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Voyager

Every 175 years, a rare phenomenon occurs in space wherein, the giant gaseous outer planets; Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune line up in a manner, enabling just one single spacecraft to hop from one to the next, using the gravity of each planet to keep speeding it on its way. Mission experts predicated this in 1960, a decade earlier than the occurrence of the phenomenon, as it would start in the late 1970's. Taking advantage of this, NASA approved the launch of the Voyager Project, designed to send twin spacecraft to the outer solar system.

Launched in 1977, the twin spacecraft is still in orbit and continues to send data. It completed 26 years of space travel and is approaching new milestones. The twin spacecraft opened new areas in space research and increased our knowledge of Jupiter and Saturn. Voyager 2 extended its space travel and flew by Uranus and Neptune, and became the only spacecraft ever to visit these planets.

Voyager 1 is now the most distant human-made object in the universe at a distance, more than twice as distant as Pluto, and Voyager 2, is soon to join its twin spacecraft. The spacecraft is at the boundary region; the heliopause and its current mission is to study the region where the Sun's influence ends and the dark areas of interstellar space begins.

The topics covered in this section are

Mission objective

Spacecraft construction

Components

Instruments

Subsystems

Let us see the mission of the voyager spacecraft

 


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