The Voyager Probes — Monuments to Science and Human Ingenuity
Monday’s Great American Eclipse captivated the nation. But it left no time to celebrate the anniversary of one of the US’s most important space missions. Four decades ago, a pair of space probes, dubbed Voyager 1 and 2, set out on an epic expedition into the cosmos and gave humanity the first up-close images of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.
The dazzling spectacle of Monday’s Great American Eclipse — and the national paranoia about prolonged eye damage it inspired — overshadowed an epic milestone in US aerospace history.
On August 20, 1977, NASA launched a pair of space probes into the cosmos, sending them on a journey to observe our celestial neighbors. Traveling at 35,000 miles per hour, Voyager 1 and 2 have ventured more than 11 billion miles from Earth, exploring the solar system — capturing up-close images of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune — before hurtling toward interstellar space. As the mission hit its 40th anniversary last Sunday, Voyager 2 has entered the “Heliosheath,” a region of space in which the pressure of interstellar gas distorts and compresses the solar wind, a stream of energetic matter emanating from the sun.
The Voyager program is not just a marvel of scientific know-how but also a testament to human imagination. Photos and data captured by the robot explorers have allowed the rest of us to envision the blurry dots seen through earth-bound telescopes as fully-fledged worlds, perhaps bearing life in some form.
Excited by the prospect of alien encounters, the scientists who created the Voyager probes equipped each spacecraft with a 12-inch, gold-plated copper disk on which is recorded a wealth of Earth memorabilia — a visual and sonic time-capsule to communicate our existence to any intelligent life able to de-code and play it back.
Watch the videos below to see the iconic images included in the golden records, and understand in geographic terms the vast distances Voyager 2 has covered in its 40-year expedition.
Related front page panorama photo credit: Adapted by WhoWhatWhy from Voyager 1 and 2 (NASA, ESA, and Z. Levay – STScI).