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🚀 The Voyager probes and the edge of the solar system

Follow Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 from their grand tour of the giant planets to the heliopause, interstellar measurements, the Golden Record, and their long goodbye.

4
lessons
~30 min
to learn
Adults
level
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What you’ll learn

  1. Two probes, one audacious planExplain why NASA built twin Voyager probes and how their original mission became a much longer exploration.Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were designed for a rare outer-planet alignment, then kept working long after their first tour ended.
  2. The grand tour of the giant planetsTrace how gravity assists carried Voyager past Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune and changed planetary science.The probes used planetary flybys to trade a little orbital energy for speed, while their instruments revealed active, complex worlds.
  3. Finding the edge of the Sun's domainDistinguish the heliosphere, heliopause, and interstellar medium, and describe what Voyager measured there.The probes crossed a changing boundary where the solar wind gives way to particles and fields shaped by nearby interstellar space.
  4. A message and a long goodbyeConnect the Golden Record, the Pale Blue Dot, radio communication, and the engineering choices keeping Voyager alive.Voyager is both a scientific instrument and a time capsule, sending faint evidence home while its power and hardware slowly run down.

Questions this course answers

Why could Voyager 2 visit Uranus and Neptune while Voyager 1 could not?

Voyager 1's close Titan flyby redirected it northward; Voyager 2 retained the route that led to Uranus and Neptune.

What does a gravity assist exchange?

A moving planet's gravity changes the spacecraft's solar-system velocity while the planet loses an extremely tiny amount of orbital energy.

What is the heliopause?

The heliopause is the outer boundary of the Sun's solar-wind bubble, not a hard shell or the farthest reach of solar gravity.

Why does Voyager still need the Deep Space Network?

The Deep Space Network's giant dishes communicate with and track the distant spacecraft as Earth rotates.

Which statement best captures Voyager's legacy?

Voyager's planetary tour expanded into interstellar science while the Golden Record made the probes a message as well as instruments.

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