# Lounge > Science and Technology >  >  Voyagers 1 and 2 going strong after 40 years!

## Sagan

It's been 40 years (to the day) since the Voyager mission commenced with the launch of Voyager 1.  

This groundbreaking and incredibly ambitious mission touched on  practically every aspect of our solar system and planetary neighbors. 

Voyager 1 left Earth on September 5, 1977 - preceded by Voyager 2 on  August 20th - on a quest to study the outer solar system. Today NASA  and the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum are celebrating the  40th anniversary of this history-making mission. 

Throughout the 1960s, NASA had focused on sending astronauts to the  Moon. But by the 1970s, as the Apollo era ended, the agency's focus  shifted toward robotic missions to the planets, as well as developing  the Space Shuttle program for delivering payloads to Earth orbit. 

In 1964, with Apollo 11's landing still a half decade away, Caltech  graduate student and Jet Propulsion Laboratory intern Gary Flandro was  working to develop feasible trajectories for a mission to the outer  planets. He turned his attention to the relatively new idea of gravity  assist, whereby a spacecraft passing close by a planet steals some of  its orbital speed, accelerating without expending any rocket fuel. 

Flandro's pencil-and-paper plots of the outer planets revealed that  Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune would align in the late 1970s such  that one spacecraft could visit all four in a single mission if it  launched by 1977.  

The craft would slingshot around each planet in succession,  completing a "Grand Tour" in only 10 to 12 years. By comparison, sending  a dedicated spacecraft to only Neptune would take 40 years without  passing any other planets along the way. 

At: http://www.skyandtelescope.com/astro...-going-strong/ 

 

Voyager 1: going strong at 40 years.

----------


## kevinjoseph

sagannnnnnnnnn we miss you in chat

----------


## Ironman

I remember the Neptune photos in 1989......awesome.

We just lost the Cassini spacecraft as it plunged into Saturn this week, but it took in a LOT of data!

----------

