Voyager Missions
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47 free Voyager Missions trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Two spacecraft launched in the summer of 1977 are still phoning home from beyond the edge of the Sun's influence, running on plutonium, 1970s computers and a data rate slower than a dial-up modem. The Voyagers were meant to last a decade. They found volcanoes on Io, rings around Jupiter, a haze-choked Titan, eleven new moons at Uranus and a Great Dark Spot on Neptune, then turned around and photographed Earth as a pale blue dot. These 47 questions follow both probes from the rare planetary alignment that Gary Flandro spotted in 1964 through the cancelled Grand Tour, the Mariner 11 and 12 names they nearly kept, the Titan IIIE launches and the near-failure that almost stranded Voyager 1. There are questions on the Jupiter and Saturn encounters, why Voyager 1 gave up Pluto for Titan, the 3.7-metre dish, the heliopause crossings of 2012 and 2018, the bad memory chip of 2023, and the stars the probes will drift past in 40,000 years. Easy questions stick to launch years and planets; the hard tier asks about plated-wire memory, the Centaur stage's 3.4-second margin and which Canberra dish is the only one that can reach Voyager 2. Every answer is cited to a page we checked, with a short explanation so you learn something either way.
30 of 47 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which president's message rides aboard Voyager's Golden Record?
Jimmy Carter
Jimmy Carter called the record "a present from a small distant world" and wrote that humanity was attempting to survive its time so that it might live into the finder's.
Q 02Voyager 1 launched 16 days after its twin but overtook Voyager 2 while both were crossing what?
The asteroid belt
The asteroid belt is where Voyager 1 pulled ahead in December 1977; its shorter, faster route then delivered it to Jupiter four months before the probe that had left Earth first.
Q 03From which US launch site did both Voyager probes lift off in 1977?
Cape Canaveral
Cape Canaveral launched the pair in reverse order: Voyager 2 lifted off first, on August 20, and Voyager 1 followed from the same pad on September 5.
Q 04Which rocket launched the Voyager probes?
Titan IIIE
Titan IIIE existed because NASA's Atlas-Centaur was too weak to throw heavy probes such as Viking and Voyager at the planets, so the Centaur upper stage was moved onto a far bigger booster.
Q 05When Voyager 1's booster shut down early, its Centaur stage saved the launch with roughly how much fuel to spare?
About 3 seconds' worth
About 3 seconds' worth was left in the tanks: the Centaur had to burn longer than planned to cover for the stage below it, while the launch team waited to hear whether it would be enough.
Q 06What rare event, spotted by Gary Flandro, made Voyager's Grand Tour possible?
A planetary alignment
A planetary alignment that recurs only about every 175 years let one craft slingshot from world to world; Flandro found it by graphing where each planet would be, cutting roughly two decades off the trip to Neptune.
Q 07Why was the original Grand Tour mission cancelled in December 1971?
Funding went to the Space Shuttle
Funding went to the Space Shuttle because President Nixon would not pay for both at once, so NASA's chief swapped the Grand Tour for two cheaper probes bound only for Jupiter and Saturn: the future Voyagers.
Q 08What were the Voyagers originally going to be called?
Mariner 11 and 12
Mariner 11 and 12 were the names until March 1977, months before launch, when NASA decided the craft had outgrown the Mariner family and ran a contest that produced Voyager.
Q 09Which Chuck Berry hit travels on the Voyager Golden Record?
Johnny B. Goode
Johnny B. Goode drew the objection that rock music was adolescent; the reply that kept it on the record was "There are a lot of adolescents on the planet."
Q 10Which moon did Voyager 1 study instead of continuing to Pluto?
Titan
Titan's thick atmosphere made it a prime target, and the close pass flung Voyager 1 up out of the plane of the planets, so no further encounters were possible.
Q 11What did Voyager 1 discover on Jupiter's moon Io?
Active volcanoes
Active volcanoes on Io were the first seen anywhere beyond Earth; the heat comes from a gravitational tug-of-war between Jupiter and its neighbouring moons that keeps flexing Io's interior.
Q 12Voyager measurements confirmed which of these as the largest moon in the Solar System?
Ganymede
Ganymede is even bigger than the planet Mercury, and Voyager's close-ups showed its icy crust split between old cratered ground and younger grooved terrain, a sign the whole shell had once been stretched.
Q 13Which moon of Jupiter did a Voyager scientist say had lines that "might have been painted on with a felt marker"?
Europa
Q 21Voyager 2 found which moon of Uranus cut by huge fault canyons, as if it had been shattered and reassembled?
Miranda
Miranda's canyons run up to 12 times as deep as the Grand Canyon, and its patchwork look inspired the theory of a moon blown apart and reassembled, though scientists still disagree about what really shaped it.
Q 22What did Voyager 2 discover in Neptune's atmosphere in 1989?
The Great Dark Spot
The Great Dark Spot was a storm about as wide as Earth, yet when Hubble looked for it in 1994 it had vanished: Neptune's giant storms come and go, while Jupiter's Red Spot has lasted for centuries.
Q 23Hours after skimming Neptune's north pole in 1989, Voyager 2 made its last close flyby, of which moon?
Triton
Europa's lines proved almost perfectly flat in Voyager 2's sharper images, which deepened the puzzle; the leading explanation is a thin crust of ice floating on an ocean.
Q 14Which moon of Saturn did Voyager 1 show scarred by a giant crater, making it look like the Death Star?
Mimas
Mimas carries Herschel, a crater a third as wide as the moon itself; the impact that dug it probably came close to breaking Mimas apart.
Q 15What was applied to some Voyager cables shortly before launch to improve radiation shielding?
Kitchen-grade aluminium foil
Kitchen-grade aluminium foil was a last-minute extra: an earlier probe had found Jupiter's radiation far fiercer than expected, and the foil gave exposed cables one more layer of protection.
Q 16Voyager 1 found Saturn's upper atmosphere short of which gas, a hint that it is slowly sinking into the planet?
Helium
Helium made up only about 7 percent of Saturn's upper air against 11 percent at Jupiter; if the heavier gas is sinking through the hydrogen, that could explain why Saturn gives off more heat than it gets from the Sun.
Q 17Roughly how fast are the winds the Voyagers clocked near Saturn's equator?
About 1,800 km/h
About 1,800 km/h, or 1,100 mph: the winds blow mostly eastward, which told scientists they are not just skimming the cloud tops but reach at least 2,000 km down into the planet.
Q 18In 2017, which long-idle part of Voyager 1 worked perfectly after 37 years without use?
Its backup thrusters
Its backup thrusters, dormant since 1980, took over from worn attitude jets so the antenna could stay pointed at Earth, which bought the mission another two to three years.
Q 19Which disaster struck four days after Voyager 2's Uranus flyby?
Challenger
Challenger broke apart on January 28, 1986, while Voyager 2's Uranus results were still coming in; the loss also kept the Galileo probe, due to leave for Jupiter that May, on the ground until 1989.
Q 20Voyager 2 found that Uranus's sideways spin pulls the tail of its magnetic field into what shape?
A long corkscrew
A long corkscrew trails behind Uranus because its magnetic field is tilted about 60 degrees from the axis the planet spins on; nobody had measured that field at all before Voyager 2 arrived.
Triton proved to be the coldest world then measured, about 38 kelvins, yet Voyager 2 still caught geysers there shooting dark plumes several kilometres high.
Q 24Astronomers had glimpsed only broken 'ring arcs' at Neptune; what did Voyager 2 show them to be?
Parts of complete rings
Parts of complete rings: most of the material is so thin and fine that from Earth only the clumpiest stretches of the outer ring had shown up, looking like disconnected arcs.
Q 25What jammed on Voyager 2 just after it passed Saturn in 1981, costing it some planned observations?
Its camera platform
Its camera platform, a swivelling mount for the cameras and spectrometers, froze as Voyager 2 left Saturn; commands from Earth later got it moving again, in good time for Uranus.
Q 26Since a 1978 failure, what must engineers do so Voyager 2's damaged radio receiver can hear a command?
Tune it very precisely
Tune it very precisely: the main receiver died, and a failed capacitor left the backup able to pick up only one narrow frequency, so each transmission must allow for Earth's motion and even the receiver's temperature.
Q 27How wide is each Voyager's main dish antenna?
3.7 metres
About 3.7 metres: even with a dish that size, distance has throttled the link from roughly 115,000 bits per second at Jupiter to about 160 by the 2020s.
Q 28What powers the Voyager spacecraft?
Plutonium-238 generators
Plutonium-238 generators turn the heat of radioactive decay into electricity because sunlight is far too weak out there for solar panels: at Neptune it is about 900 times dimmer than on Earth.
Q 29The Golden Record's cover carries a map showing where the Sun lies; which objects does it use as landmarks?
Pulsars
Pulsars each flash at their own steady rate, so the map fixes the Sun's position relative to 14 of them and gives every one's precise pulse period as a fingerprint.
Q 30Which Australian radio telescope, a prime receiver of Apollo 11's moonwalk pictures, was linked in to hear Voyager 2 at Neptune?
Parkes
Parkes was tied by microwave link to NASA's Canberra antennas so the two sites worked as one giant ear, while in New Mexico the 27 dishes of the Very Large Array were yoked to Goldstone in the same way.