eel way

When planets align.⁣ ⁣⁣ Today we salute Dr. Ed Stone, who retired as project scientist after half a century at the helm of the Voyager mission. ⁣⁣ ⁣⁣ In the late 1970s, a rare planetary alignment occurred, allowing scientists like Stone to chart a course for Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 to visit the four giant outer planets using minimal fuel and the gravitational pull of the planets themselves. This lead to scientific discoveries, a new perspective of our place in the cosmos, and the farthest travel of any human-made objects. Both Voyagers are in interstellar space now.⁣ ⁣⁣ As Voyager approached Jupiter, the two spacecraft took more than 33,000 pictures of the gas giant and its four major satellites, leading astronomers to discover volcanoes on Io and that the Great Red Spot is a complex storm. Their next stop was Saturn, which they visited nine months apart, studying the planet's atmospheric composition, wind speeds, and temperature. ⁣⁣ ⁣⁣ Voyager 2 continued its tour of t...