Voyager 2 Arriving at Neptune After a 12-Year Journey
Voyager 2 arriving at Neptune after a 12-year journey, August 25, 1989.
NASA/JPL
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NASAThis animation shows the paths of the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft, which were designed to explore the outer planets of the solar system. The twin probes, each carrying 10 instruments, provided a wealth of new information about interplanetary space and the four giant gas planets and their moons. The Voyagers were launched in late 1977. In 1979 they reached Jupiter. Passing through the planet's gravitational field, they gathered enough energy to “slingshot” around the planet and head for Saturn. Voyager 1 reached Saturn in November 1980 and then headed out of the solar system. Voyager 2 continued on to Uranus, reaching the planet in January 1986. Changing course again and heading for Neptune, the spacecraft arrived at the outermost gas giant in August 1989. It then continued out of the solar system. In the first years of the 21st century, each craft was still sending back information about the outer reaches of the solar system and had traveled well beyond the orbit of Pluto.
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Transcript
[Music in]
NARRATOR: Approaching Neptune, after 12 years on the road and another billion miles, Voyager 2 was an exhausted traveler. By August of 1989, Voyager 2 was speeding more than 40,000 miles per hour towards its rendezvous with Neptune, the last stop on its spectacular grand tour of the four outer planets.
Discovered in 1846, Neptune was named after the mythical Roman god of the sea. The planet appears blue because its methane absorbs most of the red in the spectrum, leaving mostly green and blue. Voyager 2 flew by Neptune only 22 miles off its charted course and only one second off its scheduled flyby time. Skimming only 3,000 miles over the planet's north pole, Voyager found Neptune to be a giant ball of melted rock and ice, cloaked in hydrogen, helium, and methane gases, its atmosphere whipped by winds of up to 700 miles per hour.
Voyager flew the closest that any spacecraft has come to one of the outer planets, discovering at least four complete rings of ice and rock, six new moons, and a great dark spot, a hurricane the size of Earth, raging in Neptune's southern hemisphere. Dr. Andrew Ingersoll.
ANDREW INGERSOLL: This storm revolves around the planet every 18 hours. And then it rotates around its own axis, like a big glob of pizza dough, every 16 days.
NARRATOR: Largest of Neptune's eight moons, Triton orbits in an opposite rotation from the planet. Triton was once probably an independent object and orbited around the Sun, until it collided with a moon and was captured by Neptune's gravity. Pockmarked by impact craters and glazed pink by a radiation blitz of methane and nitrogen ices and atmosphere, Triton is the coldest known object in the solar system and one of the most reflective.
Utilizing Voyager's digitized photographs of this icy moon, scientists saw jagged mountains, high cliffs, and frozen lakes. The most bizarre discovery on Triton was the presence of icy geysers, some of which are still active, spewing organic particles a 100 miles downwind. Dr. Edward Stone.
EDWARD STONE: The Voyager mission of the outer planets has certainly been a journey of a lifetime. Having encountered Triton as the last world we would visit, I don't see how any of the scientists could have been happier.
NARRATOR: Voyager 2 has set its course for southwest of the constellation Sagittarius. Traveling at 10 miles per second, it is expected to pass four light years from Sirius, the brightest star in the heavens, 290,000 years from now.
[Music out]
NARRATOR: Approaching Neptune, after 12 years on the road and another billion miles, Voyager 2 was an exhausted traveler. By August of 1989, Voyager 2 was speeding more than 40,000 miles per hour towards its rendezvous with Neptune, the last stop on its spectacular grand tour of the four outer planets.
Discovered in 1846, Neptune was named after the mythical Roman god of the sea. The planet appears blue because its methane absorbs most of the red in the spectrum, leaving mostly green and blue. Voyager 2 flew by Neptune only 22 miles off its charted course and only one second off its scheduled flyby time. Skimming only 3,000 miles over the planet's north pole, Voyager found Neptune to be a giant ball of melted rock and ice, cloaked in hydrogen, helium, and methane gases, its atmosphere whipped by winds of up to 700 miles per hour.
Voyager flew the closest that any spacecraft has come to one of the outer planets, discovering at least four complete rings of ice and rock, six new moons, and a great dark spot, a hurricane the size of Earth, raging in Neptune's southern hemisphere. Dr. Andrew Ingersoll.
ANDREW INGERSOLL: This storm revolves around the planet every 18 hours. And then it rotates around its own axis, like a big glob of pizza dough, every 16 days.
NARRATOR: Largest of Neptune's eight moons, Triton orbits in an opposite rotation from the planet. Triton was once probably an independent object and orbited around the Sun, until it collided with a moon and was captured by Neptune's gravity. Pockmarked by impact craters and glazed pink by a radiation blitz of methane and nitrogen ices and atmosphere, Triton is the coldest known object in the solar system and one of the most reflective.
Utilizing Voyager's digitized photographs of this icy moon, scientists saw jagged mountains, high cliffs, and frozen lakes. The most bizarre discovery on Triton was the presence of icy geysers, some of which are still active, spewing organic particles a 100 miles downwind. Dr. Edward Stone.
EDWARD STONE: The Voyager mission of the outer planets has certainly been a journey of a lifetime. Having encountered Triton as the last world we would visit, I don't see how any of the scientists could have been happier.
NARRATOR: Voyager 2 has set its course for southwest of the constellation Sagittarius. Traveling at 10 miles per second, it is expected to pass four light years from Sirius, the brightest star in the heavens, 290,000 years from now.
[Music out]
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