Here’s what we had to say about Voyager 1 when it launched 41 years ago.

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A conception of Voyager 1 in space.
NASA
▼ On September 5, 1977, Voyager 1launched and forever changed our understanding of the solar system. Voyager 2 launched two weeks before, on August 20. About a month before the two spacecraft left Earth,Popular Sciencewent in-depth with the scientists behind the program to find out how it was planned, NASA's goals for the spacecraft, and what would happen if something went wrong with Voyager 1 or 2. The article as originally written follows below:

Voyager 1 and its components
Science is primary object of Voyager mission. A science boom deploys in one direction, a magnetometer boom in another; 12-foot parabolic antenna rests on 10-sided basic bus. Nuclear generator will provide power.
Popular Science, August 1977
The longest space flight, a possible 12-year reconnaissance of the outer solar system, is about to begin. It's called Voyager.
The name is appropriate. This voyage will take two spacecraft on a journey already being called a training period for interstellar missions. Before they leave our solar system behind, these Voyagers will have trained their eyes and ears on enough planets and moons to force astronomers to rewrite their texts.
Until a few months ago, Voyager was called Mariner Jupiter-Saturn. But Mariners are a different class of spacecraft, designed for flights to the inner planets. The name was changed.
Both Mariner and Voyager come from the design boards and fabrication facilities at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. In late August and early September—the launches are scheduled 12 days apart—the Voyagers embark for regions where even the best earth-based telescopes provide only fuzzy clues as to what's really out there.

An artist's rendering of a Voyager spacecraft flying past Jupiter, Saturn, and their respective moons
Popular Science, August 1977
James E. Long, a slender engineer and planetologist who had run (and finished) his first Boston Marathon just the week before, tapped the small Voyager model lightly. "I don't consider this a two-planet mission," he explained. "It's really a 12-planet mission, even if we don't go to Uranus."
Long is science manager on the JPL-Voyager team. As he cheerfully admits, the option of sending Voyager on to Uranus and perhaps even Neptune became suddenly more attractive last spring—when Cornell astronomers discovered that Uranus, like Saturn, has rings (see box).(Ed. note, 2017: See image below)
Voyager, in fact, could become the long-awaited Grand Tour mission that was approved, then cancelled, in the early ‘70's. The original Grand Tour would have been launched in 1977 on a trajectory including Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, with options even for Pluto. That program died, but the idea survived.
"It didn't take us too long to get excited about a two-planet Jupiter-Saturn mission as a consolation prize." Long grinned. "Then the real detective work began, when we started looking at trajectories.
"We found hundreds that would get us to Jupiter and Saturn. We could have picked one in about 20 minutes, if that was our only concern."
It wasn't, and the trajectory analysis took more than two years. The key word for this twin mission to deep space is science, and throughout Voyager's design and planning, scientific considerations came first.
"When we started planning, we realized the value of the Galilean moons," Long said. "We finally found trajectories that give each spacecraft three of them."
Those moons, the four largest circling Jupiter, are prime targets. One Voyager will make close approaches to Callisto, Ganymede, and Europa; the other will look at lo, Ganymede, and Callisto. Both spacecraft will get distant glances at a fifth moon, Amalthea, and will make close examinations of the gas giant Jupiter before being hurled on to Saturn.
Dr. Edward Stone, Caltech physicist and Voyager's project scientist, explained why the Jovian moons are intriguing: (▪ ▪ ▪)

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