Beyond Voyager

Forty years ago this coming Tuesday, a car-sized piece of equipment launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida. Thirty five years later, it became the first and only man-made object to enter interstellar space. Along the way, the Voyager probes (there were two) made headlines for flybys of Jupiter, Saturn and Titan.

Fran Bagenal was a student when the Voyager probes launched, and wrote her doctoral thesis on data the probes collected around Jupiter. The professor of astrophysical and planetary science at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and former chair of NASA’s Outer Planet Assessment Group, has also worked on the Galileo, Deep Space 1, New Horizons and Juno missions.

Nautilus caught up with Bagenal to discuss the legacy of Voyager and the future of manned and unmanned exploration of space.

You’ve said there will never be another Voyager. Why not?

One of the reasons is that we had the planets lined up in a particular way that happens every 175 years. It’ll be another 135 years before they line up that way again. The other reason is that Voyagers were part of that first wave of exploration where you design your mission to get first glimpses. You go in with a very open view and you say, “Let’s just look and see what’s there.” The follow on missions tend to be much more targeted. Galileo, for example, was only looking at the Galilean moons around Jupiter. Cassini went to Saturn,