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Voyager 2By Marty McDowell/NASA
On August 20, 1977, the United States launched Voyager 2. This was the
first (and thus far only) craft to make it to Uranus and Neptune. Along
the way it discovered 10 moons of Uranus (as well as two rings) and six
moons of Neptune.
Read more about the Voyager mission here.
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This image of Jupiter was
produced from Voyager 2 images taken in June of
1979. The image was produced by the U.S.
Geological Survey in 1990. The colors have been
enhanced to bring out detail. The light-colored
zones circling the planet are bands of ascending
clouds while the dark regions are descending. The
Great Red Spot can be seen at lower left.
Image courtesy of NASA. |
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Where are they now?
Where are the Voyager spacecraft now? Quite far away! So far away that
signals from the craft take more than 16 hours - at the speed of light -
to reach us here on Earth. On November 17, 1998, NASA announced that it
was in the process of shutting down power to Voyager 2's scan platform
which contains science instruments, including the ultraviolet
spectrometer. Turning off the scan platform was part of a power
conservation plan to keep Voyager 2 operating until at least the year
2020. There are still five experiments operating on Voyager 2: the cosmic
ray instrument, low-energy charged particle instrument, plasma science
instrument, plasma wave instrument and the magnetometer. Although Voyager
2 is now more than 8.4 billion kilometers (5.2 billion miles) from Earth,
or more than 56 times farther from the Sun than Earth is, it is not the
most distant object ever created by humans. That honor belongs to V2's
sistercraft Voyager 1, which is currently 10.8
billion kilometers (6.7 billion miles) from Earth.
Source: NASA.
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Share Your Memories!What do you remember about Voyager 2? Have you any compelling stories to share? Share your stories with the world! (We print the best stories right here!) |
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Space References (Books):
Dickinson, Terence. Nightwatch:
A Practical Guide to Viewing the Universe. Firefly Books, 1998.
Greene, Brian. Elegant
Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate
Theory. Vintage, 2000.
Hawking, Stephen. Illustrated
Brief History of Time, Updated and Expanded Edition. Bantam, 1996.
Hawking, Stephen. Theory
of Everything: The Origin and Fate of the Universe. New Millenium,
2002.
Hawking, Stephen. The
Universe in a Nutshell. Bantam, 2001.
Kaku, Michio. Hyperspace:
A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps and the Tenth
Dimension.
Kranz, Gene. Failure
Is Not an Option: Mission Control from Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond.
Berkley Pub Group, 2001.
Sagan, Carl; Druyan, Ann. Comet,
Revised Edition. Ballantine, 1997
Sagan, Carl. Cosmos,
Reissue Edition. Ballantine, 1993
Sagan, Carl. Pale
Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space. Ballantine, 1997
Space References (Videos):
Cosmos.
PBS, 2000.
Stephen
Hawking's Universe. PBS, 1997.
Hyperspace.
BBC, 2002.
Life
Beyond Earth PBS, 1999.
The Planets. BBC, 1999.
Understanding
The Universe. A&E, 1996.
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SPACE SPECS |
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| | Courtesy of NASA | |
|  | Launched: August 20, 1977
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| | Destination: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune
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| | Arrival: July 4, 1979; August 26, 1981; January 24, 1986; August 25, 1989
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| | Return:
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| | Nation: U.S.
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| | Mission: Flybys and photographs/data.
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