Joe Palca
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
Voyagers 1 and 2 left Earth in 1977.
Voyager 1 flew by Jupiter, where it discovered two new moons, and Saturn, where it spotted five new moons and a new ring.
Voyager 2 also flew by Jupiter and then Uranus and Neptune, finding new moons at all three planets.
Both probes are now traveling faster than 34,000 miles per hour.
Voyager 1 is nearly 16 billion miles from Earth, about 2.5 billion miles further than Voyager 2.
Mission controllers successfully contacted both spacecraft in December using large radio antennas that are part of the agency's Deep Space Network.
Even traveling at the speed of light, a radio signal takes nearly a day to reach the probes.
Europa is one of the moons of Jupiter Galileo discovered in 1610.
It's of particular interest to scientists today because there appears to be a liquid ocean underneath the moon's icy outer crust.
And where there's water, there might, maybe, possibly be life.
In addition to a suite of cameras, Europa Clipper has instruments to measure the gravitational and magnetic fields around the moon.
It also has ice-penetrating radar.
To reach Jupiter, the probe needs gravity boosts from two planets.
It got one of them when it flew past Mars last March.
The second boost comes next December when the probe flies by Earth.
It's on track to arrive at Jupiter in 2030.
It's pretty easy to describe what scientists hope to learn from MAVEN.
The MAVEN mission is about understanding the history of the climate on Mars.