Voyager: To the Final Frontier

NASA launched two Voyager spacecraft 35 years ago during a short window so the crafts could follow their slingshot trajectory to the outer planets. Not only did they sent back remarkable footage, they are still powering on having covered over 10 billion miles and left outer solar system.

As presenter Dallas Campbell informs us, when the crafts were launched Jimmy Carter was the American President, computer firm's such as Apple were still a small seed.

With what is now rudimentary technology, the people who designed the crafts or worked with NASA explained the gravitation assisted slingshot flightpath to escape the gravity of two bigger objects (the sun and the planet it was exploring) so that the Voyager craft could travel in space at great speed.

During the course of the late 1970s and the 1980s as a youngster I was fascinated as it sent pictures of the storm cloud in Jupiter, how it revealed that Saturn's ring were a series of rings, revealed the outer ring of Neptune and gave us information of the moons surrounding these planets.

Much of the information revealed were staggering to the scientists at mission control but Voyager also was a valuable publicity machine for NASA. Not only the footage aroused worldwide interest but astronomer Carl Sagan designed a gold plated copper record with a message from the human race. Something that was used as a plot point in Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

The Voyager probes are still on a journey heading for interstellar space. Some of the participants in the Voyager missions may have passed on. Sagan died in 1996 and its noticeable that some of the interviews were conducted in the late 1990s presumably for another programme. However as the programme notes, the Voyager crafts could outlive us all, perhaps even the Earth itself.