30 years ago, the Voyager space probes were launched into space by the USA, and since then, they have flown out through the solar system, past the other planets, and given us as a species a great deal of insight into the make up of space, as well as providing us with some jaw dropping images of our planetary neighbours.

At the time of their launch, no-one could have known just how successful the missions would be. The NASA space agency took advantage of a unique alignment of the planets to ensure that the probes would be able to visit Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune on their journey to the outer reaches of the solar system and beyond.

On their way through space, the probes took stunning photographs of Jupiter and its moons, gathered vital scientific data about the other planets, and discovered many unique bodies within the solar system.

The two probes are now far beyond the warmth of our sun, passing into inter stellar space. The signals from them take hours to get to the planet Earth, and are so faint now that they can barely be heard above the background radiation of space. They are
Assign into a mysterious area called the Helio sheath, beyond which they will actually leave our solar system and move into the rest of the Galaxy.

It will be thousands of years before either of the Voyager probes arrives in another solar system, but they have taught us more about our immediate neighbourhood than the scientists who designed the mission 30 years ago could possibly imagine, although their greatest achievement may have been in the ear 2000, when at the absolute limits of where they could reliably transmit information, they turned their cameras back towards the earth, and took a photograph.

It showed our sun as no more than a dot of light in the blackness of space and demonstrated just how alone and fragile our world really is.