Voyager, after all these years

Jim Whitehead (ejw@ics.uci.edu)
Wed, 23 Jul 1997 15:50:33 -0700


Like everyone else these days, I've been surfing the Mars Pathfinder site
looking intently at rocks I'd never give a second glance if they were
located in the Mojave. Out of curiosity I surfed to the JPL missions site
[1], and found two other ongoing space missions which are also fascinating.

First is the continuing Voyager missions [2], which are still using the
deep space network to collect information from the probes about the
heliosphere. Don't miss the description of the slow degradation of the
probes [3] as their nuclear reactors slowly put out less and less power,
finally falling low enough no less than year 2020 to cause the probes to
lose function.

Visually awesome is the Galileo mission home page [4], which has been
reporting the successes of the Galileo mission. Even though Galileo
doesn't have a cute little robot, the pictures it has been sending back of
the Galilean moons are awesome. My favorites are Io [5] and Europa [6].

[1] http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/
[2] http://vraptor.jpl.nasa.gov/voyager/voyager.html
[3] http://vraptor.jpl.nasa.gov/voyager/vimdesc.html
[4] http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/galileo/
[5] http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/galileo/io/
[6] http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/galileo/europa/

- Jim