voyage 1986

The New York Times

The learning network | dec. 23, 1986 | voyager aircraft completes first nonstop around-the-world flight.

Dec. 23, 1986 | Voyager Aircraft Completes First Nonstop Around-the-World Flight

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On Dec. 23, 1986, the experimental airplane Voyager, piloted by Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager, completed the first nonstop, around-the-world flight without refueling. It landed safely at Edwards Air Force Base in California.

The idea for the Voyager came about as Mr. Rutan, his brother Burt and Ms. Yeager ate lunch together one day in 1981; the three sketched the design for the plane on a napkin. The Rutans, Ms. Yeager and a team made mostly of volunteers built the Voyager over the next five years. The enterprise was funded entirely by private investors. The Voyager, made of a lightweight composite material containing primarily graphite, Kevlar and fiberglass, weighed just 939 pounds but could carry more than 7,000 pounds of fuel in its 17 fuel tanks.

The Voyager took off from Edwards Air Force Base on Dec. 14, 1986. Mr. Rutan and Ms. Yeager flew the plane in short shifts over the next 9 days 3 minutes and 44 seconds, covering about 25,000 miles. The pilots, as reported by The New York Times, rested in “a 7 1/2-by-2-foot compartment beside the even smaller cockpit … equipped with food, water, a five-foot rubber band for exercising, and rudimentary toilet facilities. The aviators’ diet consisted of bland food supplements like powdered milk shakes.”

Mr. Rutan and Ms. Yeager did encounter some trouble during the trip. As The Times reported: “Seven and a half hours before the landing, as the plane cruised at 8,500 feet on the power of the rear engine alone, Mr. Rutan radioed, ‘The engine has stopped.’ Over the next five minutes, the plane descended more than 3,000 feet as the ground crew tried to stay calm. Then a Voyager staff member, Mike Melville, blurted out, ‘Well, damn it, start the front engine!’ Mr. Rutan did, and the plane recovered.

The Voyager flight came 62 years after the first around-the-world flight, completed by two U.S. Army planes that made 57 stops during their 175-day journey. At a news conference held after the landing, Mr. Rutan said, “This was the last major event of atmospheric flight.”

Connect to Today:

Today, the Voyager is on display at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington.

Mr. Rutan said of the flight, “That we did it as private citizens says a lot about freedom in America.” What do you think this statement means? As grants and other sources of government financing dwindle, should engineers and scientists look to the Rutan Voyager as an example? Do you think private investors may be the solution to financing major science and technology breakthroughs in the future? Why or why not?

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Voyager’s Nonstop Around-the-World Adventure

When Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager landed at California’s Edwards Air Force Base in the Rutan Voyager on December 23, 1986, they completed a historic flight that tested the limits of aircraft design and human endurance.   The pair had left Edwards on December 14, having spent nine days and three minutes in the air during their nonstop, unrefueled flight around the world—the first of its kind. Along the way they nearly came to grief several times, as they grappled with exhaustion, mechanical problems, severe weather and even political considerations.

Dick’s brother Burt had first sketched Voyager’s design on a paper napkin at a Mojave, Calif., res­taurant in 1981. Such an airplane—essentially a flying fuel tank—had been thought impossible.

The challenges Burt Rutan faced were daunting. He had to balance the necessary fuel capacity with the need for increased lift to overcome the fuel weight and higher induced drag. That required additional wing area, which in turn increased drag, compelling Rutan to use a high-aspect-ratio wing—long span and narrow chord—and enormously complicating the structural design.

The wing he needed could not be built without the aid of carbon composites, which boasted a strength-to-weight ratio seven times greater than that of steel. At the time Voyager was the largest composite aircraft ever to fly.

Construction of Voyager in the Rutan hangar at Mojave took two years of day and night work by a team of dedicated volunteers. Over the next three years, the airplane made 67 test flights, revealing serious operational issues. During a three-day flight, Dick and Jeana found the interior noise level generated by the tandem-mounted, push-pull engines almost unendurable, threatening permanent hearing loss, so the team added active-noise-suppression headsets. On another flight the electric propeller pitch-control motor on the front engine shorted out. Before it could be shut down, the engine shook off its mounts and the propeller departed. The only thing that saved Voyager and its crew was a flexible strap holding the engine to the fuselage.

Heading to Oshkosh, Wisc., in 1984 for the Experi­mental Aircraft Association fly-in, Voyager encountered a rainstorm that reduced lift from its wide canard to the point where the airplane kept losing altitude no matter what Dick tried. “I had a horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach,” he said, “as the airplane was coming down, and I couldn’t stop it.” Voyager emerged from the storm and regained lift just in time to avoid the terrain ahead. To fix the problem, team members installed tiny vortex generators on the canard that smoothed the airflow. Solving these and other issues occupied the next two years.  

Preparations for the around-the-world flight involved numerous additional tasks, such as securing the many overflight clearances required, studying regional weather patterns and setting up global communications relays. The support team included recognized experts in such fields as meteor­ology, communications, instrumentation and control engineering.  

Burt Rutan’s design was precisely tailored to the mission, but Dick and Jeana learned that with a high fuel load Voyager was barely flyable. The long-span, unusually flexible wings went from a pronounced droop at the start of takeoff to a hawk-like upward curve as they generated lift. The transition from takeoff to climb had to be flown with knife-edge accuracy to avoid dangerous wing oscillations. Designer and pilots knew Voyager was fundamentally unsafe. “This thing flies like a turkey vulture,” Dick said.  

In order to save weight, the airplane’s fuel system—16 individual tanks and two pumps (one per side) transferring fuel into a single central tank feeding both the forward and rear engines—was not equipped with automatic valves or individual fuel pumps. Hence keeping Voyager within center-of-gravity limits was a continuous burden, mostly on Jeana, who kept a meticulous fuel transfer record.

To reach its maximum range, Voyager had to maintain a best lift-over-drag attitude, with a specific constant angle of attack for each speed. Burt’s carefully planned vertical profile specified the speed for each successive stage as fuel weight diminished. On a flight lasting over a week, that task required an autopilot.

On the morning of December 14, Voyager was loaded with 7,011.5 pounds of fuel, 15 percent more than on its heaviest previous flight. The aircraft’s gross takeoff weight was 9,694.5 pounds, supported by an airframe that weighed just 939 pounds. The landing gear was designed to handle that one-time load on takeoff, which would be made from Edwards’ 15,000-foot runway.

Team members pumped air into the gear struts to provide a bit more clearance for Voyager’s drooping wings, then added more fuel to the forward tanks. Those actions slightly twisted the wings forward and down, inadvertently setting the stage for a potential disaster. In anticipation of the extra weight, the tires were inflated to a pressure of 3,200 psi, almost twice the rated maximum.

The halfway point on the runway, at 7,500 feet, was the agreed abort point in the event Voyager hadn’t reached the required 83 knots to begin rotation. As Voyager lumbered down the runway just after 8 a.m., it was still four knots short when it reached that point. Over the radio, Burt yelled, “Dick, pull the stick back, dammit!” But knowing he didn’t have adequate speed for liftoff and refusing to abort, Dick left the throttles wide open, staking their lives on that crucial decision. “The airplane was accelerating smoothly,” he later said, “and the end of the runway was still a mile and a half ahead.”

Dick was unaware that the extra fuel weight had caused the wingtips to scrape the runway, and that the outboard wing sections were now generating negative lift. Voyager was at the 11,000-foot point when it reached 83 knots, but still Dick didn’t rotate; a premature attempt at liftoff might fracture the wings between the inner sections generating lift and the outer sections still under downward pressure from negative lift. He held the airplane on the runway until Jeana called “87 knots,” and only then began to ease back on the stick as the assembled crowd screamed “Pull up, pull up!” Voyager finally lifted off 14,200 feet down the runway, a mere 800 feet from the end. “One hundred knots,” Jeana called out, as Voyager reached 100 feet altitude. “We needed the extra lift from ground effect—within our 110-foot wingspan—which I used to boost our airspeed to the climb target,” Dick explained.

The scraped wingtips were damaged to the point where they were soon shed, leaving tattered foam and loose wires exposed at the ends. How close was the wingtip damage to the fuel tanks? Could a leak have been started? Could the exposed wires cause a short during a storm? Nobody knew, so Voyager simply flew westward. Early in the flight, the overburdened airplane burned fuel so fast that a pound of fuel yielded less than two miles of flight distance.  

One hour into the flight, Voyager was 7,400 feet above the Pacific. The aircraft’s inherent instability would continue to pose a threat even after it was safe to turn on the autopilot. Dick had to be at the controls in case significant oscillations began that the autopilot couldn’t immediately correct. Although Jeana had a few hundred hours of flying experience, she hadn’t yet learned how to prevent those dangerous oscillations, which could break up the airplane while it was so fuel-heavy. Jeana looked out the cockpit window and exclaimed, “See the wings! They’re almost flapping.”

For the next three days, Dick stayed at the controls. His lack of adequate sleep set the stage for new dangers ahead. Jeana’s neck grew stiff as she lay on her side watching the instruments while Dick catnapped. “He needed the rest,” she said, “so I had to monitor what the airplane was doing, and reach around him to make any adjustments.”  

After passing Hawaii, they entered the Inter­tropical Convergence Zone, with high-altitude westerly winds and low-altitude easterly winds. Voyager stayed at 7,500 feet, along the five-degree north parallel, an area of frequent storm activity. As they approached Guam, the weather guru at Mission Control in Mojave, Len Snell­man, warned the crew about a large typhoon just to the southeast. Voyager was able to pick up some tailwind from the typhoon’s counterclockwise circulation by skirting it on the north side. That tailwind would provide an important gain in fuel savings.

From about mid-Pacific all the way to Africa, the crew and Mission Control became increasingly concerned about the rate of fuel consumption indicated by Jeana’s log. For reasons unknown, possibly leaks from the wingtip damage, there might not be enough fuel to complete the mission. They began to actively consider possible emergency landing sites. Dick remembered “a sinking feeling in my stomach; I wanted to cry. We were looking at failure.”  

Overflying Sri Lanka, with its 10,000-foot runway, Dick felt so tired he could hardly resist the temptation to land. But his mother’s words, “If you can dream it, you can do it,” ran through his mind, and he knew Jeana wanted to fly on, so they did. Later, Jeana discovered a reverse flow of fuel from the feeder tank back to the selected fuel tank. Dick guessed the amount was insufficient to drain the feeder tank and stop the engine, but there was no way to know for sure.  

Voyager approached the African coast well south of Somalia (for which they had no overflight clearance) on a moonless dark night. Jeana was at the controls while Dick slept in the rear compartment. Fuel was still a concern, so she ran the rear engine lean. Their radar revealed a storm ahead, just south of their course. Jeana awakened Dick, and as he got into the cockpit they were at the edge of the storm. They were through the turbulence in a few minutes, about to start across a continent with few airfields and a sky full of storm clouds.

Voyager was over western Kenya, on its planned course, heading for Lake Victoria and cumulus buildups, with mountainous terrain beyond. They were five hours late for an inflight rendezvous with Doug Shane, who had flown by airline to Kenya and rented a Beech Baron in order to observe Voyager up close to see if the wingtip damage had caused fuel leaks requiring a mission abort. Voyager already was climbing to avoid Mt. Kenya and other peaks ahead over 17,000 feet. Shane was nearing the Baron’s ceiling, with only a few minutes to approach Voyager and inspect for fuel leaks in the early morning light. “No ugly blue streaks,” he called. Relieved to know Voyager was not leaking fuel, they climbed to 20,500 feet to clear the mountains ahead.  

this article first appeared in AVIATION HISTORY magazine

Dehydration and equally insidious hypoxia threatened their survival. Neither Dick nor Jeana had managed to drink enough fluid to replenish their losses flying so high. Nor were they breathing 100-percent oxygen, required for that altitude, because earlier Dick had dialed it back to conserve their supply. Dick could see Jeana’s reflection in the radar screen; she was curled up like a cat, sleeping soundly—too soundly. Dick called, “Jeana, wake up! Wake up!” while reaching back to shake her. “What, what?” she finally responded, then quickly fell back asleep. Soon after, Dick said, “Jeana, look at this,” shaking her awake again. “Look at the instrument panel! It’s bulging out; it may explode!” “It’s o.k., Dick,” she reassured him, “you’re just tired. I’ll take care of it.” As Voyager descended to 14,000 feet, Dick’s hallucinations stopped. Jeana squeezed past him and took the controls. Her head was pounding with a migraine headache. “My stomach was churning, I started vomiting into my little throw-up bag,” she said. “I just kept flying; Dick was in worse shape.”

Night overtook them as Jeana let Dick sleep longer than planned because of his extreme fatigue. After he was back at the controls, Dick realized they were very late for the course change to avoid Mt. Cameroon. “Why didn’t you wake me?” he yelled. “There’s a mountain out there and we almost ran into it.” “So, why didn’t you remind me of it?” Jeana replied.

Clearing Africa, the two fliers experienced an overwhelming sense of relief. Looking at Dick, “I saw big tears rolling down his cheeks,” Jeana remembered. “I reached over his shoulder and gave him a hug.”

On crossing the South Atlantic, things took a turn for the worse. As Voyager approached the coast of Brazil, Mission Control lacked weather satellite data and could not provide adequate guidance for the location. With bad weather ahead, Dick was forced to thread his way through an area of dense thunderstorms, in the dark. Their radar showed storm cells close ahead, at right, left and center. Turbulence tossed Voyager like a cork, and a cell swallowed the aircraft. One wing was forced high and the other low as the aircraft quickly went into a 90-degree bank. Voyager was about to go inverted. “Well babe, this is it, I think we’ve bought the farm this time,” Dick said. “Look at the attitude indicator. We ain’t gonna make it.” Jeana stayed quiet.  

The cell ejected Voyager, but it was still far over on its side—an attitude out of a bad dream. Dick knew the only way to recover was to unload the G-force on the wings and regain airspeed, and only after that gently roll back level while ensuring airspeed didn’t build too rapidly to recover. “We never banked Voyager over 20 degrees before,” Dick noted. “I’d rather go back across Africa than tangle with one of these storms again.” Mission Control was soon getting better weather satellite coverage and helping the crew find the safest way through the remaining storm cells.

After the adrenaline wore off, Dick desperately needed rest. Jeana took over, dodging cumulus clouds for the next three hours. The airplane had by this time consumed most of its fuel and was lighter, so fuel economy increased, allowing them to shut down the forward engine. Over the Carib­bean, north of Venezuela, Voyager’s fuel economy climbed to five miles per pound—30 miles per gallon. Nevertheless, the uncertain fuel situation prompted the crew to run the engine very lean. Mis­sion Control warned of cumulus buildups over Pan­ama, and suggested overflying Costa Rica instead.  

Later, heading northwest off the Nicaraguan coast, Voyager aimed for home as dawn broke on the flight’s eighth day. Headwinds slowed its ground speed to 65 knots. Dick flew on as Jeana managed the fuel flow. Suddenly the right side fuel pump went into overspeed and failed. Dick had anticipated such a possibility and arranged a bypass of the feeder tank through the engine’s mechanical pump. Now he made the switch and fuel again flowed. But the sight tube had to be checked constantly, to detect the first bubbles of air in the line.  

When the engine coughed a few times, changing tanks brought it back to life. Dick switched to a tank in the canard that he thought had plenty of fuel, but it didn’t and the engine stopped. Voyager had been running at 8,000 feet on the rear engine, to conserve fuel. Now they heard only the wind. Dick lowered the nose, hoping higher airspeed would restart the windmilling engine, to no avail. Without engine power, the mechanical pump couldn’t operate.  

Voyager was now down to 5,000 feet. Mike Melvill in Mission Control suggested starting the front engine, but Dick feared that would block the rear engine, with its still windmilling prop, from restarting. They needed both engines to get home. The situation was critical; Voyager was rapidly losing altitude.

Dick and Jeana followed the cold-engine-start checklist. “Elbow flying now,” Dick said, needing both hands for the restart sequence. “Just take it easy, Dick,” Jeana said. “You’re doing fine.” Voyager, heavy on the right side due to the fuel imbalance, continued down. Dick used the avionics backup battery to avoid an instrument-killing current surge from the main battery. Still, the front engine would not start. At 3,500 feet Dick leveled out, allowing the fuel to flow, and the engine finally coughed to life.

Now they had to finish replacing the right-side pump to relieve the imbalance from Voyager’s fuel-heavy right wing. Dick installed the pump while Jeana got the many valves turned correctly. An anxious half-hour passed before enough fuel to get them home flowed slowly into the feeder tank.

Finally Voyager left the ocean behind, and at first light was over California’s San Gabriel Moun­tains. Chase planes flown by Melvill and Shane joined up while Dick and Jeana kept their focus on precision flying. Voyager appeared over Edwards at 7:32 a.m. Dick did a flyby at 400 feet and a few more with the chase planes. He wanted to do one more flyby, at just 50 feet, but Jeana chimed in, “Dick, time to land, we’re running low on fuel.” Thousands of people were waiting as they carefully landed, taxied to the parking area and shut down the engines that had taken them around the world. When the leftover fuel was drained, little more than 108 pounds (18 gallons) of the original 7,000-plus pounds remained.

Voyager’s world flight remains one of the greatest achievements in aviation history. For their feat, the Rutans, Yeager and the Voyager team were awarded the 1986 Collier Trophy.  

Pierre Hartman is a former light-sport pilot who lives in Tehachapi, Calif., 20 miles from Mojave. Further reading: Voyager , by Jeana Yeager and Dick Rutan, with Phil Patton; and Voyager: The World Flight , by Jack Norris.

This feature originally appeared in the November 2019 issue of Aviation History.

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Simple Flying

Rutan voyager: the first plane to circumnavigate the world without refueling or stopping.

The Rutan Voygaer holds the record for the longest flight in the world even today.

The Rutan Voyager Model 76 was the first plane to successfully circumnavigate the globe without making any stops at all. The thin airframe took five years to develop and set off on its journey on December 14th, 1986, landing a full nine days later on December 23rd. Here's a look at this record-breaking aircraft.

From a napkin to the skies

The Voyager was built by Burt Rutan, Dick Rutan, and Jeana Yaeger. Burt reportedly first sketched the design of the plane on a paper napkin in 1981 and started work not long after in Mojave, California under the banner of its aerospace company. Dick Rutan and Jeana Yaeger were the pilots of the historic flight.

To sustain flight over 216 hours, keeping the weight of the aircraft at a minimum was essential. To do this, Rutan used a combination of composite materials like kevlar and fiberglass to bring the airframe weight to just 426kgs. The engines alone weighed more than this at 594kgs, with two propellers running in the middle section on either end.

At first glance, the Voyager Model 76 is unlike any commercial aircraft design , having no clear tail or fuselage, instead seeing one long wing cutting across three fuselage sections and a parallel connector for the trio. Rutan's design was built to maximize lift to drag ratio, which would be crucial to keeping the plane in the skies for days.

The design process took over five years until the plane was ready to take to the skies in June 1986 for the first time.

Testing to takeoff

Burt Rutan's design proved to be a successful one, with the two pilots using the Model 76 to break the record for the longest flight in the world in testing in July 1986 alone. However, the trio hoped to take the voyager on a journey like no other, circumnavigating the globe without any refueling or technical stops.

After over 60 test flights, the Rutan Voyager set off for its nonstop global flight on December 14th, 1986 from Edwards Air Force Base. However, things did not go too smoothly from the beginning, with the tips of the wings hitting the runway surface and eventually ripping off in the initial stages of the flight. However, the pilots opted to continue given the plane still met its technical range even without the tips.

The pair of pilots flew heroically, avoiding closed airspace, storms, and other weather events to ensure the plane's performance was not hampered significantly. With little space in the cockpit, Dick Rutan and Jeana Yaeger were only able to switch over controls occasionally, with days passing at times.

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After a fuel pump failure toward the end of the flight, the two pilots managed to complete the voyage successfully at 08:06 AM on 23rd December at Edwards AFB, with a recorded journey time of over 216 hours and circumnavigating the globe. 38 years later, this record remains in place, with no endurance flight even close to beating the Rutan Model 76 Voyager.

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VOYAGER SUCCEEDS IN HISTORIC FLIGHT

By Sandra Blakeslee, Special To the New York Times

• Dec. 24, 1986

Sweeping out of a clear desert sky and into aviation history, the experimental airplane Voyager landed safely here early today, completing the first nonstop flight around the world on one load of fuel.

The journey of 25,012 miles set records for distance flown without refueling and for endurance by aviators on such a flight. The trip, which began and ended at Edwards Air Force Base, 60 miles northeast of Los Angeles, took 9 days 3 minutes 44 seconds.

''This was the last major event of atmospheric flight,'' Richard G. Rutan, 48 years old, said at a news conference after he landed the plane. ''That we did it as private citizens says a lot about freedom in America.''

'Never Felt Really Frightened'

His co-pilot, Jeana Yeager, 34, said that apart from bruises she got during the flight, she felt ''great.'' There was so much going on during the flight, she said, that ''I never felt really frightened.''

Both pilots looked thin, but their mood was ebullient.

According to its backers, the Voyager flight showed that new technology and design could be used to break records and perhaps change the way planes are built.

Made of stiffened paper and plastic, the strangely sturdy Voyager carried as much as five times its weight in fuel. Such materials and innovative design are already used in military aviation, and some experts say the Voyager flight may lead to more fuel-efficient cargo transportation in civilian flights.

As the Voyager landed today at 8:06 A.M. (11:06 A.M., New York time), more than 23,000 spectators were present to provide a heroes' welcome. They cheered and clapped, and many cried.

President Reagan sent a message that the pair would be awarded the Presidential Citizens Medal at a ceremony in Los Angeles on Monday.

The last leg of the Voyager's trip was not without mishap. Seven and a half hours before the landing, as the plane cruised at 8,500 feet on the power of the rear engine alone, Mr. Rutan radioed, ''The engine has stopped.''

Over the next five minutes, the plane descended more than 3,000 feet as the ground crew tried to stay calm. Then a Voyager staff member, Mike Melville, blurted out, ''Well, damn it, start the front engine!'' 'They're Both Running'

Mr. Rutan did so. A minute later, he told the ground crew, ''They're both running and maintaining 5,000 feet.''

Mr. Melville and others quickly diagnosed the problem with the rear engine. Drawing fuel out of a nearly empty tank, the engine had taken ''a big gulp of air instead of fuel,'' said Lee Herron, the Voyager spokesman. ''That stopped the engine.'' As the pilots continued on their way using both engines, Mr. Melville said, ''I've got tooth marks on my heart.''

The Voyager's final approach to Edwards Air Force Base was, by comparison, calm. As the airplane neared the airfield, Mr. Rutan asked the tower, ''Are there any test flights going on?'' The tower replied: ''All the test flights are grounded. All test pilots are watching you on TV.''

At 7:35 A.M. the Voyager, accompanied by four chase planes, flew gracefully over the cheering crowd. It circled four times as Ms. Yeager lowered the landing gear by hand.

''I'm glad to see a large crowd out,'' Mr. Rutan said. ''After all, it was grass-roots support that made this thing possible.'' He added: ''In America people are free and can do whatever they want to do, as long as they dream it. This is the last first in aviation - typically done by an American.''

Mr. Rutan and Ms. Yeager took turns piloting the Voyager, which traveled at an average of 115 miles an hour, but Mr. Rutan did most of the flying. ''I took night flight and difficult weather,'' he said. That translated into 85 percent of the time aloft.

For most of the journey Ms. Yeager lay stretched out in a 7 1/2-by-2-foot compartment beside the even smaller cockpit. The compartment was equipped with food, water, a five-foot rubber band for exercising, and rudimentary toilet facilities, including plastic bags for waste. The aviators' diet consisted of bland food supplements like powdered milk shakes.

When it landed, the Voyager had only five gallons left in its remaining usable fuel tank. There was more fuel in other tanks, but a problem with the pumping system would have made it extremely hard to retrieve, Mr. Herron said.

A flap of Magnamite fiber was hanging from the plane's right wing. It apparently had peeled off in flight after both wings were damaged on takeoff. Lucky Timing on Return

The timing of the plane's return to the base was luck, Voyager spokesmen said. Had it arrived before dawn, they said, it would have circled the airfield until daylight.

''It wasn't the best landing I've made,'' Mr. Rutan said, ''but I walked away from it.''

But before the pilots could test their legs, an official from the National Aeronautics Association inspected the plane. The association is a sanctioning body that, on behalf of the International Aeronautics Federation, certifies world aviation records.

The official, Richard Hansen, stepped up to the Voyager to check various seals and devices that he had placed on the airplane before it took off. The seals, consisting of tape with Mr. Hansen's initials, were on the cockpit, the 17 fuel tanks and on a counter device on the plane's wheels. Had any of the seals been broken, the authenticity of the world record could have been called into question. The seals were all in place.

The two pilots soon climbed out of the Voyager and waved to nearby photographers. The pilots had been in sitting and prone positions for 216 hours.

An ambulance carried them to the base hospital for a checkup.

The Voyager was towed to a special hangar where it was inspected further. Later it was to be weighed. Asked about their future plans, Mr. Rutan laughed and said, ''I plan to take another long shower.''

To view items in this collection, use the Online Finding Aid

On December 23, 1986 the unique Voyager aircraft completed the first nonstop, non-refueled circumnavigation of the globe. Voyager's designer, Burt Rutan, its pilots for the nine-day historic flight, Richard "Dick" Rutan and Jeana Yeager, as well as crew chief Bruce Evans, were all to win the Collier Trophy for their accomplishment of one of aviation's last "firsts."

NASM.2000.0054

Riva, Peter

Peter Riva, Gift, 2000, 2000-0054, unknown

9.89 Cubic feet ((1 letter document box) (8 records center boxes) (2 shoeboxes) (1 flatbox))

National Air and Space Museum Archives

This collection consists of the records kept by project manager Peter Riva and includes legal files, general office files, audio tapes, videotapes, newspaper and magazine accounts of the flight and transcripts of the account that would become the book, Voyager by Jeana Yeager and Dick Rutan with Phil Patton, published by Knopf in 1987.

Material is subject to Smithsonian Terms of Use. Should you wish to use NASM material in any medium, please submit an Application for Permission to Reproduce NASM Material, available at Permissions Requests

See accession file.

Rutan Model 76 Voyager

Aeronautics -- Records

Endurance flights

Aeronautics -- Flights

Aeronautics -- Awards

Aeronautics

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Voyager mission celebrates 30 years since uranus, jet propulsion laboratory.

Humanity has visited Uranus only once, and that was 30 years ago. NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft got its closest look at the mysterious, distant, gaseous planet on Jan. 24, 1986.

Voyager 2 sent back stunning images of the planet and its moons during the flyby, which allowed for about 5.5 hours of close study. The spacecraft got within 50,600 miles (81,500 kilometers) of Uranus during that time.

“We knew Uranus would be different because it’s tipped on its side, and we expected surprises,” said Ed Stone, project scientist for the Voyager mission, based at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena. Stone has served as project scientist since 1972, continuing in that role today.

Uranus revealed itself to be the coldest planet known in our solar system, even though it’s not the farthest from the sun. This is because it has no internal heat source.

Scientists determined that the atmosphere of Uranus is 85 percent hydrogen and 15 percent helium. There was also evidence of a boiling ocean about 500 miles (800 kilometers) below the cloud tops.

Scientists found that Uranus has a magnetic field different from any they had ever encountered previously. At Mercury, Earth, Jupiter and Saturn, the magnetic field is aligned approximately with the rotational axis.

“Then we got to Uranus and saw that the poles were closer to the equator,” Stone said. “Neptune turned out to be similar. The magnetic field was not quite centered with the center of the planet.”

This surface magnetic field of Uranus was also stronger than that of Saturn. Data from Voyager 2 helped scientists determine that the magnetic tail of Uranus twists into a helix stretching 6 million miles (10 million kilometers) in the direction pointed away from the sun. Understanding how planetary magnetic fields interact with the sun is a key part of NASA’s goal to understand the very nature of space. Not only does studying the sun-planet connection provide information useful for space travel, but it helps shed light on the origins of planets and their potential for harboring life.

Voyager 2 also discovered 10 new moons (there are 27 total) and two new rings at the planet, which also proved fascinating. An icy moon called Miranda revealed a peculiar, varied landscape and evidence of active geologic activity in the past. While only about 300 miles (500 kilometers) in diameter, this small object boasts giant canyons that could be up to 12 times as deep as the Grand Canyon in Arizona. Miranda also has three unique features called “coronae,” which are lightly cratered collections of ridges and valleys. Scientists think this moon could have been shattered and then reassembled.

Mission planners designed Voyager 2’s Uranus encounter so that the spacecraft would receive a gravity assist to help it reach Neptune. In 1989, Voyager 2 added Neptune to its resume of first-ever looks.

“The Uranus encounter was very exciting for me,” said Suzanne Dodd, project manager for Voyager, based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, who began her career with the mission while Voyager 2 was en route to Uranus.” It was my first planetary encounter and it was of a planet humanity had never seen up close before. Every new image showed more details of Uranus, and it had lots of surprises for the scientists. I hope another spacecraft will be sent to explore Uranus, to explore the planet in more detail, in my lifetime.”

Voyager 2 was launched on Aug. 20, 1977, 16 days before its twin, Voyager 1. In August 2012, Voyager 1 made history as the first spacecraft to enter interstellar space, crossing the boundary encompassing our solar system’s planets, sun and solar wind. Voyager 2 is also expected to reach interstellar space within the next several years.

The Voyagers were built by JPL, which continues to operate both spacecraft. JPL is a division of Caltech. For more information about the Voyager spacecraft, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov/voyager

http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov

Elizabeth Landau NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. 818-354-6425 [email protected] 2016-019

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Carl Sagan in 1986: 'Voyager has become a new kind of intelligent being—part robot, part human'

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One of the worries that kept legendary astronomer Carl Sagan up at night was whether aliens would understand us. In the mid-1970s, Sagan led a committee formed by NASA to assemble a collection of images, recorded greetings, and music to represent Earth. The montage was pressed onto golden albums and dispatched across the cosmos on the backs of Voyagers 1 and 2 .

In a 1986 story Sagan wrote for Popular Science , he noted that “hypothetical aliens are bound to be very different from us—independently evolved on another world,” which meant they likely wouldn’t be able to decipher the golden discs. But he took assurance from an underappreciated dimension of Voyagers’ message: the designs of the vessels themselves.

“We are tool makers,” Sagan wrote. “This is a fundamental aspect, and perhaps the essence, of being human.” What better way to tell alien civilizations that Earthlings are toolmakers than by sending a living room-sized, aluminum-framed probe clear across the Milky Way. 

Although both spacecraft were only designed to swing by Jupiter and Saturn , Voyager 2’s trajectory also hurled it past Uranus and Neptune . Despite numerous mishaps along the way—and because of the elite toolmaker skills of NASA engineers—the probe was in good enough shape to send back close-ups of those distant worlds. In 2012, Voyager 1 became the first interstellar spacecraft , followed soon thereafter by Voyager 2 . “Once out of the solar system,” Sagan wrote, “the surfaces of the spacecraft will remain intact for a billion years or more,” so resilient is their design.

Today, the probes are 12–15 billion miles from Earth , still operable (despite experiencing recent communication difficulties ), and sailing through the relative calm of interstellar space. They are expected to continue to transmit data back to Earth for another year or so , or until their plutonium batteries quit. 

It was early 20th century wireless inventor Guglielmo Marconi who suggested that radio signals never die, they only diminish as they travel across space and time. Even after communications from the Voyager spacecraft cease, perhaps the tiny voices of Earth’s first emissaries, animated by NASA’s master toolmakers nearly half a century ago, will continue to drift through the cosmos for all time, accessible to far-flung civilizations equipped with sensitive enough receivers to listen.

"Voyager's Triumph" (Carl Sagan, October 1986)

A noted scientist tells the little-known story of the remarkable feats of the Voyager engineers, a dedicated band who repeatedly overcame technical adversity to ensure the success of these historic expeditions to the outer solar system.

Carl Sagan is Director, Laboratory for Planetary Studies, Cornell University, and, since 1970, a member of the Voy­ager Imaging Science Team. His Cosmos: A Special Edition is televised this fall. 

On Jan. 25, 1986, the Voyager 2 robot probe entered the Uranus system and reported a procession of wonders. The encounter lasted only a few hours, but the data faithfully relayed back to Earth have revolu­tionized our knowledge of the aquamarine planet, its more than 15 moons, its pitch black rings, and its belt of trapped high-energy charged particles. Voyager 2 and its compan­ion, Voyager 1, have done this before. At Jupiter, in 1979, they braved a dose of trapped charged particles 1,000 times what it takes to kill a human being [PS, July '79); and in all that radiation they discovered the rings of the largest planet, the first active volcanoes outside Earth, and a pos­sible underground ocean on an airless world—among a few hundred other major findings. At Saturn, in 1980 and 1981, the two spacecraft survived a pummeling by tiny icy particles as they plummeted through previously un­ known rings; and there they discovered not a few, but thou­ sands of Saturnian rings, icy moons recently melted through unknown causes, and a large world with an ocean of liquid hydrocarbons surmounted by clouds of organic matter IPS, March '81 l. These spacecraft have returned to Earth four trillion bits of information, the equivalent of about 100,000 encyclopedia volumes.

Because we are stuck on Earth, we are forced to peer at distant worlds through an ocean of distorting air. It is easy to see why our spacecraft have revolutionized the study of the solar system: We ascend to the stark clarity of the vacuum of space, and there approach our objectives, flying past them or orbiting them or landing on their surfaces. These nearby worlds have much to teach us about our own, and they will be—unless we are so foolish as to destroy ourselves—as familiar to our descendents as the neighboring states are to those who live in America today.

Voyager and its brethren are prodigies of human inven­tiveness. Just before Voyager 2 was to encounter the Uranus system, the mission design had scheduled a final course correction, a short firing of the on-board propul­sion system to position Voyager correctly as it flew among the moving moons. But the course correction proved un­necessary. The spacecraft was already within 200 kilome­ters of its designed trajectory after a voyage along an arcing path five billion kilometers in length. This is roughly the equivalent of throwing a pin through the eye of a needle 50 kilometers away, or firing your target pistol in New York and hitting the bull's eye in Dallas.

The lodes of planetary treasure were transmitted back to Earth by the radio antenna aboard Voyager; but Earth is so far away that by the time the signal was gathered in by radiotelescopes on our planet, the received power was only 10-16 watts (fifteen zeros after the decimal point). Comparing this weak signal with the power emitted by an ordinary reading lamp is like comparing the width of an atom with the distance between Earth and the moon. (Incidentally, the first photograph ever taken of Earth and the moon together in space was acquired by one of the Voyager spacecraft.)

We tend to hear much about the splendors returned, and very little about the ships that brought them, or the shipwrights. It has always been that way. Our history books do not tell us much about the builders of the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria, or even the principle of the caravel. De­spite ample precedent, it is a clear injustice: The Voyager engineering team and its accomplishments deserve to be much more widely known.

The Voyager spacecraft were designed and assembled, and are operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in Pasadena, Calif. The mission was conceived during the late 1960s, first funded in 1972, but was not approved in its present form (which includes encounters at Uranus and Neptune) until after the 1979 Jupiter flyby. The two spacecraft were launched in late summer and early fall 1977 by a non-reusable Titan/Centaur booster configuration at Cape Canaveral, Fla. Weighing about a ton, a Voyager would fill a good-sized living room. Each spacecraft draws about 400 watts of power—considerably less than an average American home—from a generator that converts radioactive plutonium into electricity. The instrument that measures interplanetary magnetic fields is so sensitive that the flow of electricity through the innards of the spacecraft would generate spurious signals. As a result, this instrument is placed at the end of a long boom stretching out from the spacecraft. With other projections, it gives Voyager a slightly porcupine appearance. Two cameras, infrared and ultraviolet spectrometers, and an instrument called the photopolarimeter are on a scan platform; the platform swivels so these instruments can point toward a target world. The spacecraft antenna must know where Earth is if the transmitted data are to be received back home. The spacecraft also needs to know where the sun is and at least one bright star, so it can orient itself in three dimensions and point properly toward any passing world. It does no good to be able to return pictures over billions of miles if you can't point the camera.

On-orbit repairs

Each spacecraft costs about as much as a single modern strategic bomber. But unlike bombers, Voyager cannot, once launched, be returned to the hangar for repairs.

As a result, the spacecraft's computers and electronics are designed redundantly. And when Voyager finds itself in trouble, the computers use branched contingency tree logic to work out the appropriate course of action. As the spacecraft journeys increasingly far from Earth, the round-trip light (and radio) travel time also increases, approaching six hours by the time Voyager is at the distance of Uranus.

Thus, in case of an emergency, the spacecraft needs to know how to put itself in a safe standby mode while awaiting instructions from Earth. As the spacecraft ages, more and more failures are expected, both in its mechanical parts and its computer system, although there is as yet no sign of a serious memory deterioration, some robot Alzheimer's disease. When an unexpected failure occurs, special teams of engineers—some of whom have been with the Voyager program since its inception—are assigned to "work" the problem. They will study the underlying basic science and draw upon their previous experience with the failed subsystems. They may do experiments with identical Voyager spacecraft equipment that was never launched or even manufacture a large number of components of the sort that failed in order to gain some statistical understanding of the failure mode.

In April 1978, almost eight months after launch, an omitted ground command caused Voyager 2's on-board computer to switch from the prime radio receiver to its backup.

During the next ground transmission to the spacecraft, the receiver refused to lock onto the signal from Earth. A component called a tracking loop capacitor had failed. After seven days in which Voyager 2 was out of contact, its fault protection software commanded the backup receiver to be switched off and the prime receiver to be switched back on. But, mysteriously, the prime receiver failed moments later: It never recovered. Voyager 2 was now fundamentally imperiled. Although the primary receiver had failed, the on-board computer commanded the spacecraft to use it. There was no way for the controllers on Earth to command Voyager to revert to the backup receiver. Even worse, the backup receiver would be unable to receive the commands from Earth because of the failed capacitor. Finally, after a week of command silence, the computer was programmed to switch automatically between receivers.

And during that week's time the JPL engineers designed an innovative command frequency control procedure to make a few essential commands comprehensible to the damaged backup receiver.

This meant the engineers were able to communicate, at least a little bit, with the spacecraft. Unfortunately the backup receiver now turned giddy, becoming extremely sensitive to the stray heat dumped when various components of the spacecraft were powered up or down. Over the following months the JPL engineers designed and conducted a series of tests that let them thoroughly understand the thermal consequences of most operational modes of the spacecraft on its ability to receive commands from Earth. The backup-receiver problem was entirely circumvented. It was this backup receiver that acquired all the commands from Earth on how to gather data in the Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus systems. The engineers had saved the mission. (But to be on the safe side, during most of Voyager's subsequent flight there is in residence in the onboard computers a nominal data-taking sequence for the next planet to be encountered.)

Another heart-wrenching failure occurred just after Voyager 2 emerged from behind Saturn after its closest approach to the planet in August 1981. The scan platform had been moving rapidly in the azimuth direction—quickly pointing here and there among the rings, moons, and the planet itself during the time of closest approach. Suddenly, the platform jammed. A stuck scan platform obviously implies a severe reduction in future pictures and other key data. The scan platform is driven by gear trains called actuators, so first the JPL engineers ran an identical copy of the flight actuator in a simulated mission. The ground actuator failed after 348 revolutions: the actuator on the spacecraft had failed after 352 revolutions. The problem turned out to be a lubrication failure. Plainly, it would be impossible to overtake Voyager with an oil can. The engineers wondered whether it would be possible to restart the failed actuator by alternately heating and cooling it, so that the thermal stresses would cause the components of the actuator to expand and contract at different rates and un-jam the system. After gaining experience with specially manufactured actuators on the ground, the engineers jubilantly found that they were able to use this procedure to start the scan platform up again in space. More than this, they devised techniques to diagnose any imminent actuator failure early enough to work around the problem. Voyager 2's scan platform worked perfectly in the Uranus system. The engineers had saved the day again.

Ingenious solutions

Voyager 1 and 2 were designed to explore the Jupiter and Saturn systems only. It is true that their trajectories would carry them to Uranus and Neptune, but officially these planets were never contemplated as targets for Voyager exploration: The spacecraft was not supposed to last that long. Because of trajectory requirements in the Saturn system, Voyager 1 was flung on a path that will never encounter any other known world; but Voyager 2 flew to Uranus with brilliant success, and is now on its way to an August 1989 encounter with the Neptune system.

At these immense distances, sunlight is getting progressively dimmer, and the spacecraft's transmitted radio signals to Earth are getting progressively fainter. These were predictable but still very serious problems that the JPL engineers and scientists also had to solve before the encounter with Uranus.

Because of the low light levels at Uranus, the Voyager television cameras were obliged to take longer time exposures. But the spacecraft was hurtling through the Uranus system so fast (about 35,000 miles per hour) that the image would have been smeared or blurred—an experience shared by many amateur photographers. To overcome this, the entire spacecraft had to be moved during the time exposures to compensate for the motion, like panning in the direction opposite yours while taking a photograph of a street scene from a moving car. This may sound easier than it is: You have to compensate for the most casual of motions. At zero gravity, the mere start and stop of the on-board tape recorder that's registering the image can jiggle the spacecraft enough to smear the picture. This problem was solved by commanding the spacecraft thrusters, instruments of exquisite sensitivity, to compensate for the tape-recorder jiggle at the start and stop of each sequence by turning the entire spacecraft just a little. To compensate for the low received radio power at Earth, a new and more efficient digital encoding algorithm was designed for the cameras, and the radiotelescopes on Earth were joined together with oth ers to increase their sensitivity. Overall, the imaging system worked, by many criteria, better at Uranus than it did at Saturn or even at Jupiter.

Voyager has become a new kind of intelligent being—part robot, part human. It extends the human senses to far-off worlds.

The ingenuity of the JPL engineers is growing faster than the spacecraft is deteriorating. And Voyager may not be done exploring after its Neptune encounter.

There is, of course, a chance that some vital subsystem will fail tomorrow, but in terms of the radioactive decay of the plutonium power source, the two Voyager spacecraft will be able to return data to Earth until roughly the year 2015. By then they will have traveled more than a hundred times Earth's distance from the sun, and may have penetrated the heliopause, the place where the interplanetary magnetic field and charged particles are replaced by their interstellar counterparts; the heliopause is one definition of the frontier of the solar system.

Robot-human partnerships

These engineers are heroes of our time. And yet almost no one knows their names. I have attached a table giving the names of a few of the JPL engineers who played central roles in the success of the Voyager missions.

In a society truly concerned for its future, Don Gray, Charlie Kohlhase, or Howard Marderness, would be as well known for their extraordinary abilities and accomplishments as Dwight Gooden, Wayne Gretzky, or Kareem Abdul Jabbar are for theirs.

Voyager has become a new kind of intelligent being-part robot, part human. It extends the human senses to far-off worlds. For simple tasks and short-term problems, it relies on its own intelligence; but for more complex tasks and longer term problems, it turns to another, considerably larger brain—the collective intelligence and experience of the JPL engineers. This trend is sure to grow. The Voyagers embody the technology of the early 1970s; if such spacecraft were to be designed in the near future, they would incorporate stunning improvements in artificial intelligence, in data-processing speed, in the ability to self-diagnose and repair, and in the capacity for the spacecraft to learn from experience. In the many environments too dangerous for people, the future belongs to robot-human partnerships that will recognize Voyager as antecedent and pioneer.

Unlike what seems to be the norm in the so-called defense industry, the Voyager spacecraft came in at cost, on time, and vastly exceeding both their design specifications and the fondest dreams of their builders. These machines do not seek to control, threaten, wound, or destroy; they represent the exploratory part of our nature, set free to roam the solar system and beyond.

Once out of the solar system, the surfaces of the spacecraft will main intact for a billion years or more, as the Voyagers circumnavigate the center of the Milky Way galaxy.

This kind of technology, its findings freely revealed to all humans everywhere, is one of the few activities of the United States admired as much by those who find our policies uncongenial as by those who agree with us on every issue. Unfortunately, the tragedy of the space shuttle Challenger implies agonizing delays in the launch of Voyager's successor missions, such as the Galileo Jupiter orbiter and entry probe. Without real support from Congress and the White House, and a clear long-term NASA goal, NASA scientists and engineers will be forced to find other work, and the historic American triumphs in solar-system exploration—symbolized by Voyager—will become a thing of the past. Missions to the planets are one of those things—and I mean this for the entire human species—that we do best. We are tool makers—this is a fundamental aspect, and perhaps the essence, of being human.

Greeting the aliens

Both Voyager spacecraft are on escape trajectories from the solar system. The gravitational fields of Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus have flung them at such high velocities that they are destined ultimately to leave the solar system altogether and wander for ages in the calm, cold blackness of interstellar space—where, it turns out, there is essentially no erosion.

Once out of the solar system, the surfaces of the spacecraft will main intact for a billion years or more, as the Voyagers circumnavigate the center of the Milky Way galaxy. We do not know whether there are other space-faring civilizations in the Milky Way. And if they do exist, we do not know how abundant they are.

But there is at least a chance that some time in the remote future one of the Voyagers will be intercepted by an alien craft. Voyagers 1 and 2 are the fastest spacecraft ever launched by humans; but even so, they are traveling so slowly that it will be tens of thousands of years before they go the distance to the nearest star. And they are not headed toward any of the nearby stars. As a result there could be no danger of Voyager attracting "hostile" aliens to Earth, at least not any time soon.

So, it seemed appropriate to include some message of greeting from Earth At NASA's request, a committee I chaired designed a phonograph record that was affixed to the outside of each of the Voyager spacecraft. The records contain 116 pictures in digital form, describing our science and technology, our institutions, and ourselves; what will surely be unintelligible greetings in many languages; a sound essay on the evolution of our planet; and an hour and a half of the world's greatest music. But the hypothetical aliens are bound to be very different from us—independently evolved on another world. Are we really sure they could understand our message? Every time I feel these concerns stirring, though, I reassure myself: Whatever the incomprehensibilities of the Voyager record, any extraterrestrial that finds it will have another standard by which to judge us.

Each Voyager is itself a message. In its exploratory intent, in the lofty ambition of its objectives, and in the brilliance of its design and performance, it speaks eloquently for us.

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Feature | December 14, 2012

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Voyager 2 Mission Team Scientists, Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Much of what we know about our solar system's seventh planet comes from Voyager 2's historic flyby on Jan. 24, 1986. The spacecraft returned a wealth of information about the ice giant. Voyager 2 is the only spacecraft to have visited Uranus and Neptune.

At closest approach, the spacecraft came within 50,600 miles (81,500 km) of Uranus's cloud tops. The thousands of images and reams of scientific data Voyager 2 sent back revealed a complex system of rings, moons, and an unusual magnetosphere. Ten of the moons had never been seen before. The mission team also discovered two rings. It was an exciting time for planetary scientists.

In celebration of Voyager 2's Uranus encounter's silver anniversary, we asked past and present Voyager team members to share their favorite images and stories from the flyby.

"A view of the planet that is impossible to see from the Earth, no matter how terrific your telescope is, and it was a chance to really reflect on all the great results we had achieved." —Candice Hansen

"Just in time for Uranus, I got my subscription to "Sky & Telescope." The first issue came a few months after the encounter. I opened the wrapper and found the Uranus crescent picture filling the cover. It is, in my view, the most aesthetical image of that encounter. This left a deep impression on me as it is comparable in beauty with the "final look back" image of Saturn, of which I had the poster on the wall in my room. Perhaps I had a weak spot for special perspectives that the planets offered and which up to then were captured only by artists' imaginations.

At the time of the Voyager 2 Uranus encounter in January 1986, I was the equivalent of a high school senior back in Germany. Voyager 1 and 2 with their spectacular Jupiter and Saturn encounters years earlier inspired me at a critical preteen age to go into science in general and space science in particular. It was their fault! The images I saw on German TV news, newspapers, and science programs influenced me. I remember watching JPL scientists celebrating their launches, planetary encounters, and landings and these actually gave me goosebumps. In 1981 I got my first telescope. I learned to navigate the night skies at the expense of my parents' sleep, started organizing eclipse and comet (Halley) watches at my school, and wrote articles about some of the latest news in astronomy and astrophysics for our high school student newspaper.

The Uranus encounter is special for me in the sense that no other spacecraft had been there before. Jupiter and Saturn, on the other hand, had been visited before by the Pioneers. True, the image quality improved significantly. But the quantum leap was achieved at Uranus. Ground-based telescopes up to 1986 showed no more than a fuzzy bluish ball with little white dots (moons) around it.

A year ago I happened to become Voyager Program Scientist, which allows me now to directly work with the Voyager science team on behalf of NASA. This closes an incredibly unlikely circle from being inspired by the project to actually working for the project. The next encounter of both Voyagers is what I am looking forward to nowadays: the heliopause. This is where the extended solar atmosphere ends. It will catapult humanity into a new era of exploration, from that of the sun and the solar system to that of interstellar space. For the first time, we will sample truly interstellar plasma. From where the Voyagers are now, it will likely take a few years. And that is the big difference between previous Voyager encounters and this one: we don't exactly know when we will reach interstellar space. So my calendar does not have a specific date penciled in. The Voyagers will tell us."— Arik Posner

"(This image) meant a lot to me because, along with my team of trajectory and maneuver engineers (Steve Matousek, Chris Potts, and Karl Francis), we did an extensive analysis to create and execute the targeting strategy that made it possible. We had to account not only for accurate delivery of the spacecraft to the Miranda relative aim point but also accurate camera pointing and image motion compensation. Truly an event to remember!" —Robert Cesarone

"The job prospect for computer science graduates in1985 was pretty rosy and I always thought I would go work for IBM or HP or someplace like that. But a series of unexpected events put me on the VGR (Voyager) flight team getting ready for the Uranus encounter. It was like living in a different world. Never mind that I didn't know what everyone around me was doing; I didn't know what I was supposed to do either. However, it was amazing to watch what everyone was doing come together and turn into these incredible images we'd never seen before. It was such an infectious experience that I was seriously hooked. I like this image of Miranda that shows so much detail, the result of so much hard work of so many dedicated people. What a difference VGR had made! What a difference we had made!" —Sun Matsumoto

"Without a doubt, my favorite image from the Voyager 2 Uranus flyby is this high resolution, high phase view of the rings. I vividly remember watching this image as it was displayed on the monitor for the first time and being completely amazed at what I saw! The nine narrow rings were now joined by a whole host of previously unknown belts of fine dust that were enhanced by the backlighting of the rings. Some of these wispy dust belts were even brighter than the major rings in this image. Later, I eagerly looked through the Voyager photopolarimeter (PPS) stellar occultation data of the Uranian rings for evidence of these newly discovered dust bands. What a spectacular flyby!" —Linda Spilker

"The image of the Uranian ring system seen in forward scattered light. There were many images taken, but most were underexposed. This is the only forward scattered light image to reveal structure (since it was the only 96-second exposure). The science team was holding their daily science team meeting when this image first came down: The room exploded with excitement since the other forward scattered light images didn't reveal any structure. The funny part was that someone yelled out, 'This has to be a joke. Someone must've placed a Saturn image up on the monitors.' The room believed this statement and returned to their science discussions. Then someone else cried out, 'Look at the FDS count (the computer clock associated with formatting the data). It's a Uranus image!' The room exploded again with amazement." —Randii Wessen

"When this image appeared on the screen, there was an audible gasp, followed by a comment that someone was trying to fool us by slipping in an image of the Saturn rings. Then as we looked closer and saw the short streaks indicative of stars and a long exposure image, we realized we were seeing for the first time a wide-angle image of the Uranus rings at a very high phase angle, the only successful one of its kind during the Uranus encounter.

The image was obtained just a few days before the infamous Challenger explosion, which most of us viewed live in the same room in building 264, although the reaction was entirely different—silent disbelief that what we were viewing had actually happened. I was serving as Voyager Assistant Project Scientist at the time, and although 25 years have elapsed since then, both events are still vivid in my recollection." —Ellis D. Mine

"My favorite image of the Uranus encounter is of the moon Miranda. To me it is one of the strangest objects in the solar system, ranking just behind Io in weirdness. It has all those striations. It looks like someone has been plowing the fields. And it has that weird chevron-shaped region. Miranda is just plain weird." —Alan Cummings

"The Uranus encounter was my first exposure to the excitement of planetary missions. The 'family portrait' was a composite of the best images that Voyager took of the moons of Uranus. They all looked somewhat different, even though they all orbit Uranus, just like siblings from the same parents look different and have different features. My second favorite is the Miranda image with the chevron feature shown prominently (see the previous image). It's like God put his checkmark of approval on the satellite." —Suzy Dodd

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Challenger Explosion

By: History.com Editors

Updated: April 15, 2024 | Original: February 15, 2010

The NASA space shuttle Challenger exploded on January 28, 1986, just 73 seconds after liftoff, bringing a devastating end to the spacecraft’s 10th mission. The disaster claimed the lives of all seven astronauts aboard, including Christa McAuliffe, a teacher from New Hampshire who would have been the first civilian in space. It was later determined that two rubber O-rings, which had been designed to seal the sections of the rocket booster, had failed due to cold temperatures on the morning of the launch. The tragedy and its aftermath received extensive media coverage and prompted NASA to temporarily suspend all shuttle missions.

Space Shuttle Program

In 1976, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) unveiled the world’s first reusable manned spacecraft, known as the space shuttle.

Five years later, flights began when the space shuttle Columbia embarked on a 54-hour mission. Launched by two solid-rocket boosters and its main engines, the aircraft-like shuttle entered into orbit around Earth.

When the mission was completed, the shuttle fired engines to reduce speed and, after descending through the atmosphere, landed like a glider. Early shuttles took satellite equipment into space and carried out various scientific experiments.

Did you know? After "Teacher in Space" Christa McAuliffe was killed during the 1986 Challenger disaster, her backup, a former math teacher named Barbara Morgan, served as a mission specialist during a 2007 flight of the shuttle Endeavor.

Challenger, NASA’s second space shuttle to enter service, embarked on its maiden voyage on April 4, 1983, and made a total of nine voyages prior to 1986.

That year, it was scheduled to launch on January 22 carrying a seven-member crew that included Christa McAuliffe , a 37-year-old high school social studies instructor from New Hampshire who had earned a spot on the mission through NASA’s Teacher in Space Program. After undergoing months of training, she was set to become the first ordinary American citizen to travel into space.

Challenger Disaster

The mission’s launch from Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida , was delayed for six days due to weather and technical problems.

The morning of January 28 was unusually cold, and engineers warned their superiors that certain components—particularly the rubber O-rings that sealed the joints of the shuttle’s solid rocket boosters—were vulnerable to failure at low temperatures. However, these warnings went unheeded, and at 11:39 a.m. Challenger lifted off.

Seventy-three seconds later, hundreds on the ground, including the families of McAuliffe and the other astronauts on board, stared in disbelief as the shuttle broke up in a plume of smoke and fire. Millions more watched the wrenching tragedy unfold on live television.

Within seconds, the spacecraft broke apart and plunged into the ocean, killing its entire crew, traumatizing the nation and throwing NASA’s shuttle program into turmoil.

Rogers Commission

Shortly after the disaster, President Ronald Reagan appointed a special commission to determine what went wrong with Challenger and to develop future corrective measures. Headed by former secretary of state William Rogers, the commission included former astronaut Neil Armstrong and former test pilot Chuck Yeager .

Their investigation revealed that the O-ring seal on Challenger’s solid rocket booster, which had become brittle in the cold temperatures, failed. Flames then broke out of the booster and damaged the external fuel tank, causing the spacecraft to explode and disintegrate.

The commission also found that Morton Thiokol, the company that designed the solid rocket boosters, had ignored warnings about potential issues. NASA managers were aware of these design problems but also failed to take action.

Famously, scientist Richard Feynman, a member of the commission, demonstrated the O-ring flaw to the public using a simple glass of ice water.

Aftermath of the Challenger Explosion

After the accident, NASA refrained from sending astronauts into space for more than two years as it redesigned a number of the shuttle’s features.

Flights began again in September 1988 with the successful launching of Discovery. Since then, the space shuttle has carried out numerous important missions, including the repair and maintenance of the Hubble Space Telescope and the construction of the International Space Station .

On February 1, 2003, a second shuttle disaster rocked the United States when the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated upon reentry , killing all seven people aboard. While missions resumed in July 2005, the space shuttle program ended in 2011.

Ten years after the Challenger disaster, two large pieces from the spacecraft washed ashore on a Florida beach. The remaining debris is now stored in a missile silo at Cape Canaveral.

HISTORY Vault: Christa McAuliffe: Teacher in Space

Portrait of the teacher who died in the tragic explosion of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986. Includes interviews with her parents and students.

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mission  /  science

Uranus approach.

NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft flew closely past distant Uranus, the seventh planet from the Sun, in January 1986.

At its closest, the spacecraft came within 81,500 kilometers (50,600 miles) of Uranus's cloudtops on Jan. 24, 1986.

Voyager 2 radioed thousands of images and voluminous amounts of other scientific data on the planet, its moons, rings, atmosphere, interior and the magnetic environment surrounding Uranus.

Since launch on Aug. 20, 1977, Voyager 2's itinerary has taken the spacecraft to Jupiter in July 1979, Saturn in August 1981, and then Uranus. Voyager 2's next encounter was with Neptune in August 1989. Both Voyager 2 and its twin, Voyager 1, will eventually leave our solar system and enter interstellar space.

Voyager 2's images of the five largest moons around Uranus revealed complex surfaces indicative of varying geologic pasts. The cameras also detected 11 previously unseen moons. Several instruments studied the ring system, uncovering the fine detail of the previously known rings and two newly detected rings. Voyager data showed that the planet's rate of rotation is 17 hours, 14 minutes. The spacecraft also found a Uranian magnetic field that is both large and unusual. In addition, the temperature of the equatorial region, which receives less sunlight over a Uranian year, is nevertheless about the same as that at the poles.