Origins
The Voyager program began in the 1965 with Gary Flandro’s discovery of a rare planetary alignment of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune that would occur in 1977. This alignment occurs only once every 175 years. The Grand Tour as the program was called had launch windows between 1976 and 1980. The original idea of the Grand Tour was to send four probes to ultimately visit every planet in our outer solar system. In 1971 funding for the Grand Tour program was canceled in the 1973 NASA budget due to the federal budget reducing NASA funding and subsequently NASA focusing on the new shuttle program. To keep their dream alive NASA reworked their proposal and proposed two probes making long flights would be more economical then numerous individual probes heading to different targets. Saving money was considered critical to getting approval for such a large project. Donald P. Hearth when he learned of The Grand …show more content…
The primary mission of Voyager 1 was a flyby of Jupiter, Saturn and Saturn’s moon of Titan. In 1979 Voyager began its observation of Jupiter. At Jupiter, Voyager 1 discovered that the moon IO was volcanically active . This was a huge discovery as this was the first active volcano outside of the planet Earth. Ultimately Voyager 1 helped discover 71 active volcanos on this moon of Jupiter. The next stop for Voyager 1 was Saturn in 1980. The probe was targeted to keep farther away from Saturn’s rings the Voyager 2 but was set to get about 4,000 miles away from the moon Titan. Titan was found to have an atmosphere much like Earth’s early atmosphere. The probe did not get to see the surface of Titan as the atmosphere was too thick to penetrate. In the Winter of 1980 Voyager 1 had finished its primary mission and began its trek to interstellar space. It wasn’t until summer 2012 that it exited the heliosheath and entered interstellar
The Voyager program began in the 1965 with Gary Flandro’s discovery of a rare planetary alignment of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune that would occur in 1977. This alignment occurs only once every 175 years. The Grand Tour as the program was called had launch windows between 1976 and 1980. The original idea of the Grand Tour was to send four probes to ultimately visit every planet in our outer solar system. In 1971 funding for the Grand Tour program was canceled in the 1973 NASA budget due to the federal budget reducing NASA funding and subsequently NASA focusing on the new shuttle program. To keep their dream alive NASA reworked their proposal and proposed two probes making long flights would be more economical then numerous individual probes heading to different targets. Saving money was considered critical to getting approval for such a large project. Donald P. Hearth when he learned of The Grand …show more content…
The primary mission of Voyager 1 was a flyby of Jupiter, Saturn and Saturn’s moon of Titan. In 1979 Voyager began its observation of Jupiter. At Jupiter, Voyager 1 discovered that the moon IO was volcanically active . This was a huge discovery as this was the first active volcano outside of the planet Earth. Ultimately Voyager 1 helped discover 71 active volcanos on this moon of Jupiter. The next stop for Voyager 1 was Saturn in 1980. The probe was targeted to keep farther away from Saturn’s rings the Voyager 2 but was set to get about 4,000 miles away from the moon Titan. Titan was found to have an atmosphere much like Earth’s early atmosphere. The probe did not get to see the surface of Titan as the atmosphere was too thick to penetrate. In the Winter of 1980 Voyager 1 had finished its primary mission and began its trek to interstellar space. It wasn’t until summer 2012 that it exited the heliosheath and entered interstellar