When Neptune had his most impressive plan: flying over Voyager 2, 30 years later

This allowed the spacecraft to use gravitational assistance from one planet to visit the next, as well as the Voyager program to visit four planets in four years. This alignment only occurs once every 176 years.

Trina Ray was working at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory for Neptune's overflight of the Voyager 2 mission. She joined the General Science Data team at her first job outside of the university.

There were monitors throughout the Voyager Operations Lab in the JPL building 264, with the teams spread over several floors. Because Voyager 2 was always pointing the antenna to Earth, it was constantly transmitting data back.

Chris Jones helped develop the flight software for the Voyager mission and helped the agency determine the best ways to handle the ever-increasing distance to communicate with the spacecraft. He also helped the mission overcome the problem of reducing light levels to render clear images of Neptune.

The images would fall on the monitors, line by line. At the slow approach of Neptune, the planet began by forming several pixels, a fuzzy blue dot that was getting a little bigger each day.

As the approach got closer, everything changed.

Ray would be sitting at his desk and someone would say "Wow," which brings everyone to watch the screens.

"It's the best image of Neptune we've ever seen," says one of the scientists. They would go back to work until someone else exclaimed and another image came alive.

"The incredible unfolding of the meeting was extremely exciting," Ray said. "In the month leading up to the closest approach, you were really trapped by what was happening.There was this feeling of acceleration.I've never seen another Space ship mission profile have this intensity over the months, resulting in an incredible set of data days around the closest approach ".

During the flyby week, Ray did not want to fall asleep or even get away from the monitors for a second. Everyone was the same. While the probe was out of communication, Ray used one of the showers on the spot and took a nap. She did not know anyone who went home.

Media from around the world camped in the JPL car park and presented themselves at the daily press conference to discuss new images and scientific discoveries.

"It was five days of incredible science," said Ray. "And there was this intense emotion to know that it was the last fly-in. It was the end of an era."

A new look at Neptune

Voyager's team has been working together for 20 to 30 years, a functional machine filled with people who knew each other well and who knew each other.

Ray was a new addition. Voyager set all his expectations of how the teams would work together for the rest of Ray's 30-year career at NASA, which continues. This sparked a spark in her and she will spend the next 20 years working on Saturn's Cassini orbiter, inspired by Voyager.

The science gathered during the flight over Neptune revealed that their existing models for the gas giant were too simple to show what was really happening.

They discovered that the magnetic field of Neptune was reversed. They found on the planet a giant spot called the Great Dark Spot, similar to the Great Red Spot of Jupiter. But the event was passing because it was no longer there when the Hubble Space Telescope looked four years later. Neptune was found to have some of the fastest and coldest winds in the solar system.

Four rings were found around the planet.

And when Voyager 2 flew over Triton, Neptune's moon, scientists discovered that she was circling around him. Unlike other Neptune moons formed from the remains after Neptune became a planet, Triton was a captured object that was fired into a retrograde orbit.

During the flyover, six more moons were discovered.

Triton was the coldest object ever observed by Voyager 2, hitting negative 391 degrees Fahrenheit. The surface in the wild was found to be geologically active, with geysers arising from frozen nitrogen ice on the Triton.

Understanding the diversity of our solar system came from Voyager flybys.

"We have repeatedly found objects doing unexpected things," said Ed Stone, a Voyager project scientist since 1975 and a professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology. "It changed our vision of the solar system."

"It was a wonderful experience because there was so much to learn," said Stone, referring to his experience with the Voyager mission. "We were able to share this trip for several decades with the public, we could get people on the trip as we discovered things for each of the flybys."

Stone believes that three aspects of Voyager have contributed to NASA's continued legacy of spacecraft: innovative engineering, transformative science, and extraordinary inspiration for learning what's out there. .

And after

The Voyager 1 and 2 are the longest spaceships in history. Forty-two years after their launch, the two companies conserve their energy and send data as they explore the interstellar space. It's the farthest we've ever pushed into space. And the spacecraft was originally designed to last only five years.

Dodd began working on Voyager in 1984 and stayed on the project to see the Uranus and Neptune encounters. After that, Dodd would work on missions inspired by the information gleaned from Voyager's data. And now, Dodd has returned to the helm of Voyager once more.

The Dodd team, made up of 12 people, occupies both spacecraft to make sure that the probes are healthy, safe, that they work well and that they are safe. it's not too cold.

Jones, who has returned to the country to take up the mission as chief engineer, describes himself as a "permanent home doctor," according to Voyager. "You never know when you might need you," he said.

Voyager's overflights have inspired orbiter missions such as Cassini to Saturn and its moons, Galileo and Juno to Jupiter and its moons, and planned future missions.

"I describe Voyager as a grandparent of the missions that have flown since," said Dodd.

No mission followed Uranus or Neptune, however. If a mission was ready to launch right now, it would take ten years to reach Neptune. But nothing is currently in the works, although Voyager's intriguing scientific discoveries have given way to return and investigate further.

"We have to develop an orbiter for each of these planets," said Dodd. "In Uranus, the five main moons are very different, they have a unique geological history, so we need to understand how they were formed or captured, Uranus has a pole of rotation that is inclined more than Earth, so we need a To understand why this happened, Neptune has a lot of characteristics in an atmosphere similar to Jupiter and Saturn, and Neptune's Triton moon is interesting because of its methane geysers. "

When the Voyager probe flew over the planets of our solar system, it allowed some questions to be answered while creating others, Ray said.

But missions on outer planets take longer, so the teams working there know that they will probably only work on one or two of them in their lifetime.

"We are absorbing in our soul the fact that we are going to get going and it will take seven years to get there," said Ray, who is now working on the Europa Clipper mission to explore the moon of Jupiter, Europa.

Those who have worked on the mission Voyager and now participate in the development of Europa Clipper know that they may not be able to carry out their mission. But they bring everything that they have learned from Voyager and other missions to make sure it will be the best possible. And they will move on to a new generation of scientists.

For all those still working on Voyager, they are proud of the longest spaceship in the history of humanity, which is now exploring the unexplored territory of the heliosphere.

"You send only a robot emissary that leaves the solar system once, and that's the Voyager," Ray said. "It's a milestone for humankind – just look at these little robots and how long they have been going in. Damn it, it's a rider."