Voyager: The grandest tour. The mission to the outer planets

A history and general accomplishments of the Voyager 1 and 2 missions to the outer planets are presented. Over the course of 12 years, these spacecraft drew back the curtain on nearly half the solar system. They brought into sharp focus the faces of the four giant outer planets - Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune - and their families of disparate moons. The Voyagers showed us unimagined worlds: frozen beauty in the rings of Saturn, and molten violence in the explosive sulfur volcanoes on Jupiter's moon Io. They brought us close-ups of the florid and intricate storms of Jupiter itself. Voyager 2 went on to reveal the peculiarities of cockeyed Uranus and its equally skewed rings and moons. Then finally, Neptune, nearly invisible from earth, was unveiled in all its big, blue splendor, circled by shadowy rings and a bright pastel moon called Triton. Both Voyagers are headed toward the outer boundary of the solar system in search of the heliopause, the region where the sun's influence wanes and the beginning of interstellar space can be sensed.