Voyager at 40: Opening up the Solar System - Paul Schenk

Forty years ago, twin spacecraft, the most advanced of their day, set our on a 12-year journey to explore the vase outer solar system. The resulting cascade of discovery from Jupiter to Neptune fundamentally reshaped our perception of planets and revealed the complexity of planetary worlds. The giant planets were vigorously active, their ring systems proved to be extremely complex, their moons bizarre and in some cases geologically active even today. Later missions like Galileo and Cassini built on these discoveries, and we now understand that water-rich "ocean worlds" are commonplace, some of which could be potentially habitable. Even today, amateur scientists are reexamining the thousands of Voyager images to create new mosaics and movies from the data. It is difficult to imagine today but virtually none of this was even suspected 40 years ago.

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