Friday, August 20, 2010

Space... the final frontier

On this day, August 20, 33 years ago (or 1977 for those of you who have trouble with subtraction), NASA launched Voyager 2. Its continuing mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no spacecraft has gone before.

And while Voyager 2 has yet to find new life or new civilizations (at least as far as we know), it has found a lot of other really stellar stuff (including rings around Jupiter and new moons around Uranus*) over the course of its 21 billion kilometer voyage. And it has sent back some out of this world pictures, like this one of Saturn and its moons (Dione front; Tethys; Mimas right; Enceladus; Rhea left; and Titan distant top**).

















*Please feel free to share your "moon" and "Uranus" jokes in the comments. I have not had any coffee yet and am not feeling particularly witty or creative.

**To see more Voyager photos, check out the Voyager Images gallery on the NASA JPL site.

2 comments:

The Daily Del Franco said...

Reading J-Two can be informative too.....

Let me go get my Copernicus on.....

Charlene said...

This is also the date in 1969 when the first human, as far as we know, stepped on the moon. I remember it well. I stayed up really late and we all were gathered around our 19" black and white TV.