
NASA to Power Down Voyager Probes: Here Are Their Best Space Photos
The Voyager Space Probes -- the most distant cameras in the universe -- are being powered down after 44 years of interstellar travel.
The Voyager Space Probes -- the most distant cameras in the universe -- are being powered down after 44 years of interstellar travel.
In 2012, 35 years after its launch in 1977, NASA's Voyager 1 space probe left the Solar System and became the first human-man object to enter interstellar space. On board is a Golden Record with sounds and images that show life on Earth. 116 images were selected for inclusion by a committee led by Carl Sagan.
Vox just published the 5-minute video above to share a rapid-fire slideshow of the photos we humans chose to send toward the farthest reaches of space (note: one photo shows nudity).
In 1979, as Voyager 1 made its final approach towards Jupiter, it snapped a series of beautiful black-and-white images of the massive planet that, when converted into a time-lapse, showed the movement of Jupiter's cloud bands for the very first time.
It's iconic footage, astronomically speaking, which is why 7 Swedish amateur astronomers and astrophotographers set out to recreate it using their own ground-based telescopes.