Houston, we have lift off!
All week long for World Space Week, we will be posting exclusive excerpts from Chris Impey and Holly Henry’s new book, Dreams of Other Worlds: The Amazing Story of Unmanned Space Exploration. Each day will include an excerpt from a different chapter(s) about a different unmanned spacecraft, along with a picture of the craft that doubles as an iPhone background!
Today we have two excerpts. The first is from Chapter 4, and our excerpt does its best to describe exactly how far away the Voyager spacecrafts are, and how completely wild that is. The second excerpt is from Chapter 5, which describes the way in which Cassini travels around Saturn without getting sucked into its gravitational pull.
Tomorrow will bring another chapter and another adventure, so stay tuned!

1,100 feet at its closest approach. As we’ve seen, it took an arduous effort spanning more than a decade before NASA successfully landed a probe on our nearest neighbor. A very deep breath is needed to explore the outer Solar System. In our scale model, Jupiter and Saturn are large beach balls 1.5 and 3.5 miles away from Earth, respectively, and Uranus and Neptune are soccer balls 7 and 12 miles from the Earth. This large step up in distance was a great challenge for spacecraft designers and engineers. On this scale, the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft are metallic “motes of dust” 48 and 37 miles from home, respectively.

Think you know all about these missions? Take our quiz and find out!
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