a miracle. And then, after two decades of essentially being on NASA's back burner, the Voyagers did something truly unprecedented. In the 2010s, they both crossed out of the solar system, cruising past the edge of the protective magnetic bubble provided by our sun and into interstellar space, that mostly empty space between our solar system and all the others in the Milky Way. By that time, Susie had returned to the Voyagers as project manager.

Voyager's a trailblazer, right? It's going out, away from us. It's never coming back. We want to get to the farthest reaches that we can so we understand how our star interacts with all the stardust that's outside of it.

The Voyagers measure the strength of the magnetic field, the energy of galactic rays, the density of plasma, which is the sea of electrified particles created by stars sloshing around in space. It records variations in the density of plasma onto a magnetic tape recorder. And when you play back the tape, it sounds like this. The Voyagers are sending back to Earth a near-continuous stream of precious information about how space changes the further you get away from our sun. And Susie's job is to keep them going.

So basically the only commands you can send to these are like on-off?

Yes, exactly.

Because the nuclear generators that fuel the Voyagers are losing power bit by bit each year, Susie's team has had to turn off most of their instruments, like the cameras, they turned off their heaters.

It's very cold where they are. They were never designed to work with their heaters off, but that has happened. We've been, you know, this is another miracle of Voyager. They're living on borrowed time to some degree. I wouldn't want to be the project manager or a team member that let a bad command slip through.

So I believe it was July 21st, 2023?

2020, yeah. I hear about it from our team. this is happening. It should be talking to us now, and it's not.

On July 21st, 2023, Susie's team sent a command to Voyager 2, telling it to turn its satellite dish two degrees towards Earth.

We have to keep Voyager's antenna pointed at the Earth. Over time, it drifts slightly. It'll drift off point. We were sending a pretty simple type of command saying, move it two steps back toward the center.

But two days later, on July 23rd, the stream of data coming in from Voyager 2 went silent. Susie tried to stay calm as they ran through potential issues. Maybe the problem was coming from home base and was easy to fix.

Maybe our ground data software is offline or something like that. So you have to rule out all the things on the ground. But once you do that, then there's only one thing that can be the problem, which is the spacecraft.

The spacecraft Voyager 2, that was over 12 billion. miles away. Once you know that it's the spacecraft that's not sending us data, then you need to start trying to determine why it's not sending.

And when they retraced their steps, they found a problem in the last command they'd sent to Voyager two days earlier, telling it to turn its satellite dish two degrees towards Earth.

Once you looked at that command string, we knew exactly what happened.

Somebody had put the wrong number of degrees in the command.

Instead of moving the antenna back toward the center, it sent it the other way. So it was even further off. Instead of bringing it back to the Earth, we pointed it more away from us.

It was a typo. A typo had taken out contact with Voyager 2.

It's bad. I mean, it's really bad. You've put so much time and energy in this.

Even though they were still in contact with Voyager 1, Susie knew this could be the end of the entire mission.

There's a domino. You messed up. Well, you need to change all your processes.

If Susie and her team couldn't reestablish contact with Voyager 2, they'd be subject to intense scrutiny.

You know, having extra sets of eyes, developing new processes to do checks for you, those all cost money. We'll just stop the Voyager mission.

And then you would have to go out and talk to people like me and say, Voyager's over. That would be your responsibility. Decades of mind-blowing science. Billions of dollars. Humanity's only connection to interstellar space. Over. Finished. Because of a typo. Do you know who sent the command?

Yeah. I mean, there are a couple people that have the blame for the air.

Were you angry?

Yeah.

What's Susie Angry look like?

You should ask my husband. When an anomaly happens like this, everybody is all in and trying to get it fixed, right? It's not a blame immediately. The blame comes later.

There was no time to waste. Every minute, Voyager 2 hurtled over 500 miles further away from Earth. Susie and her team turned to the Deep Space Network, the DSN, a network of satellite dishes spread across the globe.

The DSN can work miracles, almost.

The DSN scanned the skies for any sign of life. Ten days passed before they finally heard something.

Something called carrier signals, which are radio waves without any information on those radio waves.

The faintest heartbeat coming all the way from Voyager 2.

It's giving us this frequency tone, which was somewhat relieving because it means, OK, the spacecraft is still operating.

But they couldn't talk back. Now, because of where Voyager 2 is flying relative to the Earth, there's only one satellite dish on Earth that can talk to it. It's in Australia, outside Canberra. The Canberra dish is humongous, right?

It's 70 meters in diameter.

It's just like a couple of buildings.

It fits inside the Rose Bowl.

A Rose Bowl-sized satellite dish. Trying to talk to Voyager 2's dish, which is about the size of a hot tub, and all the way across the chasm of space. Susie and her team, sweating this out in a conference room at JPL, don't have a lot of options.

So we said, let's do the shout.

What if they marshaled all of the Canberra dish's energy, 100 kilowatts, enough to power an office building, and put it into one single powerful signal? A shout across space.

I would call it more of a blast than a shout. You can think of James Bond movies where they're like giant lasers, you know, shooting down satellites or something like that. It's akin to a laser, but it's not optical. It's radio. I mean, you're just putting lots and lots of power to send a signal with as much energy as possible toward Voyager.

Extra loud?

Yes, extra loud. Exactly.

So Susie and her team load up the new command to reverse the typo and tell Voyager 2 to point its dish back towards Earth.

You better believe we had like 10 people review the command, make sure it was correct this time.

And then they send out this blast that goes roaring through space in search of Voyager 2.

because Voyager 2 is so far away, they have to wait two days before they know anything.

Now, what are those two days like for you where you're waiting?

You're planning on what happens if it doesn't go correctly. Plan B options, basically.

But it sounds like there really wasn't a plan B.

There wasn't an easy plan B, for sure. Do I get stressed? I do get stressed, yes.

What do you do to deal with stress?

I go swimming.

Susie is a lifelong swimmer. The pool is where she goes to empty her mind. Or try to, anyway.

There's some aspect of going back and repeating through your mind decisions that were made. And did you make the correct decision for the information you had?

I'm imagining you swimming, you know, and just asking yourself these questions over and over. Is that something that you do?

I do that sometimes. I try not to run into the wall.

Two weeks had gone by since they first lost contact with Voyager 2. But then, at 12.29 a.m. on August 4th, a familiar voice reached the DSN's satellite ears with news about plasma, galactic rays, and the magnetic fields in interstellar space. It was Voyager 2. The shout had worked. And how did that feel?

Very relieving. Very relieving. I was still mad. I was still mad we had done it. But I was relieved that we were able to recover the spacecraft.

Against all expectations, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are still out there, over 13 billion miles away, and they're still talking to us. They're the most distant man-made objects and the oldest spacecraft still in operation.

And Voyager will be gone in five, six years. We'll either run out of power or we'll freeze. That's going to be the end of it.

How are you going to feel when it's over?

I think it's going to be a mixture of sad but proud. This mission will be more than a half century old. And it definitely bookends my career because I started on Voyager. My career will definitely end on Voyager. So I have a life outside of work, but it'll be an adjustment.

You'll kind of both be kind of drifting off into space a little bit.

I'm not expecting any aliens to contact me after I retire, though. They'll probably contact Voyager first.

It's a jagged line, nothing lasts forever, when you travel time, I've been sipping that Kool-Aid at the Cosmos, cause the Voyager's in every boy and girl.

In 2027, the Voyager mission will celebrate its 50th anniversary. Thank you, Susie Dodd, for sharing that story with us. And special thanks to Ginny Lewis. The song you're hearing, The Voyager, is from her album of the same name. Special thanks as well to the team at JPL and Keith Karemi. The original score for this piece was by Doug Stewart. The story is produced by John Fasile. That was just the start of Snap's All Systems Down series. There is more on the way. And so you don't miss a moment, make sure that the Snap Judgment Podcast is on your phone device. And Snap Plus is now available. Subscribe for bonus Snap episodes every month and on a special ad-free stream, Snap meetups, and more. Snap Plus at snapjudgment.org. KQED in San Francisco is Snap's orbiting hall of justice on Team Snap. The union-represented producers, artists, editors, and engineers are members of the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians, Communications Workers of America, AFL-CIO, Local 51. Something's brought to you by the team that comes to a full stop at each and every stop sign, except for the Uber user, Mr. Mark Ristich, who believes that traffic signs are traffic suggestions. And this is Nancy Lopez.

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