Happy Carl Sagan Day — The Voyagers and the Pale Blue Dot
It was the year 1977 and just eight years after human beings had landed on the moon that another epic journey began. Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are robotic probes launched in 1977, whose primary mission was to study the planetary systems of Jupiter and Saturn. After making game changing discoveries, such as the active volcanoes of Io and liquid water oceans on Europa (Jupiter’s moons), imaging the complexities of Saturn’s rings, as well as studying the atmosphere of Titan, the mission was extended — three times.
Voyager 2 went on to explore Uranus and Neptune and is still the only spacecraft to have visited the outer planets. On its 41st year, it is now studying the outer reaches of the Solar System, currently travelling through the heliosheath. Voyager 1 began its journey out of the Solar System in 1980 and crossed the heliopause in 2012, becoming the first spacecraft to enter interstellar space.
The extended mission of both spacecraft is called the Voyager Interstellar Mission (VIM) and its new objective is “to extend the NASA exploration of the solar system beyond the neighborhood of the outer planets to the outer limits of the Sun’s sphere of influence, and possibly beyond.”
As of today, November 2018, Voyager 1 was at a distance of 13.4 billion miles (144 AU) from the sun and Voyager 2 at a…
