Short answers, pulled from the story.
Voyager 1 crossed the heliopause and entered interstellar space on the 25th of August 2012, at a distance of 121 AU from the Sun. NASA officially confirmed this on the 12th of September 2013, after plasma wave instruments measured an 80-fold increase in electron density consistent with the interstellar medium.
As of 2026, Voyager 1 is more than 172 AU from Earth, making it the most distant human-made object ever launched. Its radio signals take over 23 hours to travel from the spacecraft to a receiver on the ground.
The golden record carries photographs of Earth, greetings in 55 languages, and a wide range of sounds and music. Recordings include works by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Blind Willie Johnson, Chuck Berry, and Valya Balkanska, as well as sounds of whales, ocean waves, and a baby crying. The project was assembled under the direction of a team including Carl Sagan and Timothy Ferris.
NASA chose the Titan flyby because Titan was known to have a substantial atmosphere, making it a scientifically higher priority. The trajectory required to reach Titan sent Voyager 1 below Saturn's south pole and out of the ecliptic plane, ending any possibility of continuing to Pluto.
Voyager 1 uses a 3.7-meter high-gain Cassegrain antenna to transmit signals at 2.3 GHz or 8.4 GHz to one of three Deep Space Network stations on Earth. Power comes from three radioisotope thermoelectric generators fueled by plutonium-238, which may continue supplying enough electricity for engineering data until 2036.
In November 2023, a corrupted memory bank in the Flight Data Subsystem caused Voyager 1 to transmit unreadable data. Engineers found the failure was likely caused by a high-energy particle strike or age-related wear. By the 20th of April 2024, they restored health and status data by relocating code away from the damaged chip, and by the 13th of June 2024, all four remaining active instruments were returning science data.