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================================================================================================================ Researchers have re-examined data captured by the Voyager 2 spacecraft back in 1986, and think they've found evidence of two never-before-seen moons hidden in the rings of Uranus. Uranus, the third largest planet in our Solar System, already has 27 moons that we know of - but these two new ones appear to orbit the planet more closely than any of its other natural satellites, and are causing wavy patterns in its closest rings. Although Saturn is the most famous ringed planet orbiting our Sun, it's not the only one, with the three other gas giants - Jupiter, Uranus,...

Explanation: What would it look like to fly past Triton, the largest moon of planet Neptune? Only one spacecraft has ever done this -- and now, for the first time, images of this dramatic encounter have been gathered into a movie. On 1989 August 25, the Voyager 2 spacecraft shot through the Neptune system with cameras blazing. Triton is slightly smaller than Earth's Moon but has ice volcanoes and a surface rich in frozen nitrogen. The first sequence in the video shows Voyager's approach to Triton, which, despite its unusual green tint, appears in approximately true color. The mysterious terrain...

Explanation: Cruising through the outer solar system, the Voyager 2 spacecraft made its closest approach to Neptune on August 25, 1989, the only spacecraft to visit the most distant gas giant. Based on the images recorded during its close encounter and in the following days, this inspired composited scene covers the dim outer planet, largest moon Triton, and faint system of rings. From just beyond Neptune's orbit, the interplanetary perspective looks back toward the Sun, capturing the planet and Triton as thin sunlit crescents. Cirrus clouds and a dark band circle Neptune's south polar region, with a cloudy vortex above...

Explanation: Despina is a tiny moon of Neptune. A mere 148 kilometers across, diminutive Despina was discovered in 1989, in images from the Voyager 2 spacecraft taken during its encounter with the solar system's most distant gas giant planet. But looking through the Voyager 2 data 20 years later, amateur image processor and philosophy professor Ted Stryk discovered something no one had recognized before -- images that show the shadow of Despina in transit across Neptune's blue cloud tops. His composite view of Despina and its shadow is composed of four archival frames taken on August 24, 1989, separated by...

NASA announced a monumental event this month; The renowned spacecraft known as Voyager 1 has exited our solar system.Thirty-six years ago, Voyager 1 departed Cape Canaveral on September 5, 1977 atop of a Titan-Centaur launch vehicle, joining sister ship Voyager 2 which was already en route to Jupiter.Voyager 2 had been hurled into space by her own Titan-Centaur two weeks earlier on August 20, 1977. The twin spacecraft followed complex, pre-programmed orbits on a shared mission of capturing images and data on the solar system’s largest planets.Together, the Voyager spacecrafts executed close-up fly-by visits to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and...

With the recent announcement by NASA that the 36 year-old spacecraft Voyager 1 has officially entered interstellar space at a distance from the Sun about four times further than Neptune's orbit, and with Voyager 2 not far behind, it seems worthwhile to explore how humans managed to fling objects so far into space. Interplanetary spacecraft often use a maneuver called a gravity assist in order to reach their targets. Voyager 2 famously used gravity assists to visit Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune in the late 1970s and 1980s. Cassini used two assists at Venus and one each at Earth and...

NASA's plucky Voyager 2 spacecraft has hit a long-haul operations milestone - operating continuously for 12,000 days. For nearly 33 years, the venerable spacecraft has been returning data about the giant outer planets, and the characteristics and interaction of solar wind between and beyond the planets. Among its many findings, Voyager 2 discovered Neptune's Great Dark Spot and its 450-meter-per-second (1,000-mph) winds. The two Voyager spacecraft have been the longest continuously operating spacecraft in deep space. Voyager 2 launched on August 20, 1977, when Jimmy Carter was president. Voyager 1 launched about two weeks later on Sept. 5. The two...

For spacecraft that zoom through the cosmos at thousands of miles per hour, calculating which one is traveling at the fastest speed is more complicated than simply clocking the first to cross the finish line. When space agencies calculate and establish speed records, these numbers need to be defined and qualified, because there can be more than one frame of reference. In other words, the speed of a spacecraft can be calculated relative to the Earth, the sun, or some other body. The record for the highest speed at which a spacecraft has launched and escaped from Earth's gravity is...

NASA engineers have fully revived the far-flung Voyager 2 probe on the edge of the solar system after fixing a computer glitch that scrambled its messages home for nearly three weeks.

One flip of a bit in the memory of an onboard computer appears to have caused the change in the science data pattern returning from Voyager 2, engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said Monday, May 17. A value in a single memory location was changed from a 0 to a 1. On May 12, engineers received a full memory readout from the flight data system computer, which formats the data to send back to Earth. They isolated the one bit in the memory that had changed, and they recreated the effect on a computer at JPL. They found the...

A GERMAN UFO expert has claimed that a NASA spacecraft may have been hijacked by aliens - who are now attempting to contact Earth. Hartwig Hausdorf claims that Voyager 2 - an unmanned interplanetary probe blasted into space 33 years ago - has started transmitting strange, unintelligible signals, Bild newspaper revealed today NASA installed a 12-inch disk containing music and greetings in 55 languages in case intelligent extraterrestrial life ever found it. But last month the probe began sending back distorted messages from its location near the edge of the solar system that baffled NASA scientists were unable to decode,...

IT left Earth 33 years ago, now it's claimed the Voyager 2 spacecraft may have been hijacked by aliens after sending back data messages NASA scientists can't decode. NASA installed a 12-inch disk containing music and greetings in 55 languages in case intelligent extraterrestrial life ever found it. But now the spacecraft is sending back what sounds like an answer: Signals in an unknown data format! The best scientific minds have so far not been able to decipher the strange information – is it a secret message? Alien expert Hartwig Hausdorf said:"It seems almost as if someone had reprogrammed or...

NASA has commanded the famed Voyager 2 probe to send only information on its health and status after spotting a puzzling change in the spacecraft's pattern of communication from the edge of the solar system. The 33-year-old Voyager 2 spacecraft, which is currently 8.6 billion miles (13.8 billion km) from Earth, is apparently still in good health, according to the latest engineering data received on May 1. But Voyager 2's flight data system, which formats information before beaming it back to Earth, has experienced a hiccup that altered the pattern in which it sends updates home. Because of that...

Voyager 2 probe reaches solar system boundary 18:25 10 December 2007 NewScientist.com news service David Shiga The Voyager 2 spacecraft has crossed an important space frontier called the termination shock, and in a few years may become the first object made by humans to travel outside the solar system. NASA's two Voyager spacecraft were launched in 1977 to tour the outer solar system. They are now far beyond the orbits of the outermost planets and heading towards interstellar space. In 2004, the faster of the two spacecraft, Voyager 1, became the first human-made object to reach a boundary called the...

RIVERSIDE, Calif. - Using a computer model simulation, Haruichi Washimi, a physicist at UC Riverside, has predicted when the interplanetary spacecraft Voyager 2 will cross the "termination shock," the spherical shell around the solar system that marks where the solar wind slows down to subsonic speed. According to Washimi's simulations, the spacecraft is set to cross the termination shock in late 2007-early 2008. To make this forecast, Washimi and his colleagues used data from Voyager 2 and performed a global "magneto-hydrodynamic simulation" - a method that allows for precise and quantitative predictions of geomagnetic disturbances caused by solar activities. Because...

Voyager 2 could pass beyond the outermost layer of our solar system, called the "termination shock," sometime within the next year, NASA scientists announced at a media teleconference today. The milestone, which comes about a year after Voyager 1's crossing, comes earlier than expected and suggests to scientists that the edge of the shock is about one billion miles closer to the Sun in the southern region of the solar system than in the north. This implies that the heliosphere, a spherical bubble of charged low-energy particles created by our Sun's solar wind, is irregularly shaped, bulging in the northern...

Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2002 September 22 Two Hours Before Neptune Credit: Voyager 2, NASA Explanation: Two hours before closest approach to Neptune in 1989, the Voyager 2 robot spacecraft snapped this picture. Clearly visible for the first time were long light-colored cirrus-type clouds floating high in Neptune's atmosphere. Shadows of these clouds can even be seen on lower cloud decks. Most of Neptune's atmosphere is made of hydrogen and helium, which...