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.
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