Check out the National Geographic’s elaborate and beautifully illustrated history of the two Voyager spacecraft, which toured the outer planets and then headed out towards interstellar space. It’s all on a single web page and as you scroll down you go through the various phases of their missions and different audio clips play for each.
Like the ancient mariners, they would navigate a vast ocean, the solar system …
It was 1977. Jimmy Carter was president, Elvis Presley gave his last performance, and Saturday Night Fever blasted into theaters. Above the Earth, twin spacecraft called Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 sailed into space on a trailblazing expedition to go where no man had gone before.
They would reveal that the moons orbiting Jupiter were worlds in their own right, that Saturns fabled rings boasted intricate weaves, and that Earth was but a pale blue dot set in the vastness of space. No other spacecraft have divulged the secrets of so many worlds, roamed so far, or so profoundly reshaped our view of our home in the cosmos.
Their journey was an idea centuries in the making and their success far from predetermined. It was a risk but a serendipitous one. As Captain Kirk said, “Sometimes a feeling is all we humans have to go on.”
The videos have been posted of the panels in Monday’s two-part NASA event (see earlier posting) about the New Horizons Pluto mission and comparing that probe’s passing the orbit of Neptune with the 25th anniversary of the Voyager 2 fly-by of Neptune.
A panel discussion of the New Horizons project:
Caption:
NASA’s Mission to Pluto was a two part televised science event at NASA headquarters on August 25 – the same date that the agency’s New Horizons spacecraft passed the orbit of Neptune on its way to Pluto and exactly 25 years after the Voyager spacecraft’s encounter with Neptune in 1989. During the first event, entitled NASA’s New Horizons Pluto Mission: Continuing Voyager’s Legacy of Exploration, NASA scientists and officials discussed the two missions.
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Five participants in the Voyager 2 fly-by of Neptune in 1989 reminisce and compare that event with next year’s New Horizon’s fly by of Pluto:
Caption:
NASA’s Mission to Pluto was a two part televised science event at NASA headquarters on August 25 – the same date that the agency’s New Horizons spacecraft passed the orbit of Neptune on its way to Pluto and exactly 25 years after the Voyager spacecraft’s encounter with Neptune in 1989. During the second event, entitled New Horizons-Voyager Connections: Memories from the Team, several New Horizons science team members gave personal accounts of their work during the Voyager Neptune encounter and discussed their new assignments on the Pluto mission.
Neptune’s moon Triton is far, far away but we got a close up look at it when the Voyager 2 probe passed by in 1989. The Voyager’s imagery of Triton has been enhanced with modern processing techniques:
August 21, 2014 : NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft gave humanity its first close-up look at Neptune and its moon Triton in the summer of 1989. Like an old film, Voyager’s historic footage of Triton has been “restored” and used to construct the best-ever global color map of that strange moon. The map, produced by Paul Schenk, a scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, has also been used to make a movie recreating that historic Voyager encounter, which took place 25 years ago, on August 25, 1989.
The Voyager 2 spacecraft flew by Triton, a moon of Neptune, in the summer
of 1989. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Lunar & Planetary Institute. Full image and caption
The new Triton map has a resolution of 1,970 feet (600 meters) per pixel. The colors have been enhanced to bring out contrast but are a close approximation to Triton’s natural colors. Voyager’s “eyes” saw in colors slightly different from human eyes, and this map was produced using orange, green and blue filter images.
In 1989, most of the northern hemisphere was in darkness and unseen by Voyager. Because of the speed of Voyager’s visit and the slow rotation of Triton, only one hemisphere was seen clearly at close distance. The rest of the surface was either in darkness or seen as blurry markings.
The production of the new Triton map was inspired by anticipation of NASA’s New Horizons encounter with Pluto, coming up a little under a year from now. Among the improvements on the map are updates to the accuracy of feature locations, sharpening of feature details by removing some of the blurring effects of the camera, and improved color processing.
Although Triton is a moon of a planet and Pluto is a dwarf planet, Triton serves as a preview of sorts for the upcoming Pluto encounter. Although both bodies originated in the outer solar system, Triton was captured by Neptune and has undergone a radically different thermal history than Pluto. Tidal heating has likely melted the interior of Triton, producing the volcanoes, fractures and other geological features that Voyager saw on that bitterly cold, icy surface.
Pluto is unlikely to be a copy of Triton, but some of the same types of features may be present. Triton is slightly larger than Pluto, has a very similar internal density and bulk composition, and has the same low-temperature volatiles frozen on its surface. The surface composition of both bodies includes carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, methane and nitrogen ices.
Voyager also discovered atmospheric plumes on Triton, making it one of the known active bodies in the outer solar system, along with objects such as Jupiter’s moon Io and Saturn’s moon Enceladus. Scientists will be looking at Pluto next year to see if it will join this list. They will also be looking to see how Pluto and Triton compare and contrast, and how their different histories have shaped the surfaces we see.
Although a fast flyby, New Horizons’ Pluto encounter on July 14, 2015, will not be a replay of Voyager but more of a sequel and a reboot, with a new and more technologically advanced spacecraft and, more importantly, a new cast of characters. Those characters are Pluto and its family of five known moons, all of which will be seen up close for the first time next summer.
Triton may not be a perfect preview of coming attractions, but it serves as a prequel to the cosmic blockbuster expected when New Horizons arrives at Pluto next year.
In another historic milestone for the Voyager mission, Aug. 25 also marks the two-year anniversary of Voyager 1 reaching interstellar space.
The Voyager mission is managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, California, for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. Caltech manages JPL for NASA. The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, manages the New Horizons mission for NASA’s SMD.
For more information about the Lunar and Planetary Institute, visit: ww.lpi.usra.edu
Cassini scientists noted a decrease in clouds everywhere on Titan after a large storm in 2010, and expected clouds to return sooner, based on computer models of Titan’s atmosphere.
NASA’s Cassini spacecraft recently captured images of clouds moving across the northern hydrocarbon seas of Saturn’s moon Titan. This renewed weather activity, considered overdue by researchers, could finally signal the onset of summer storms that atmospheric models have long predicted.
The Cassini spacecraft obtained the new views in late July, as it receded from Titan after a close flyby. Cassini tracked the system of clouds developing and dissipating over the large methane sea known as Ligeia Mare for more than two days. Measurements of cloud motions indicate wind speeds of around 7 to 10 mph (3 to 4.5 meters per second).
For several years after Cassini’s 2004 arrival in the Saturn system, scientists frequently observed cloud activity near Titan’s south pole, which was experiencing late summer at the time. Clouds continued to be observed as spring came to Titan’s northern hemisphere. But since a huge storm swept across the icy moon’s low latitudes in late 2010, only a few small clouds have been observed anywhere on the icy moon. The lack of cloud activity has surprised researchers, as computer simulations of Titan’s atmospheric circulation predicted that clouds would increase in the north as summer approached, bringing increasingly warm temperatures to the atmosphere there.
“We’re eager to find out if the clouds’ appearance signals the beginning of summer weather patterns, or if it is an isolated occurrence,” said Elizabeth Turtle, a Cassini imaging team associate at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab in Laurel, Maryland. “Also, how are the clouds related to the seas? Did Cassini just happen catch them over the seas, or do they form there preferentially?”
A year on Titan lasts about 30 Earth years, with each season lasting about seven years. Observing seasonal changes on Titan will continue to be a major goal for the Cassini mission as summer comes to Titan’s north and the southern latitudes fall into winter darkness.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team consists of scientists from the United States, England, France and Germany. The imaging team is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado.
More information about Cassini is available at the following sites:
On June 30th it will be 10 years since the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft, built by a US/Europe collaboration, went into orbit around Saturn. Huygens successfully landed on the moon Titan in 2005 and Cassini has continued to provide tremendous information and imagery of Saturn, its rings and moons. Here is a NASA video about the day it arrived at Saturn:
