Voyage to Jupiter

In the Sun’s necklace of planets, one gem far outshines the rest: Jupiter. Larger than all the other planets and satellites combined, Jupiter is a true giant. If intelligent bei...

Since the beginning of the Space Age, scientists had dreamed of sending probes to Jupiter and its family of satellites. Initially, robot spacecraft were limited to studying the...

Voyager had its origin in the Outer Planets Grand Tour, a plan to send spacecraft to all the planets of the outer solar system. In 1969, the same year in which the Pioneer Proje...

There are many reasons for sending spacecraft to the planets, but in the final analysis, we send our robot messengers across the vastness of space for the sake of scientific exp...

On August 20, 1977, exactly two years after the launch of the Viking spacecraft to Mars, the first of the Voyagers—actually Voyager 2—was boosted into space at 10:29 a.m. EDT, l...

The Voyager 1 encounter took place at 4:42 a.m. PST, March 5, 1979. About six hours before, while the spacecraft continued to hurtle on toward Jupiter, overflow crowds had poure...

At the beginning of July, the dry summer heat had returned to Pasadena, and so had the press. The scientists had come days or weeks earlier to look at data being transmitted fro...

More massive than all the other planets combined, Jupiter dominates the planetary system. The giant revealed by Voyager is a gas planet of great complexity; its atmosphere is in...

In a sense, the Voyager Mission revealed a new planetary system. Astronomers had long been fascinated by the large Galilean satellites of Jupiter, but they had only looked from...

The spectacular discoveries of the Voyagers did not exhaust our interest in the Jovian system. Both the giant planet and its system of satellites will almost certainly play a ce...