What is Voyager 2?
Voyager 2 is an unmanned planetary spacecraft, one of the only to visit the outer planets and the only to complete the Planetary Grand Tour — fly-bys of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune — possible only once every 176 years. For its visits to all the outer planets, Voyager 2 is often cited as the most productive space probe ever. When images of the outer planets are shown in books, magazines, and on the Internet, images from Voyager 2 are widely used, especially for Uranus and Neptune. Currently, Voyager 2 is twice as far from the Sun as Pluto, at about 83.5 AU (Earth-Sun lengths) distant. It continues to travel away from the Sun at 3 AU per year, and has enough velocity to escape the gravity well of the solar system. Unlike its partner, Voyager 1, launched one month later but significantly more distant, Voyager 2 has not passed outside of the area where the solar wind is the primary force in dust particle dynamics, known as the heliosphere. Unfortunately, by the time it does, in th
