In 1965 a Student Found a Window That Opens Once Every 175 Years | The Voyagers Ep 1

In the summer of 1965, a graduate student at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory noticed that Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune would line up in the late 1970s, an alignment that comes around roughly once every 175 years. One spacecraft could use each planet's gravity to fling itself to the next. NASA called it the Grand Tour, then cancelled it as too expensive. What flew instead were two machines officially built only for Jupiter and Saturn: Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. This episode covers how the window was found, how the Voyagers were built on a budget with about 69 kilobytes of memory each, and the two launches in 1977 that almost went wrong. Episode 1 of The Voyagers, a six-part series. On 18 November 2026, Voyager 1 becomes the first human-made object one light-day from Earth. Chapters 0:00 A dull assignment 0:16 The alignment 0:37 The gravity slingshot 1:02 The Grand Tour 1:12 Cancelled 1:30 Inside a Voyager 2:22 Launch day 2:42 Voyager 1 follows 2:56 The golden record 3:14 The window closes 3:39 One light-day away 3:49 Next: Jupiter Next episode: Jupiter, and the Moon That Was On Fire. More from Deep Field Eye: The Deep Fields, Hubble to Webb (full series):    • The Most Important Photo in History Is a P...   Images: NASA / JPL-Caltech. Narration and music generated with AI. #voyager #space #nasa