While we celebrate this achievement on Earth, Voyager 1 will observe its "light-day" in darkness; mission scientists turned off the probe's camera in 1990, immediately after it snapped its iconic "Pale Blue Dot" and "Solar System Family Portrait" images from beyond the orbit of Neptune. But before that, Voyager 1 had already taken tens of thousands of images of our cosmic neighborhood, and some of them totally transformed our understanding of the outer planets.
A time-lapse animation of Voyager 1 approaching Jupiter over the course of a month in 1979. (Image credit: NASA/JPL)
Voyager observed discrete bands of Jupiter's atmosphere spinning at various speeds and in different directions, like a cosmic Rubik's Cube being twisted by an invisible hand. Clouds speed by as if on conveyor belts as giant, planet-size storms swirl.
Just before making its closest approach to the planet, Voyager spotted something remarkable: Jupiter had a thin, faint ring system. Made primarily of dust, the rings appeared only when Voyager saw Jupiter backlit by the sun. No telescope had ever seen this before, but ground-based observatories soon confirmed the rings' existence, and Voyager 2 took even clearer pictures of the rings when it reached Jupiter in July 1979.
Voyager 1 discovered a thin ring of dust around Jupiter when it was backlit by the sun. (Image credit: NASA/JPL)This discovery, too, can be linked to Voyager. While making a close approach to Io, the spacecraft witnessed the first-ever volcanic eruption on a world beyond Earth. This observation showed that moons, not just planets, can be geologically active. In this image, a giant volcano called Loki Patera (the largest volcano on Io, measuring an estimated 125 miles, or 200 km, wide) spews its guts into space.
Voyager 1 witnessed a volcanic eruption (blue) on Io — the first volcaic eruption seen beyond Earth. (Image credit: NASA/JPL)Voyager 1's work continues in interstellar space, which it officially reached in 2012. With its camera off, it studies the radiation environment of space using magnetic field and plasma detectors — the last two of its 10 science instruments still receiving power. Scientists suspect the legendary probe will fully run out of power in the 2030s.
For more stunning space photos, check out our Space Photo of the Week gallery.
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