Voyager 1 & 2 Celebrate 40 Years in Space

Twenty years ago today, Voyager 1 was launched from earth at Cape Canaveral. In a nondescript office building in Altadena, California, not far from the main campus of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), a few engineers keep tabs on humanity's most distant emissaries. Their job is to communicate with the twin Voyager probes, launched by NASA in 1977 and currently sailing out of the Solar System. At their launches, on 20 August and 5 September 1977, the school-bus-sized probes soared separately into space. After they zipped past the giant planets Jupiter and Saturn, gathering photographs and scientific data, they went their separate ways, Voyager 2 sailing on to Uranus and Neptune — a first for any spacecraft — and Voyager 1 heading out of the Solar System.

Scientific discoveries come fast and furious each time one of the probes flies past a planet. Every image taken as the spacecraft approaches its target becomes the best ever made of it. Jupiter's Great Red Spot pops into focus, glaring balefully in a swirl of tempestuous clouds. Volcanoes on its moon Io hove unexpectedly into view. Saturn's extraordinary ring system appears, along with its haze-encrusted moon Titan. Even poor Uranus, that boring aquamarine blob, turns out to have an unusual magnetic field, torqued as the planet orbits on its side. And lurking in the cold, gassy clouds of Neptune was a vast dark spot. In August 2012, Voyager 1 crossed into interstellar space, the first human-made object to leave the Solar System. Voyager 2 will soon follow. As their plutonium power sources wane, the craft leave us pondering much more about ourselves than about the cosmos.



Credits:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v548/n7668/full/548392a.html
http://www.pbs.org/the-farthest/home/