Voyager Photographs Jupiter's Moons

[altezon]

i saw the star trek film when it was first shown

i'm surprised the usa is closing down some of it's space operations.
surely we need to explore outside our solar system if we're to survive as a species.

The Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena has always given us the most bang for the buck. It continues to monitor remotely-guided missions like Voyager that are decades-old. Imagine the time lags involved. http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/

Engineers Diagnosing Voyager 2 Data System

On June 28, 2010, Voyager 2 completed 12,000 days of continuous operations since its launch on August 20, 1977. For nearly 33 years, the venerable spacecraft has been returning unprecedented data about the giant outer planets, the properties of the solar wind between and beyond the planets and the interaction of the solar wind with interstellar winds in the heliosheath. Having traveled more than 21 billion kilometers on its winding path through the planets toward interstellar space, the spacecraft is now nearly 14 billion kilometers from the sun. Traveling at the speed of light, a signal from the ground takes about 12.8 hours to reach the spacecraft.

Voyager 2 is now returning properly formatted data at 160 bits per second. Commands to reset the incorrect bit were uplinked on 19 May and we confirmed via downlink on 20 May that the bit change was successful and that the Checksum was now correct. On Saturday, 22 May we commanded back to the nominal cruise mode and confirmed on Sunday that we could frame-sync on the data. All experimenters report that their data looks normal except for a timing offset. The timing offset is a result of the “wait 10 msec” FDS instructions that were executed during the anomaly. Our next action is to correct the FDS timing. We have also begun to investigate a software patch to bypass the affected memory location.

Voyager 1 will reach this milestone on July 13 after having traveled more than 22 billion kilometers. Voyager 1 is currently more than 17 billion kilometers from the Sun.

http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/