![]() Nearly five decades on, the secret to Voyager’s apparent immortality is most likely the spacecrafts’ robust design-and their straightforward, redundant technology. “It’s really helped shape and change the way we think about our solar system,” she says.Ĭurrently traveling at a distance between 12 and 14 billion miles from Earth, Voyager 1 and 2 are the oldest, farthest-flung objects ever forged by humanity. Spilker, now the Voyager mission project scientist, says the probes’ journeys have shed light on the universe we live in-and ourselves. But surprisingly, the pair continued whizzing beyond the heliopause into interstellar space, where they’ve been wandering ever since, for more than three decades. Many in the scientific community expected the spacecrafts to go dark soon after. “Both of them were well past their initial lifetimes.” “We kind of thought of it as a farewell party, because we’d flown by all the planets,” says Spilker. Planetary scientist Linda Spilker remembers the bittersweet moment: the sight of the eighth planet’s azure-colored atmosphere signaled the end of the mission’s solar system grand tour. Goode.” But 12 years later, out on the grassy “Mall” of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, scientists celebrated as Voyager 2 made a previously unscheduled flyby of Neptune. Launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in 1977, identical twins Voyager 1 and 2 embarked on a five-year expedition to observe the moons and rings of Jupiter and Saturn, carrying with them Golden Records preserving messages from Earth, including Berry’s smash single “Johnny B. The bash wasn’t a concert, but a celebration of two space probes about to breach the edge of our solar system: NASA’s Voyager mission. IN 1989, rock-and-roll legend Chuck Berry attended one of the biggest parties of the summer. ![]()
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