Voyager 1 & 2 – The Real Energizer Bunnies

I remember when Voyagers 1 and 2 were launched by NASA in separate months in the summer of 1977 from Cape Canaveral, Florida. As originally designed, they were to conduct closeup studies of Jupiter and Saturn, Saturn’s rings, and the larger moons of the two planets. To accomplish their two-planet mission, the spacecraft were built to last five years. But as we see, they achieved of all their objectives and then some! They had additional flybys of the two outermost giant planets, Uranus and Neptune, and they kept on going and going and going. And now in 2024, with numerous tweaks of their systems, they are still flying through the depths of interstellar space, long ago leaving our tiny solar system. We can only hope our home appliances last this long!

Kudos to NASA and the mission scientists and engineers at the Voyagers’ home at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. The Voyagers can still phone home.