After 34 Years in Space, the Voyager Spacecraft Fly On — and On and On
The Voyager space probe
NASA
There are few things as awful as the detritus of the 1970s. An era that gave us crock pots, Pintos, pet rocks, shag carpet, the avocado green refrigerator and the Captain and Tennille is an era best lost to history.
But then, of course, there are the Voyager spacecraft. It was in August and September of 1977 — when Jimmy Carter was in the White House, “Best of My Love” was the No. 1 song, Laverne & Shirley the No. 1 show, and the Dow was headed for a year-end close of 831 — that Voyagers 1 and 2 were launched. Their mission was ambitious: fly to Jupiter, then on to Saturn and then, just maybe — if the hardware was working, the gyros were sound and the thrusters hadn’t frozen — swing by Uranus and Neptune too. Voyager 2 made that grand tour, flying in the flat straight through the solar system and successfully rendezvousing with Neptune in 1989. Voyager 1 made a gravitational whipsaw below and above Saturn, a trajectory that flung it up and out of the solar-system plane and limited it to a two-planet itinerary.
But the ships’ primary missions succeeded beyond the giddiest predictions of the engineers who built them. And today, improbably, those missions continue, with the creaky old spacecraft adding 330 million miles (530 million km) to their odometers every year — each mile constituting a new distance record for the reach of the human species. This month, NASA engineers young enough to be the grandsons and granddaughters of the people who built the Voyagers announced that they’d taken new power-saving steps to ensure that the missions continue — and it’s not just the distance record they’re after. The Voyagers are poised to pass at last from the outermost boundary of the solar system into the truly uncharted regions of interstellar space, and NASA wants them fit for duty when they do.