NASA's Voyager Spacecraft Celebrate 40 Years of Space Exploration

Our longest-living and farthest-reaching spacecraft, Voyager 1 and 2, are celebrating 40 years of space exploration this August and September. Each spacecraft carries the Golden Record of earth sounds, pictures and messages.
Today, Voyager 1 is almost 13 billion miles from Earth as it travels northward through interstellar space. Voyager 2 is almost 11 billion miles from Earth, traveling south, and will enter interstellar space within the next few years.

This artist’s concept shows NASA’s Voyager spacecraft against a field of stars in the darkness of space.
Voyager 2 was launched on August 20, 1977, from the NASA Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral in Florida, propelled into space on a Titan/Centaur rocket.
As NASA’s two Voyager spacecraft travel out into deep space, they carry a small American flag and a Golden Record packed with pictures and sounds — mementos of our home planet. This picture shows John Casani, Voyager project manager in 1977, holding a small flag that was folded and sewed into the thermal blankets of the Voyager spacecraft before they launched.
This approximate natural-color image shows Saturn, its rings, and four of its icy satellites.
This 1997 montage of planetary images was taken by spacecraft managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Included are (from top to bottom) images of Mercury, Venus, Earth (and moon), Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. While a variety of spacecraft were responsible for the images, the Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune images were taken by Voyager.
Upon receiving its first signals from the first spacecraft to closely observe Mars, Mariner 4, on March 18, 1966, Deep Space Station 14 (DSS-14) was nicknamed the “Mars Antenna.” Originally a 64 meter (210 foot) antenna, DSS-14 was upgraded to 70 meters (230 feet) in May 1988 to receive the faint signals transmitted by Voyager 2 as it encountered Neptune.
This narrow-angle color image of the Earth, dubbed “Pale Blue Dot,” is a part of the first ever portrait of the solar system taken by Voyager 1.
Voyager 1 image of Io showing active plume of Loki on limb. Heart-shaped feature southeast of Loki consists of fallout deposits from active plume Pele.
Voyager 1 looked back at Saturn on Nov. 16, 1980, four days after the spacecraft flew past the planet, to observe the appearance of Saturn and its rings from this unique perspective.
Uranus’ icy moon Miranda is seen in this image from Voyager 2 on January 24, 1986.
NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft gave humanity its first glimpse of Neptune and its moon Triton in the summer of 1989.
Arriving at Uranus in 1986, Voyager 2 observed a bluish orb with extremely subtle features. A haze layer hid most of the planet’s cloud features from view.
NASA’S Voyager 1 took this picture of the planet Jupiter, the first in its three-month-long, close-up investigation of the largest planet.
As part of a celebration of 35 years of flight for NASA’s Voyager spacecraft, a crowd of engineers and scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California on September 5, 2012.
A 12-inch gold plated copper disk containing recorded sounds and images representing human cultures and life on Earth, is affixed to each Voyager – a message in a bottle cast into the cosmic sea. In a Saturday Night Live segment, Steve Martin’s character predicts that an upcoming cover of Time Magazine will show the words “Send More Chuck Berry,” in reference to Voyager and its Golden Record.
Voyager 2’s encounter with Jupiter was not only a scientific triumph, but an engineering one, too. The mission used the planet’s immense gravity to boost it on a journey that continue to this day.
This dramatic view of the crescents of Neptune and Triton was acquired by Voyager 2 approximately 3 days, 6 and one-half hours after its closest approach to Neptune (north is to the right).
Reaching interstellar space isn’t the first time Voyager 1 has been among stars. The spacecraft transcended into both film and television. In the first Star Trek feature film, a V’Ger spacecraft is revealed to be Voyager 6, a fictional Earth space probe modeled after Voyager.
An artist concept depicting one of the twin Voyager spacecraft. Humanity’s farthest and longest-lived spacecraft are celebrating 40 years in August and September 2017.
This graphic, based on data from NASA’s Voyager spacecraft, shows a model of what our solar system looks like to an observer outside in interstellar space, watching our solar system fly towards the observer.
This true-color simulated view of Jupiter is composed of four images taken by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft on December 7, 2000.
This artist’s rendering depicts NASAs Voyager 2 spacecraft as it studies the outer limits of the heliosphere – a magnetic “bubble” around the solar system that is created by the solar wind.
Artist rendering of the Voyager spacecraft.
This montage of images taken by the Voyager spacecraft of the planets and four of Jupiter’s moons is set against a false-color Rosette Nebula with Earth’s moon in the foreground.
Possible variations in chemical composition from one part of Saturn’s ring system to another are visible in this Voyager 2 picture as subtle color variations that can be recorded with special computer-processing techniques.
Global color mosaic of Triton, taken in 1989 by Voyager 2 during its flyby of the Neptune system.
The 34 meter (111 foot) High Efficiency (HEF) antenna in the foreground is nicknamed the “Uranus Antenna” because it was built in the 1980s to receive signals during Voyager 2’s Uranus encounter.
This archival photo shows engineers working on NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft on March 23, 1977.
An artist concept depicting one of the twin Voyager spacecraft. Humanity’s farthest and longest-lived spacecraft are celebrating 40 years in August and September 2017.