Inside the High Stakes Missions of NASA’s Oldest Deep-Space Probes
On Aug. 20, 1977, NASA launched the Voyager 2 probe on a mission to explore the outer planets of our solar system.
Twelve years later, having scanned Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, the 1,600-pound spacecraft completed its initial mission.
But it kept going. And going. And going. Nursed farther and farther into space by a small team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, Voyager 2 is now more than 11 billion miles from Earth, making it the second-most-distant man-made object from Earth after its speedier twin Voyager 1.