Voyagers 1 & 2 Turn 40 Years Old
This montage of images of the planets visited by Voyager 2 was prepared from an assemblage of images taken by the 2 Voyager spacecraft. (Credits: NASA/JPL)
PASADENA, Calif. (NASA PR) — Few missions can match the achievements of NASA’s groundbreaking Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft during their 40 years of exploration. Here’s a short list of their major accomplishments to date.
Planetary Firsts
Launched in 1977, the Voyagers delivered many surprises and discoveries from their encounters with the gas giants of the outer solar system: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Between 1977 and 1990, the mission attained these distinctions:
- First spacecraft to fly by all four planets of the outer solar system (Voyager 2)
- First mission to discover multiple moons of the four outer planets (both spacecraft):
- 3 new moons at Jupiter
- 4 new moons at Saturn
- 11 new moons at Uranus
- 6 new moons at Neptune
- First spacecraft to fly by four different target planets (Voyager 2)
- First spacecraft to visit Uranus and Neptune (Voyager 2)
- First spacecraft to image the rings of Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune (Voyager 2)
- First spacecraft to discover active volcanoes beyond Earth (on Jupiter’s moon Io — Voyager 1)
- First spacecraft to detect lightning on a planet other than Earth (at Jupiter — Voyager 1)
- First spacecraft to find suggestions of an ocean beyond Earth (at Jupiter’s moon Europa — both spacecraft)
- First spacecraft to detect a nitrogen-rich atmosphere found beyond our home planet (at Saturn’s moon Titan — Voyager 1)
Heliophysics Firsts
After Voyager 1 departed from Saturn in November 1980, it began a journey to where no human-made object had ever gone before: the space between the stars. On August 25, 2012, it crossed over into interstellar space, leaving behind the heliosphere — the enormous magnetic bubble encompassing our Sun, planets and solar wind. Voyager 2 set course for interstellar space after departing from Neptune in August 1989, and is expected to enter interstellar space in the next few years. Together the Voyagers have taught us a great deal about the extent of our sun’s influence and the very nature of the space that lies beyond our planets.
- First spacecraft to leave the heliosphere and enter interstellar space (Voyager 1)
- First spacecraft to measure full intensity of cosmic rays — atoms accelerated to nearly the speed of light — in interstellar space (Voyager 1)
- First spacecraft to measure magnetic field in interstellar space (Voyager 1)
- First spacecraft to measure density of interstellar medium — material ejected by ancient supernovae (Voyager 1)
- First spacecraft to measure solar wind termination shock — the boundary where solar wind charged particles slow below the speed of sound as they begin to press into the interstellar medium (Voyager 2)
Engineering and Computing Firsts and Records
The Voyagers, which launched with nearly identical configurations and instruments, were designed to withstand the harsh radiation environment of Jupiter — the greatest physical challenge they would ever encounter. Preparations for the peril at Jupiter ensured that the Voyagers would be well equipped for the rest of their journeys, too. Engineering and computing advances that the Voyagers debuted set the stage for future missions.
- First spacecraft extensively protected against radiation, which also set the standard for radiation design margin still in use for space missions today
- First spacecraft protected against external electrostatic discharges
- First spacecraft with programmable computer-controlled attitude and articulation (which means the pointing of the spacecraft)
- First spacecraft with autonomous fault protection, able to detect its own problems and take corrective action
- First use of Reed-Solomon code for spacecraft data — an algorithm to reduce errors in data transmission and storage, which is widely used today
- First time engineers linked ground communications antennas together in an array to be able to receive more data (for Voyager 2’s Uranus encounter)
Beyond that, the Voyager spacecraft continue setting endurance and distance records:
- Longest continuously operating spacecraft (Voyager 2, which passed Pioneer 6’s record on Aug. 13, 2012)
- Most distant spacecraft from the Sun (Voyager 1, which passed Pioneer 10’s distance on Feb. 17, 1998 and is currently about 13 billion miles, or 21 billion kilometers, away)
The Voyager spacecraft were built by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, which continues to operate both. JPL is a division of Caltech in Pasadena. The Voyager missions are a part of the NASA Heliophysics System Observatory, sponsored by the Heliophysics Division of the Science Mission Directorate in Washington. For more information about the Voyager spacecraft, visit:
and
For all the latest space news,
please follow Parabolic Arc on Twitter.
9 responses to “Voyagers 1 & 2 Turn 40 Years Old”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Many people consider themselves “Children of Apollo”. I’m a Voyager kid. Apollo was most def cool, but the Voyagers at Jupiter and Saturn had me hooked. In 1982 I discovered an office at NASA I could write to, and they’d send me a friggin’ box, or boxes of literature on anything I asked about, planetary probes, weather satellites, communications satellites, and of course, the STS. I’d love to see what NASA spent feeding my young brain on things astronautical. I’ll bet it was 100’s of dollars in postage fees. Long before the internet carried this information, and even if it did, I did not have access to the internets until 1987. It was not long until my collection of satellite programs exceeded what the Ft Worth Public Library at Tandy Center had on hand. They had a really good film vault with NASA material. It never escapes me that I watched a NASA film brief about Pioneer at Jupiter featuring among others the PI of the photo polarimiter instrument. I would go on to work for him in my 20’s. I still had a stash of those line cards, and brochures when I left for college. Fond memories.
I remember one of the Voyagers launching in Aug 1977. It was a hot muggy day in Passaic New Jersey watching it launch on the evening news with Walter Cronkite, I think. I was at great aunt Anna Marie’s house sitting on her hard plastic lined sofa. Her husband Frank was an aviation mechanic at Newark Airport and was covered in all the high end petro products that the 60’s and 70’s had to offer, so all the furniture was covered in thick clear plastic. It was one of those really early TV’s with the very rounded CRT’s Looked more like an octagon than a rectangle.
it is funny that CONgress wants to kill the education dept.
It was them that sent you and myself all sorts of interesting information such as on apollo, skylab, coming shuttle, etc. Think of how stary-eyed you were. I certainly was.
I see your point, and have gone back and forth with myself on the issue. The curmudgeon in me rails at the dumbed down content NASA creates today vs the hard stuff we got. I’d love for NASA to generate more content that’s not lowered to the point of Sesame Street. Or perhaps a better balance. But that said, killing the education budget of NASA is shooting ourselves in the foot. It’s easy to look at the political stances of the right and come away thinking that they don’t like education. Many times they seem to be of the opinion that in order to make eduction more effective teachers need to be impoverished and school districts need to be starved. But I sometimes wonder if the root of their feelings come from being offended by the Sesame Street level of introducing subjects that has become fashionable. I don’t mind Sesame Street as entry level drug. But you’ve got to elevate to the hard stuff at some point. I give Kerbel Space Program as a wonderful balance between whimsical treatment of a very difficult subject and then transition into a very difficult subject.
bummer that we do not build another couple and design them to use ion engines, along with slinging past 1, maybe 2 planets for speed boosts.
Then send these in a different direction to see what we can see.
There are many of us in the active community who bemoan this very approach. I was hoping that Red Dragon was going to finally deliver this kind of service. But alas it will have to await Space X’s new approach, what ever it is. JPL and LockMart, and APL don’t seem to be too interested in serial production, they make their bread and butter doing research and development cycles on unique systems. My institution, the UofA is one of the few to refly a known spacecraft and change only a few instruments. But I have to admit, the number of changes increased after approval of the proposal was higher than the proposal. Voyager still has great fundamentals. A big, stiff antenna, nuclear power (Yeah, it’s a GOOD thing.), an instrument platform, good solid proven mechanical design, and a Falcon 9 in full throw away mode could throw it to Jupiter or a multi Venus-Earth encounter to put them any where we want them. I think DAWN would be the best platform for us to use as a generic flyby/orbiter mission if we were going to start economizing planetary missions today.
yeah, I had high hopes with red dragon. Adding more fuel would have enabled lunar landing.
I still hope that SX will consider the idea of creating such a craft and then sell multiples to not just NASA, but other nations that want to explore the solar system cheaply.
The ability to put a 1 ton or 2 of instruments or even robotics on the moon, or put a fly on venus would be huge for a nation that wants to build up their space division.
DAWN? Hmmmm. That might not be a bad idea for at least sending several into the asteroid belt and let it run around.
I’m still waiting for Space X to offer Dragons and Falcon 9 first stages as an instant national manned space program and make money on refurb and 2nd stages. Say charge $120 mil per booster, and what’s the cost of a Dragon this deep into the program? $30 mil, $40 mil? So call the reusable bits ~200 mil. Then there’s refurb and new service modules and 2nd stages. Call it a billion for a squadron of 5, and that’s the cheapest operational manned space program in history. It matches what nations who buy fighter jets pay for a squadron of 4th generation figher jets. Germany, England, France, Japan, Australia, and Brazil could afford it. Not to mention Middle Eastern states awash in cash such as Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait and Qater. When the national desire is there, or if money could be put together for a private effort, the capability will be there very soon.
Dawn is awesome. Kilowatts of solar, lot’s of delta v to move around the sub Jovian Solar System. Proven design, comms capable of transmitting excellent imaging data volumes. Flight proven and long lived.
I agree entirely with you, I’m not arguing with you. But people get… weird about it. I’ve had people insist that if NASA bought seats on SpaceX’s earliest manned Mars flights for the agency’s best’n’brightest Mars experts, that wouldn’t be “America” going to Mars, and therefore if “America” wanted to go to Mars (and they, as Americans, did want to go to Mars) then NASA had to develop their own hardware via the usual contract model (like Apollo, like SLS, like the Shuttle.)
And I’ve never been able to get any answer about what the difference is (other than hideous waste), all I got was “Well if you can’t see it, I can’t explain it to you.”
If an American space-enthusiast, talking about an American company ferrying NASA-employed researchers to Mars is not “America” going to Mars. Then what chance do we have of convincing, say, my own Australia that flying Australian researchers to a leased Bigelow station via SpaceX is an “Australian space program”?
Not for any reasonable definition of “adding” and “fuel”. To turn Dragon into a lunar lander, you need to add a lunar lander.