![]() 10, 1979, the spacecraft crossed into the Jovian moon system and in early March, it discovered a thin ring circling Jupiter (less than 19-miles or 30 kilometers-thick). 30, 1979, Voyager 1 took a picture every 96 seconds for a span of 100 hours to generate a color time-lapse movie to depict 10 rotations of Jupiter. Images sent back by January 1979 indicated that Jupiter’s atmosphere was more turbulent than during the Pioneer flybys in 1973-1974.īeginning Jan. It began its Jovian imaging mission in April 1978 when it was about 165 million miles (265 million kilometers) from the planet. NASA's Voyager 1 was launched after Voyager 2, but because of a faster route, it exited the asteroid belt earlier than its twin, having overtaken Voyager 2 on Dec. Credit: NASA Visualization Technology Applications and Development (VTAD) 1, 2012: Voyager 1 enters interstellar spaceĪ 3D model of NASA's twin Voyager spacecraft. 16, 2006: 100 astronomical units reachedĪug. 1, 1990: Voyager Interstellar Mission (VIM) officially beganĪug. 17, 1998: Became the most distant human-made object after overtaking NASA's Pioneer 10 At Saturn, Voyager 1 found five new moons and a new ring called the G-ring.įeb.Voyager 1 discovered a thin ring around Jupiter and two new Jovian moons: Thebe and Metis.Voyager 1 is the first human-made object to venture into interstellar space.Voyager 1 was the first spacecraft to cross the heliosphere, the boundary where the influences outside our solar system are stronger than those from our Sun.Low-Energy Charged Particles Experiment (LECP) Planetary Radio Astronomy Experiment (PRA)Ĩ. Infrared Interferometer Spectrometer (IRIS)Ĥ. Voyager 1 carries a copy of the Golden Record-a message from humanity to the cosmos that includes greetings in 55 languages, pictures of people and places on Earth and music ranging from Beethoven to Chuck Berry's "Johnny B.Not only are the Voyager missions providing humanity with observations of truly uncharted territory, but they are also helping scientists understand the very nature of energy and radiation in space-key information for protecting future missions and astronauts.Voyager 1 and its sister ship Voyager 2 have been flying longer than any other spacecraft in history.Launched in 1977 to fly by Jupiter and Saturn, Voyager 1 crossed into interstellar space in August 2012 and continues to collect data. With the development of the human space vehicles presently underway, along with NASA’s return to a capsule concept for spaceflight, it may be more important than ever to record this history to help inform the NASA team of what has gone before and the lessons they may learn from those earlier efforts.No spacecraft has gone farther than NASA's Voyager 1. Moreover, the challenges, mystery, and outcomes wrestled with by those in programs that required safe reentry and return to Earth offer object lessons in how earlier generations of engineers sought optimal solutions and made trade-offs. Bits and pieces of this history exist in various disparate publications, but the critical role played by the researchers in developing the concepts that made possible a return to Earth have been generally overlooked. It is time that this important story is told in a compelling, sophisticated, and technically sound manner for a general audience. Rogallo at Langley developed creative parasail concepts that informed the development of the recovery systems of numerous reentry vehicles. Eggers at Ames pioneered blunt body reentry techniques and ablative thermal protection systems in the 1950s, while Francis M. This story extends back at least to the work of Walter Hohmann and Eugen Sänger in Germany in the 1920s and involved numerous NACA and NASA engineers at the Langley, Lewis, and Ames laboratories. Accordingly, this case study is intended as a means of highlighting the myriad technological developments that made possible the safe reentry and return from space and landing on Earth. Without this base of fundamental and applied research the capability to fly into space would not exist. Coming home after a flight into space is fundamentally a challenge that has involved over the years critical contributions from engineers working in aerodynamics, thermal protection, guidance and control, stability, propulsion, and landing systems. One of the most difficult tasks with which NASA has had to deal is how its space systems operate while transiting the atmosphere as they return to Earth.
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