Voyager program

:Voyager is also the name of a planned series of unmanned probes to Mars, cancelled in 1968.

Related Topics:
Voyager - Mars

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The Voyager program consisted of a pair of unmanned scientific probes, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, launched in 1977. They were sent to study Jupiter and Saturn, using an advantageous planetary alignment of the late 1970s. However, the mission planners always had in the back of their minds a continued mission, and Voyager 2 also examined Uranus and Neptune. They were originally conceived as part of the Mariner program, being Mariner 11 and Mariner 12 respectively. The original program name was Mariner Jupiter-Saturn. It was later given the more appealing and romantic name "Voyager".

Related Topics:
Probe - Voyager 1 - Voyager 2 - 1977 - Jupiter - Saturn - 1970s - Uranus - Neptune - Mariner program - Mariner 11 - Mariner 12

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Voyager was actually a scaled back version of the Grand Tour program of the late 1960's and early 1970's to send a pair of probes to fly by all the outer planets (scaled back because of budget cuts). In the end, they fulfilled all the Grand Tour flyby objectives save Pluto despite not being officially designed for such a long duration mission.

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Both missions revealed large amounts of information about the gas giants of the solar system. In addition, the spacecraft have been used to place limits on the existence of a hypothetical post-Plutonian Planet X.

Related Topics:
Gas giant - Solar system - Plutonian - Planet X

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In the 1990's Voyager 1 overtook the slower travelling Pioneer 10 to become the most distant human made artifact in space - a record it will keep for at least several more decades (and since they are traveling in opposite directions, Voyager 1 and Pioneer 10 are also the most widely separated human made objects).

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Periodic contact has been maintained with both probes to monitor conditions in the outer expanses of the solar system. The crafts' radioactive power sources are still producing electrical energy, fuelling hopes of locating our solar system's heliopause. In late 2003, Voyager 1 began sending data that seemed to indicate it had crossed the termination shock, but interpretations of this data were in dispute. It is now believed that the termination shock was crossed in December, 2004, with the heliopause an unknown distance ahead.

Related Topics:
Radioactive - Heliopause - 2003 - Voyager 1 - Termination shock

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Due to budget shifts prompted by President Bush's Vision for Space Exploration, it seems the probes may be deactivated and abandonedhttp://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4338245.stm as early as October 2005, before they observe the heliopause, disappointing many scientists.

Related Topics:
Vision for Space Exploration - 2005 - Heliopause

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These probes were built at JPL funded by NASA. Attached to each of them is a copy of the Voyager Golden Record.

Related Topics:
JPL - NASA - Voyager Golden Record

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