Four…Three…Two…One…and Titan IIIE was launched from Cape Canaveral on 20th August 1977.
Despite its name, Voyager 2 was the first of the two twin probes NASA launched in 1977 to explore the outer planets of our solar system. These twin probes were named in the order they reached Jupiter and not in the order that they were launched. Voyager 1 was launched on a faster trajectory arriving at Jupiter 4 months before Voyager 2. Voyager 2 was launched in a slower trajectory so that it could reach Uranus and Neptune.
Built with 16 hydrazine thrusters, three-axis stabilization, gyroscopes and celestial referencing instruments, three multi hundred-Watt radioisotope thermoelectric generators, and through the utilization of gravity assist methods, Voyager 2 completed the mission in 1989.
Voyager 2 reached Jupiter in 1979, two years after its launch. The information provided by the Voyager 2 was used to make comparisons since Voyager 1 had just passed through the system 4 months earlier. Voyager 2 had clicked pictures of many satellites of Jupiter. It also paved the way for spectacular findings of the icy moon Europa.
On 26th August 1981, the space probe reached the closest point of the ringed planet, the Saturn, and took a huge lot of pictures of the planet, its moons and its rings. The space probe had also helped scientists in discovering the ringlets that circled the Saturn. They confirmed the presence of the ringlets by watching the star Delta Scorpii for two and a half hours as it passed through the plane of the rings. The star’s flickering light revealed the presence of ringlets as small as 330 feet in diameter.
January 24, 1986, could probably be marked as a day of great significance in the astronomy calendar, as the space probe had made the closest approach to Uranus and had become the only space probe to provide the closest glimpses of the planet. It had discovered rings around the planet, 10 new moons, and a magnetic field that oddly was 55 degrees off the planet’s axis. The pictures by the Voyager 2 also revealed the moon Miranda to be the strangest moon in the solar system.
The space probe then made its way towards the planet Neptune, reaching the closest point on the 25th of August 1989. It spotted five new moons as well as four rings around the planet.
Voyager 2 is the second spacecraft to cross the heliopause, a bubble created by the solar wind flowing from our Sun that also marks where the interstellar space begins.
Though it is 11 billion miles away, scientists expect that the spacecraft will have enough power for its instruments and will last until at least 2025, which is 48 years after it’s launch.
Reference: NASA
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