As NASA commemorated the 45th anniversary of its longest-running mission, the most distant human-made spacecraft - Voyager 1 and 2 - are still traveling in interstellar space, more than 12 billion miles from Earth.
Both spacecraft were dispatched to investigate the solar system's outer planets after their launches in 1977. August 20 saw the initial departure of Voyager 2, while September 5 saw the release of Voyager 1.
According to The Register, Voyagers 1 and 2 are equipped with 3.7-meter-wide radio antenna dishes and several instruments that can measure various forms of electromagnetic radiation, charged particles, photons, and magnetic fields. Their purpose is to detect the rumblings of deep space and transmit this information back to Earth.
By 1989, both spacecraft had traveled to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, revealing previously unseen moons and planetary rings.
"Both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 provided tremendous legacies for planetary exploration," Jonathan Lunine, a planetary scientist and physicist at Cornell University working on the Juno, Europa Clipper, and James Webb Space Telescope missions, told Space.com.
"Not only in what they accomplished in terms of science but also demonstrating that it was really possible to explore the outer solar system with a couple of spacecraft," Lunine added.
Voyager Mission: Here's How Long It Would Last
The space agency said that NASA developed Deep Space Network to interact with Voyager 2 at Uranus and Neptune. Voyagers 1 and 2 still communicate with this network, receiving normal instructions and sometimes sending data to Earth.
The probes' scientific equipment will be completely turned off in the mid to late 2020s. Eventually, the spacecraft will become cold and silent, but their voyages into interstellar space will continue perpetually.
Voyager 1 and 2 will enter the Oort cloud, the ring of comets surrounding the solar system, in around 300 years. They will leave the area after about 30,000 years and spend millions of years quietly orbiting the Milky Way's core.
Voyager Probes Revelation
Voyager's discoveries are the stuff of folklore for many planetary scientists who still rely on the exceptional photographs from the spacecraft's wide-angle and narrow-angle sensors, Space.com mentioned.
The probes determined that Jupiter's Great Red Spot is an Earth-sized storm, that the gas giant has weak rings, and that the moon Io of Jupiter contains volcanoes. They investigated Saturn's rings, saw the giant moon's thick, Earth-like atmosphere of Titan, and discovered that Enceladus, a small moon, was geologically active.
Then, Voyager 2 by itself traveled to Uranus and Neptune. The first-ever photographs of Uranus's spacecraft showed its black rings, skewed magnetic field, and geologically active moon Miranda. While this was happening, Neptune also had many more moons and rings than previously imagined.
Researchers also got to observe Triton, which, like Pluto, is now thought to be a captured dwarf planet from the Kuiper Belt. Triton is a geologically active moon that orbits "backward."
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