I went down a Voyager rabbit hole again. And I came up with a factoid that entertains me.
The original Grand Tour program was canceled in late 1971, due to congressional pressure over cost. Voyager was the cheaper mission to just Jupiter and Saturn.
Voyager and its team are incredible, and they managed to pull off the entire grand tour anyway, and then 34 years and counting more science after that.
There's a good chance Voyager might outlive the entire congress that killed the grand tour.
It's not clinched yet, but of the 534 members of the congress who chose to pass on a once-in-history opportunity for exploration, 24 are still alive. And the actuaries don't have _great_ news for those who remain.
Meanwhile, the Voyagers have another 1-6 years of science mission left, and could well keep returning engineering data until 2036, at which point they'll be too far away for the DSN to communicate with them.
So... I'd say it's game on, really.
It's now definitely my tongue in cheek headcanon that the Voyagers in fact have two power sources on board: a radioisotope thermoelectric generator, but also a vast reservoir of pure spite that drives them to keep sending magnetometer readings for as long as the 92nd congress still bears witness.
The day after the last senator kicks the bucket, the DSN will receive a short, puzzling message: "No YOU'RE canceled. At last, we can rest."
@hyc not so. Even though Voyager accomplished more than promised, it was still less than the original grand tour. Two spacecraft instead of four, a more limited set of science, and they had to drop Pluto from the tour, delaying it's observation until New Horizons 30 years later.
Voyager accomplished a lot with little, and should be celebrated for that... But we still lost out on what could have been.
@danderson *Almost the entire Grand Tour. It wasn't technically done until 2015, as Pluto was part of the original Grand Tour proposal.
Now if we can only get Congress to allow a return to Uranus...
@danderson I recall there was open talk from early on of routing Voyager 2 to Uranus and Neptune, but since they weren't official targets, they were prioritized below Titan--the line was that if Voyager 1 failed to get close pictures of Titan, Voyager 2 would be re-routed to get it at the expense of Uranus and Neptune.
Well, Voyager 1 did get close pictures of Titan but its atmosphere was frustratingly opaque to the instruments Voyager 1 had. Still, that was enough to go ahead to the outer planets with Voyager 2.
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