What is Voyager 1 ?

The tape recorder aboard each Voyager has been designed to record and playback a great deal of scientific data.

Voyager has been designed to record and playback a great deal of scientific data.

Voyager magnetometers are mounted on a frail, spindly, fiberglass boom that was unfurled from a two-foot-long can shortly after the spacecraft left Earth. After the boom telescoped and rotated out of the cannister to an extension of nearly 13 meters (43 feet), the orientations of the magnetometer sensors were controlled to an accuracy better than two degrees.

Each Voyager used the enormous gravity field of Jupiter to be hurled on to Saturn, experiencing a Sun-relative speed increase of roughly 35,700 mph. As total energy within the solar system must be conserved, Jupiter was initially slowed in its solar orbit---but by only one foot per trillion years.

Voyager's fuel efficiency (in terms of mpg) is quite impressive. Even though most of the launch vehicle's 700 ton weight is due to rocket fuel, Voyager 2's great travel distance of 7.1 billion km (4.4 billion mi) from launch to Neptune resultsed in a fuel economy of about 13,000 km per liter (30,000 mi per gallon). As Voyager 2 streaked by Neptune and coasts out of the solar system, this fuel economy just got better and better!

he resolution of the Voyager narrow-angle television cameras is sharp enough to read a newspaper headline at a distance of 1 km (0.62 mi).