They discovered dark rings made of tiny rocky grains, whilst time-lapse movies of the famous Great Red Spot unmasked the centuries-old, counter-clockwise-rotating, Earth-sized hurricane. Voyager 1 reached the gas giant Maand Voyager 2 arrived July 9, 1979. And just recently, engineers finally fixed an error with Voyager 1’s aging computer that had first begun earlier this year.ĭespite their early struggles, the twin craft swept past Jupiter. In 1998, contact with Voyager 2 went dead for 66 heart-stopping hours. And those were just the first in a line of glitches that plagued the craft over the years. Shortly after launching, Voyager 1’s scan platform jammed and Voyager 2 lost its main radio receiver. So, the mission was downsized to a quarter-billion-dollar visit to Jupiter and Saturn.Īs enduring as the spacecrafts proved to be, they were not faultless. NASA seized on the opportunity, but shrinking budgets made a grand tour of the outer solar system too expensive. But if the chance was missed, another wouldn’t arise until the 22nd century. Neptune, at the Solar System’s ragged edge, was suddenly reachable in a dozen years, rather than 30. Gary Flandro then applied that logic and showed that probes launched in the late 1970s and '80s could benefit from a rare geometric line-up of the outer planets, skipping world to world on gravitational arcs. First, Michael Minovich showed that a spacecraft could “steal” velocity from a planet and use it to accelerate away from the Sun.

The Voyager mission arose from a happy accident of celestial mechanics. The brutalized moons, ring particles clinging to million-mile racetracks, sulphur-belching volcanoes, ice-spewing geysers, craters straight out of Star Wars, and roiling, Earth-sized tempests the Voyagers saw captivated us with an exquisitely savage beauty. Across that bundle of years, they visited mighty Jupiter, ring-bedecked Saturn, gloomy Uranus, and stormy Neptune to lay bare humanity’s naked insignificance. The twin Voyagers left Earth 45 summers ago.

Voyager disk map