Voyager Program

Montage of planets and some moons the two Voyager spacecraft have visited and studied The Voyager program is an American scientific program that employs two, and, to study the outer. The probes were launched in 1977 to take advantage of a favorable alignment of,, and. Although their original mission was to study only the planetary systems of Jupiter and Saturn, Voyager 2 continued on to Uranus and Neptune. The Voyagers now explore the outer boundary of the in; their mission has been extended three times and they continue to transmit useful scientific data. Neither Uranus nor Neptune has been visited by a probe other than Voyager 2. On 25 August 2012, data from Voyager 1 indicated that it had become the first human-made object to enter interstellar space, traveling 'further than anyone, or anything, in history'.

The Voyager program is an American scientific program that employs two robotic probes, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, to study the outer Solar System. The Voyager Program is the name given to a JPL project to develop and deploy two identical space probes to survey the outer planets in our solar system; Voyager 1 and Voyager 2.

As of 2013, Voyager 1 was moving with a velocity of 17 kilometers per second (11 mi/s) relative to the Sun. Data and photographs collected by the Voyagers' cameras, and other instruments, revealed unknown details about each of the four and their. Mitsubishi asa program download. Close-up images from the spacecraft charted Jupiter's complex cloud forms, winds and storm systems and discovered volcanic activity on its moon. Saturn's rings were found to have enigmatic braids, kinks and spokes and to be accompanied by myriad 'ringlets'.

At Uranus, Voyager 2 discovered a substantial magnetic field around the planet and ten more moons. Its flyby of Neptune uncovered three rings and six hitherto unknown moons, a planetary and complex, widely distributed. Voyager 2 is the only spacecraft to have visited the two. In August 2018, NASA confirmed, based on results by the spacecraft, of a ' at the outer edges of the that was first detected in 1992 by the two Voyager spacecraft. The Voyager spacecraft were built at the in and they were funded by the (NASA), which also financed their launches from,, their tracking and everything else concerning the probes. The cost of the original program was $865 million, with the later-added Voyager Interstellar Mission costing an extra $30 million.

Plot of Voyager 2's heliocentric velocity against its distance from the Sun, illustrating the use of gravity assist to accelerate the spacecraft by Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus. To observe, Voyager 2 passed over Neptune's north pole, resulting in an acceleration out of the plane of the ecliptic and reduced its velocity away from the Sun. The two Voyager space probes were originally conceived as part of the, and they were thus initially named and. They were then moved into a separate program named 'Mariner Jupiter-Saturn', later renamed the Voyager Program because it was thought that the design of the two space probes had progressed sufficiently beyond that of the Mariner family to merit a separate name. The Voyager Program was similar to the planned during the late 1960s and early 70s. The Grand Tour would take advantage of an alignment of the outer planets discovered by, an at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. This alignment, which occurs once every 175 years, would occur in the late 1970s and make it possible to use to explore Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and.

The Planetary Grand Tour was to send several pairs of probes to fly by all the outer planets (including Pluto, then still considered a planet) along various trajectories, including Jupiter-Saturn-Pluto and Jupiter-Uranus-Neptune. Limited funding ended the Grand Tour program, but elements were incorporated into the Voyager Program, which fulfilled many of the flyby objectives of the Grand Tour except a visit to Pluto. Was the first to launch. Its trajectory was designed to allow flybys of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Voyager 1 was launched after Voyager 2, but along a shorter and faster trajectory that was designed to provide an optimal flyby of Saturn's moon, which was known to be quite large and to possess a dense atmosphere. This encounter sent Voyager 1 out of the plane of the ecliptic, ending its planetary science mission. Had Voyager 1 been unable to perform the Titan flyby, the trajectory of Voyager 2 could have been altered to explore Titan, forgoing any visit to Uranus and Neptune.