In an epic journey that began in 1977, the Voyager 2 spacecraft has shown hazy pinpoints of light in the heavens to be giant, turbulent worlds. Cutting a 4-billion-mile swath through the Solar System, Voyager 2 has relayed close-up images and detailed measurements to Earth from distant, previously barely distinguishable unknown entities. On the way the spacecraft transmitted thousands of pictures, plus huge quantities of other observations, from the vicinity of the four largest planets and many of their moons and rings.
Voyager 2's observations show that Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune and many of their moons possess their own unique characteristics. On some of these bodies the spacecraft's TV cameras and other instruments observed gigantic mountain ranges, colossal volcanoes, extraordinarily strong magnetic fields, and ferociously turbulent weather patterns, as well as other extreme phenomena unknown on Earth.
So far from the Earth was Voyager 2 this past August when it reached the vicinity of Neptune--presently the most distant from the Sun of the Solar System's nine planets--that radio transmissions traveling at the speed of light (186,000 miles each second) required four hours and six minutes to reach Earth. Neptune, which from Earth is invisible with unaided eyes and only faintly observable with telescopes, exposed itself for the first time to close-up observations by human instruments.
An identical spacecraft, Voyager 1, had been launched two weeks after Voyager 2 on a faster, shorter trajectory and flew closely past Jupiter and Saturn and then veered off, as intended, on a course that will eventually take it out of the Solar
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