[Red Badger]

V-GER Ping!..................

[V_TWIN]

Cool......I’m surprised obama didn’t order it to be destroyed

[EEGator]

I remember when NASA did amazing stuff…

[Organic Panic]

AND YET NASA accomplished this before their number one mission was to make Muslims feel good about themselves.

[M Kehoe]

Cool.

Or, probably very cold.

5.56mm

[dragnet2]

And some folks are not happy because there are not more manned missions...But these unmanned mission are going to where man cannot and possibly never will.

These unmanned missions have collected enough data to keep scientist busy for the next 50+ years. I see them as reconnaissance missions for humans, if humans can survive long enough and don't kill each other off over their petty squabbles.

I'm not overly confident we'll make it because of all the controlling power hungry tyrants, dictators and religions fanatics.

[ifinnegan]

Great stuff.

And yes, I remember V-Ger from the first Star Trek movie.

[butlerweave]

too bad these 2 can’t take selfies to see if they have any Klingons ,LOL

[Paladin2]

“The radio isotope thermoelectric generators, Voyager’s power source, are visible to the lower left. “

At last, a sustainable power source!

[Attention Surplus Disorder]

Those pix of Saturn and her rings and Jupiter’s surface remain stunning, even today.

I also remember very well that the success of the mission, signaled by the receipt of those Saturn pix, was also one of the very, very few bright spots of the late 70’s; a dull, dreary nihilistic nation-in-decline period matched only by.....today.

[Seruzawa]

I remember rushing home from work every night and watching the Saturn flyby for hours on end. Great stuff.

[Falconspeed]

Excellent story. Brilliant engineering by Cal Tech, UC Irvine, etc.

News flash. NASA deserves zero credit for spacecraft. NASA is the supervisor of government funds for private research. NASA does not create nor guide any machines.

NASA is a set of busy bodies who make pointless meetings and delay projects. Neil Armstrong was ready to land on the moon in 1967 but NASA delayed it by two years with silly meetings and threats to withhold funds.

Yes, private researchers need government funds, because private researchers needs money for tools that they don’t have.

[sit-rep]

I’m curious... Neptune photo from 1989 and then uranus from 1986... somethin aint right...

[Dr. Franklin]

They each carry an eight-track tape player for recording data...

I am sure that when the aliens find that 8-track tape, they will laugh their asses off at how primitive we were. We are so much more advanced now!

[zeugma]

These are two of the most amazing craft we ever put into space. Totally amazing that they are still functional at all, and even more amazing that we can still pick up their signals over the background radiation, given their puny broadcasting power.

Back in the day NASA used to make seriously hardy craft. The Mars lander Viking, performed for years beyond its intended lifespan. In fact, it could have gone far longer. NASA sent it a command to shut it down because they ran out of money to continue receiving data from it. We don't know how long it would have continued giving us regular weather reports. (something that would have been worth funding IMO)

BTW, Mars is the only planet we know of that is entirely populated by robots.

[beef]

Both the Voyagers and the Pioneers carried artifacts relating to their makers (us), but not the only other probe to leave the solar system - New Horizons. There was some talk a while back of loading it’s memory up with info about us, but I don’t think anything came of it. I guess you need someone like Carl Sagan to drive a project like that.