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Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is larger than Earth. This gallery highlights some of Voyager’s best photos.
NASA
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The Voyagers revealed many worlds in our solar system that begged for more in-depth investigation.
NASA
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This image of Europa’s crescent moon led scientists to believe that a large ocean exists beneath the ice.
NASA
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And here’s another one of the four major Jovian satellites, Ganymede.
NASA
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Jupiter’s moon Callisto.
NASA
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Voyager 1 looked back at Saturn on November 16, 1980, four days after the spacecraft flew past the planet, and observed the appearance of Saturn and its rings from this unique perspective.
NASA
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Titan’s thick haze can be seen in this enhanced Voyager 1 image taken on November 12, 1980 from a distance of 270,000 miles.
NASA
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Saturn’s moon Dione as seen by NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft.
NASA
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This is an image of the planet Uranus taken by the Voyager 2 spacecraft in January 1986.
NASA
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This image of Neptune was created from the latest images of the entire planet, taken through the narrow-angle Voyager 2 camera’s green and orange filters.
NASA
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Taken two hours before closest approach, this high-resolution color image from Voyager 2 provides clear evidence of vertical relief in Neptune’s bright cloud streaks.
NASA
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A color mosaic of Triton, Neptune’s largest moon. There are probably geysers.
NASA
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Voyager 1’s cameras pointed back to the sun on February 14, 1990, and took a series of images of the sun and planets, creating the first-ever “portrait” of our solar system from the outside.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
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Dubbed the “Pale Blue Dot,” this color image from a small corner of Earth is part of the first-ever “portrait” of the solar system taken by Voyager 1.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
Sunday marks the 40th anniversary of Voyager 2’s launch, which confused the press and public at the time because it actually launched before Voyager 1. Why did they launch the second probe first? Because Voyager 2 would take a longer trajectory to reach the Jupiter system, allowing it to fly past Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Voyager 1 launched 16 days later on a faster orbit optimized to fly past Jupiter and Saturn and pass Saturn’s intriguing moon Titan relatively close by.
The missions were, of course, great successes. Voyager 1 reached Jupiter on March 5, 1979, about four months before its twin. Scientists weren’t sure what they would find there. Pioneer 10 and 11 had given them some insight about Jupiter and Saturn as gas giants, but little information was known about the many moons of these worlds. Most scientists thought they would probably look a lot like the cold, dark, and lifeless moons of Earth and Mars.
They were anything but. If you talk to the scientists involved with the Voyagers and ask when they knew their missions would reveal something very different and truly alien, they point to the discovery of volcanic activity on Jupiter’s moon Io. Until then, the only known active volcanoes in the solar system were on Earth. Here was a small moon with 10 times the volcanic activity.
“That was really the wake-up call for a journey that was even more spectacular in terms of what we were going to discover than we could imagine,” said Ed Stone, who has been Voyager’s chief scientist since the program. began in 1972. “There were many of them. That’s really the beauty of Voyager. But if I had to pick one that was symbolic, it would be Io.”
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Voyager scientists were amazed to discover volcanism on Io. Here, a volcanic plume from Pele erupts 300 kilometers above the surface, in an umbrella-like shape.
NASA
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This is the image in which Linda A. Morabito, a JPL engineer, discovered the first extraterrestrial volcanic eruption (the brightly curved volcanic cloud on the rim).
NASA
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Image of Io with Loki active plume on limb. The photos that make up this mosaic were taken from an average distance of about 300,000 miles.
NASA
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Io’s volcanic plains are shown in this Voyager 1 image mosaic, which covers an area about 800 miles (1,300 km) in length. Also visible are numerous volcanic calderas and lava flows.
NASA
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This view shows two of Io’s 10 highest peaks, the Euboea Montes, at the top left, and Haemus Mons (10,000 meters), at the bottom.
NASA
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Io’s North Pole.
NASA
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The volcanoes of Io are constantly rising above the moon, so that any impact craters have disappeared.
NASA
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Tiny Io, for Jupiter. This gallery highlights the extraordinary volcanism on the moon.
Io really was the start of a special journey. After that, the Voyager spacecraft found a deep-sea ocean on Europa, methane seas on Titan, and likely geysers on Triton. Later, Voyager 1 took an iconic photo of Earth among the other planets in the solar system. Later, it completely left the system in the void of interstellar space.
“Over and over again, we discovered things that we hadn’t even imagined,” Stone told Ars. Indeed. We still marvel today.
List image by NASA