The Voyager probes were a huge part on my childhood. I was 7 years old when they gave us the best images of Jupiter and its moons we’d ever seen. The following year, we received unprecedented data on Saturn.
Uranus and Neptune remained somewhat mysterious. In the ground-based telescopes of the time, they were just big, white dots. Voyager 2 reached Uranus when I was 14, and it revealed a more colorful, active, and strange world than we’d imagined. Neptune was predicted to be remote, cold, and serene. My senior year of high school, Voyager proved that expectation wrong. Neptune is warmer than we though it would be, and it has storm systems with winds faster than the speed of sound. Its moon Triton is large enough to suggest it had been captured from somewhere else, and it has geysers of liquid nitrogen.
In short, the more we knew, the stranger things became. Continued...