Voyager's Terrifying New Discovery SHOCKS The Entire Space Industry!

Voyager, the most ambitious space mission in history. The two Voyager spacecraft are iconic. 

They’re the first probes to truly explore half the planets in our solar system. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. 

These went from dots of light in the sky to real worlds. The Voyager missions have ventured far beyond where other probes have explored. 

They are the most distant emissary representatives of the human species. They’re the first spacecraft to taste interstellar space. 

Exploring further than any human-made spacecraft has gone before. These are the logs of the Starships Voyager 1 and 2. 

They have crossed the final frontier, and are now in interstellar space. Almost a decade ago, Voyager 1 achieved something that had never been achieved before. 

It left our solar system. When Voyager crossed into interstellar space, humans became an interstellar species. 

Fourteen billion miles from Earth, their radio signals, traveling at the speed of light, still take 21 hours to reach us. The Voyagers are so far out that when the look back toward the Sun it’s just a pinprick of light, and they would need an exceptionally powerful telescope just to see the Earth. 

Their original 4-year mission has been extended to 44 and counting from their current distant vantage point. They look back on the strange new worlds and bold new science they discovered. -Five, four, three, two, one. -August 20th, 1977. 

We have a mission and we have lift off. The mission begins when Voyager 2 blasts off. Followed, two weeks later by its twin, Voyager 1, which will take a shorter and faster route. Their destination, Jupiter, and then Saturn. 

When the time comes that that mission is actually ready to go the launch pad, it’s a funny mixture of joy and bittersweet loss. They become like your children, and that launch is like the birth of a baby. I was standing there watching it climb up into the sky and we were cheering, we were so happy. Voyager was on its way. September, 1977. 

Before heading out to the planets, Voyager 1 captures an image to see if everything is working. As Voyager was flying away from the Earth, we turned the camera back to take a picture of the Earth and the Moon. 

That was the first time you could actually see our home and the Moon together, in the same frame. It was fantastic. What a great first picture for Voyager. But Voyager 1 doesn’t stick around. It’s on a tight schedule. 

Though, funded to just explore the two gas giants, mission planners have a much bigger journey in mind, to send the Voyager spacecraft on a grand tour of the solar system... to the outer most planets, Uranus and Neptune. 

Worlds that have never been explored. To visit each planet, the probes must stick to a strict schedule with only a quick flyby of each world. Once reaching Jupiter, they must use every second to complete close-up studies of the planet and its largest moons. One of the biggest challenges was flyby spacecraft is, it may have taken years to get there, but the actual time that you’re close to the planet is remarkably short. 

The Jupiter close-up data occurred during just three days. February, 1979. Voyager 1 begins beaming pictures back to Earth. It’s an anxious wait. This is pre-internet, and so when you look at the data coming in, it’s coming in line by line, pixel by pixel. It was such an exciting time. It was hard to know when to sleep. 

I brought my sleeping bag into my office, so I wouldn’t miss a single exciting picture. Both Voyagers reveal an unbelievably dynamic world. 

Scientists were able to take a sequence of images of Jupiter that they could put together like a flip book to get a sense of motion, and it was just astounding. Now, we can see things moving within the atmosphere of Jupiter in a way that we had no sense of before. Together, the spacecraft take over 33,000 images of the gas giant. 

These pictures re-shape our understanding of Jupiter, especially its largest moons. Ganymede, Callisto... Europa, and Io. We saw all sorts of different kinds of landscapes on them, and each one had its own individual type of personality. Of all the moons around Jupiter, and there are a lot, Io was the one that shocked everybody. 

We got back this very unusual picture, and we saw this bright feature on the dark limb of Io, and we wondered what could it be? At first, they thought that arc might be another moon behind Io, but the geometry was wrong. 

There were no moons there. Well, they figured out that these were volcanic plumes. And that bright feature on the dark limb was a volcano erupting on Io. Voyager 1 records ash and lava blasting 190 miles into space. 

Eight times higher than the largest eruptions on Earth. This is the first time we’d ever seen another volcanically active world anywhere in the solar system, right? It really transformed our ideas, our concept of what a moon could be. 

But astronomers were also baffled. When scientists first saw these images of Io, they had to ask the question, how is this little moon still so hot? On Earth we know it’s a, you know, it’s a big planet, it’s volcanically active because of plate tectonics and there’s this, you know, ancient heat system inside the planet. 

When you look at a little moon like Io, you expect it’s gonna be dead, right? But instead, it’s the most volcanically active body in the solar system. Io’s volcanism is powered by tidal heating. As it orbits Jupiter, it gets stretched and compressed by the gravity of Jupiter and the other moons as they all pass by it. 

The compression and expansion generates heat, melting Io’s interior. A planetary process never before witnessed. And tidal heating may explain another Jovian moon, Europa. As Voyager flew by and took pictures of Europa, it could see these striations on the surface and it saw that the crust was really ice. We started to realize, looking at additional data, that it might host an ocean somewhere on the sub-surface. 

The possible discovery of an ocean elsewhere in the solar system is groundbreaking. Liquid water is the vital ingredient for all life as we know it. So, we have this liquid water and it’s interacting with a rocky core, making minerals, putting things into the water all the raw ingredients for life. 

It’s hard to tell whether or not life actually exists on Europa, but where we find water it’s a good place to search for life. At Jupiter, the Voyagers discover three new moons, and a ring system invisible from Earth. Not to be out-done, the planet itself has a few surprises. The probes turn to the gas giant’s most famous feature the great red spot. Jupiter’s red spot is a feature that has existed in its atmosphere since we began looking at Jupiter. 

It’s incredible. What it turns out to be is a storm that has lasted centuries. The Voyagers reveal a maelstrom of gas. 

Swirling counter-clockwise, between two bands of high-speed winds. The red spot has been kept in a single place because it’s sort of sandwiched between these two bands of atmosphere. Like a whirlpool, an eddy and two currents that are moving next to each other. That may have helped promote its stability over all these centuries. 

But Voyager’s close-up shots show a far more complex structure than we expected. It turns out the great red spot is not a single vortex, it’s more complicated than that, which you might expect from a storm bigger than the Earth. 

Voyager actually took close-up images of it and saw several smaller vortices spinning around inside of it. These small vortices are ten times larger than any hurricane on Earth, but the Voyagers can’t detect how they interact with the spot. 

It’ll take a new generation of space probes to solve that mystery. So, after Voyager had flew past, there were lots of questions that went unanswered and Jupiter is a long way from the Earth, and really the only way to answer some of them was to go back. 

Thirty-seven years after the Voyager flybys, the Juno probe arrives at Jupiter. The Juno spacecraft has a microwave radiometer. That instrument is able to detect the microwave radiation coming from very deep inside Jupiter and from that we’re able to determine things like its deep composition, and its deep temperature. Juno finds the great red spot stretches at least 200 miles below the surface. And in 2021, a team combines Juno data with Hubble and ground-based telescopes to finally discover what powers the gargantuan storm. 

The small storms that are coming in are rotating very quickly. All of that feeds the great red spot and keeps it spinning, gives it that spinning energy that it needs to survive. The Voyager probes are ready for their next destination, Saturn. But to get there, they must first fly dangerously close to Jupiter.