Forty-five years ago, on August 20, 1977, NASA's Voyager 2 was launched on a "grand tour" of the solar system that would take it to Jupiter and the other planets.
Scientists are starting to wonder how long the famed space probe can keep going after it was over 12 billion miles away.
It was possible to slingshot from planet to planet across the solar system in the 70s because of a once-every-sixtie years alignment. Two weeks after the first launch, the second was followed by the third. The Golden Record contains sounds and images depicting the diversity of life and culture on Earth.
The farthest artificial object from Earth is now over 14 billion miles from here. There is an incredible multidecade tour of the giant planets in the film.
The images of our solar system are amazing.
In March 1979 and November 1980 it was supposed to reach Jupiter and Saturn before leaving the plane of the planets. Jupiter was visited in July 1979 while the other planets were visited in August 1981 and January 1986
Jonathan Lunine, a planetary scientist and physicist at Cornell University, told Space.com that the legacies of the first and second Voyagers were great. It was demonstrated that it was possible to explore the outer solar system with a couple of spaceships.
Many planetary scientists still rely on the unique images from the wide-angle and narrow-angle cameras for their research. The probes spotted volcanic activity on Jupiter's moon Io and found that the gas giant has faint rings. They were able to see the giant moon Titan's thick, Earth-like atmosphere, as well as the tiny moon Enceladus.
There was only one person who went to Uranus and Neptune. Dark rings, a tilted magnetic field and a geologically active moon were revealed in the first ever images of Uranus. Scientists initially thought that Neptune had just one moon, but it was found to have more than that. There is a geologically active moon that is retrograde and is believed to be a dwarf planet.
Scientists were aided in determining what merited deeper exploration by the Voyager mission. The Galileo mission was launched in 1989 and the Juno mission was launched in 2011. The work of the probe helped inspire the mission to the moon.
Lunine said thatVoyager 1's flyby of Titan was the catalyst for the wonderful Cassini mission. An amazing video was sent back from the Huygens probe after it landed on the surface of Titan.
Most of the exoplanets found so far are roughly the size of Neptune and Uranus, which has led to investigations into the role of the ice giant planets.
Today, NASA continues to follow up on the Voyager missions. In 2034, the space agency's Dragonfly mission will reach Titan, which is the largest moon in the solar system. The National Academies Planetary Science Decadal Survey recommended in April that NASA send a $4.2 billion probe to discover the ice giant planet.
The latest mission is a direct result of the brief visit to the Uranus system in January 1986. The flyby of Uranus was a bull's-eye because of the orientation of the sun's axis to the moon. It was unlike flybys at other planets where the probes were able to visit multiple moons. The moons are largely unexplored becauseVoyager 2 got very brief images.
They are thought to be ocean worlds and so would be targeted by the probe. Lunine said that it has been 45 years since the launch of the first and second Voyagers. It seems like a long time because these missions take so long to conceive, fund, build, launch and execute, but it all comes from the intriguing peeks that we got from the first mission.
NASA's Deep Space Network is still used to send and receive commands and occasionally transmit data to Earth. During a news conference held at COSPAR 22 in July, Stamatios Krimigis said that they are still getting data from Voyager. We're looking forward to getting more data for a long time.
The probes' scientific instruments will be completely turned off around the late 2020s, but their journeys into space will continue indefinitely. Krimigis wants to be here after the show ends. I'm not certain that will happen.
The Oort cloud is a sphere of comets surrounding the sun. They'll leave the neighborhood and go to the center of the Milky Way for millions of years.
The work of the scientific team may be over, but they have just begun their journeys into the universe.
We encourage you to follow us on social networking sites.
All Rights Reserved © 2024
