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.