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The twin Voyager spacecraft were launched a few days apart in 1977. They both set out to explore Jupiter and Saturn. Uranus and Neptune were later added to Voyager 2's mission.
The Voyagers' missions to the outer planets have given us more new information about them than had existed throughout all history.
Both spacecraft are still going strong! Voyager 1 is the farthest human-made object from Earth. They are now studying the outer reaches of the Sun's influence and beyond, into the space between stars.
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Jupiter's great red spot is a giant storm big enough to swallow up two Earths! It has been seen from Earth for over 300 years.
Here's an animation of the Voyager 2 flyby of Saturn. (NASA video clip in QuickTime format, 800Kb.)
This is a montage of pictures taken by Voyager 1 of Saturn with 6 of its known 16 moons.
Uranus is the only planet we know of that rotates on its side! This image was made by Voyager 2, and was processed in false color to better show the structure of the atmosphere. It also has lines of latitude and longitude drawn on it to show the axis of rotation.
When Voyager 2 took this picture in 1989, Neptune had a dark spot in its atmosphere as big as Earth. But in 1994, the Hubble Space Telescope (which orbits Earth) revealed that the spot had disappeared! What was it and where did it go?
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More amazing facts:
- Voyager 1 is almost 11 billion kilometers from the Sun. (That's 6,750,000,000 miles.) That's over 28,000 round trips to the moon!
- Voyager 1 is now traveling at over 17 kilometers per second (that's 38,728 miles per hour) relative to the Sun. If Voyager 1 could fly that fast through air, it could get all the way across the United States in about 5 minutes.
- The cameras on the Voyagers are sharp enough to read a newspaper headline from 1 kilometer (0.6 mile) away.
- There's very little sunlight way out in the far reaches of the solar system where Neptune orbits. So Voyager 2 had to be able to hold its camera very still for a long time to gather enough light to make pictures. And it had to do this while whizzing by its subject at thousands of miles per hour! Voyager's camera moved, relative to its target, 30 times slower than the hour hand on a clock.
- Finding its way to Neptune from Earth, Voyager 2 was so close to its target, it would be like a golfer putting a golf ball 3630 kilometers (2260 miles) right into the hole.
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