By spacecraft standards, Voyager 2 is an endurance athlete. On 28 June, the longest operating space probe celebrated having spent 12,000 days – almost 33 years – in space. But it’s not the only spacecraft to have set a record for extreme achievement. New Scientist chronicles the missions that have pushed the envelope
Longest lived: Voyager 2
NASA’s probes were launched in reverse order, so Voyager 2 is actually older. It rocketed into space on 20 August 1977, 16 days before its twin, and went on to visit Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.
It continues to send back measurements of the solar wind as it coasts out of the solar system towards interstellar space.
Its radioactive power source should keep it alive until around 2025, by which point it will be 48 years old.
(Image: NASA / JPL-Caltech)
Fastest: Helios-B
The joint German-US mission , also known as Helios-2, was the second of two space probes that studied the sun.
It holds the record for the highest speed ever attained by a spacecraft. In a close approach to the sun in 1976 it reached a speed of more than 250,000 kilometres per hour, relative to our parent star.
The probe shown is a prototype.
(Image: NASA/Kennedy Space Center)
Sharpest vision: Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter
This picture was taken by the (HiRISE) on NASA’s : the most powerful camera ever sent to another body in the solar system.
HiRISE can discern features as small as 1 metre, and has even been able to image different features of the Mars rovers from orbit.
(Image: NASA / JPL / University of Arizona)
Longest lived lander: Opportunity
NASA’s landed on Mars on 25 January 2004 and is still functioning more than 6 years and 5 months later, far surpassing its design lifetime of just 90 days.
Its twin, Spirit, landed three weeks earlier but has not been heard from since March, when the limited sunlight of winter starved its solar panels of power and forced it into hibernation.
If it wakes up again it will seize the record for the longest-lived lander from Opportunity.
(Image: Mars Exploration Rover Mission, Cornell, JPL, NASA)
Farthest: Voyager 1
Even though Voyager 2 had a two-week head start, Voyager 1 is the faster of the two probes, so has travelled farther.
It is 114 times as far as Earth from the sun, way beyond Pluto’s average distance of 39 times the Earth-sun separation.
Voyager 1 is expected to enter interstellar space in about five years, exiting the vast bubble around the sun, the heliosphere, that is created by the solar wind.
(Image: NASA)
