Perspectives on More Than 3 Decades of the Voyager Mission
[1] Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, twin NASA probes that were launched from Cape Canaveral, Fla., in the summer of 1977 during a once-every-175-year alignment of the solar system's giant outer planets, changed our understanding about those planets—Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune—as well as the 4 dozen moons the spacecraft have flown by and the shape of the solar system itself. Today these 722-kilogram probes, whose instruments mostly are still operating after almost 34 years in space, are helping to rewrite the textbooks about the outer edge of our solar system as they continue to race outward from Earth. Voyager 1, currently 17.4 billion kilometers from Earth, and Voyager 2, 14.2 billion kilometers from Earth, are on their way to becoming the first human-made objects to leave the solar system and enter interstellar space, the medium between stars. In exclusive interviews with Eos and during a 27 April news briefing at NASA headquarters in Washington, D. C., Voyager project scientist Ed Stone and several others who have worked on the project discussed mission highlights and the probes' journeys through the heliosheath. This is the final outer layer of a kind of bubble the Sun creates around itself called the heliosphere, a margin where the solar wind is slowed by the pressure of interstellar gas. All the while, the spacecraft, still responsive to ground commands, are sending back data about the solar wind, the magnetic field carried out by the wind, charged particles, and plasma waves.