40 Years In Space: What has Voyager Seen?

On August 25th 2012, Voyager 1 left the solar system, making it the first man-made object to do so. Whilst on its journey towards interstellar space, it captured this record-breaking image, picturing Earth from 6 billion kilometres away, or roughly 40 times the distance between Earth and the Sun. And this was back in 1990. Voyager 1 hasn’t stopped travelling further into the expanse of space since. So what else did the Voyager missions find along the way?

Amidst the height of the space race between the world’s then two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, the idea for the Voyager programme was put forward to the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab. American aerospace engineer Gary Flandro discovered that there would be a rare alignment of the solar system’s outermost gas giants in the late 1970s, allowing passing spacecraft to perform gravitational assists. This would drastically reduce the time needed to travel out of the solar system, creating an opportunity which NASA could simply not pass up. Under normal circumstances, it would take 30 years for a space probe to reach Neptune, the furthest planet from the sun. However, by using the gravitational assists available to the Voyager missions, Neptune could be reached in just 12 short years. This alignment occurs only once every 175 years, meaning that time was of the essence for NASA to develop and launch the Voyager probes on their grand tour of the solar system.

On August 20th 1977, Voyager 2 was launched into space, 16 days before its sister craft Voyager 1. However, Voyager 1 would eventually pass Voyager 2 on its way out of the solar system, as it was on a different, faster trajectory. During the course of their main mission, the probes would visit Jupiter and Saturn, although Uranus and Neptune were added as destinations for Voyager 2 after its launch. The probes were primarily designed to beam collected data back to Earth, all the while capturing breath-taking images of their planetary pit stops.

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Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/Cornell Univ./Arizona State Univ./SSI
Music: Epidemic Sound

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