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Jupiter's great red spot is larger than Earth. This gallery highlights some of the Voyager's best images.NASA
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The Voyagers revealed many worlds in our Solar System begging for more in-depth exploration.NASA
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This image of the crescent moon of Europa led scientists to believe a large ocean exists beneath the ice.NASA
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And here's another one of the four big 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 layer is shown in this enhanced Voyager 1 image taken November 12, 1980, at a distance of 435,000 kilometers.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 spacecraft Voyager 2 in January 1986.NASA
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This picture of Neptune was produced from the last whole planet images taken through the green and orange filters on the Voyager 2 narrow-angle camera.NASA
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This Voyager 2 high resolution color image, taken two hours before closest approach, provides obvious evidence of vertical relief in Neptune's bright cloud streaks.NASA
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A color mosaic of Triton, Neptune's largest moon. It is likely to have geysers.NASA
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The cameras of Voyager 1 on February 14, 1990, pointed back toward the Sun and took a series of pictures of the Sun and the planets, making the first ever "portrait" of our solar system as seen from the outside.NASA/JPL-Caltech
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This narrow-angle color image of the Earth, dubbed "Pale Blue Dot," is a part of the first-ever "portrait" of the Solar System taken by Voyager 1.NASA/JPL-Caltech
Sunday marks the 40th anniversary of the launch of Voyager 2 which, at the time, confused the heck out of the press and public because it actually launched before Voyager 1. Why did they launch the second probe first? Because Voyager 2 was going to follow a longer trajectory to reach the Jupiter system, allowing it to fly by Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Voyager 1 launched 16 days later on a faster track optimized to fly by Jupiter, Saturn, and make a relatively close pass of Saturn's intriguing moon Titan.
The missions, of course, were smashing successes. Voyager 1 reached Jupiter on March 5, 1979, about four months before its twin. Scientists weren't sure what they would find out there. Pioneer 10 and 11 had given them some insights 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 be a lot like the cold, dark, and lifeless moons of Earth and Mars.
They were anything but. When you talk to the scientists involved with the Voyagers and ask when they knew their missions would reveal something entirely different and truly otherworldly, they point toward 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 that we were in for a journey that was even much 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 started in 1972. "There were many. That's really the wonderful thing about Voyager. But if I had to pick one that was symbolic, Io was it."
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Voyager scientists were astonished to find volcanism on Io. Here, a volcanic plume erupts from Pele 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 bright curved volcanic cloud on the limb).NASA
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Image of Io showing active plume of Loki on limb. The photos that make up this mosaic were taken from an average distance of approximately 490,000 kilometers.NASA
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Io's volcanic plains are shown in this Voyager 1 image mosaic, which covers an area about 1,300km long. 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, upper left, and Haemus Mons (10,000 meters), at the bottom.NASA
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Io's north pole.NASA
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Io's volcanoes continually resurface the moon, so that any impact craters have disappeared.NASA
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Tiny Io, in front of Jupiter. This gallery highlights the extraordinary volcanism on the moon.
Io really was the beginning of a special journey. Thereafter, the Voyager spacecraft found a deep water 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. It later left the system entirely into the void of interstellar space.
"Time after time, we discovered things that we hadn't even imagined," Stone told Ars. Indeed. We still marvel today.
Listing image by NASA
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