After 34 Years in Space, the Voyager Spacecraft Fly On — and On and On

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.    Read More