What's your favorite Spaceprobe?

[Jose Lu]

Mine are the Voyagers 1 and 2..
I must thank them for giving the very details of the planets.
For servicing over 35 years,

Time since Sep 5, 1977 12:56 PM started in UTC

who will knows first the neptune's and uranus rings ?
or the very image of jupiters moons?

I salute you,and my hope for the journey till 13 more years until the end!

what's yours?

[Modlerbob]

My favorite space probe is Cassini/Huygens mission to Saturn. Seeing the pictures of the surface of Titan was mind blowing.

[matthewota]

Cassini/Hugens. I spent four years from 2004 to 2008 with the JPL Saturn Observation Campaign as a volunteer lecturer and telescope operator. I learned a lot about the spacecraft and the instruments on board, and also the results of the mission. I am going to apply in September to be a JPL Solar System Ambassador and specialize in doing lectures about unmanned spacecraft solar system exploration history.

[cbrucker]

I was just at the open house at JPL this last weekend. For the first time they let people into the "dark room" instead of the visitor's gallery in the control room. What was particularly keen was seeing the real time telemetry coming from Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. I was told that most of the science packages had long since frozen but they were still getting some data out of them. That by far is way cool in my book.

[KeithBC]

It's hard to pick a favourite.

Who can argue with the Voyagers? Boldly going where no one has gone before. The Energizer bunnies of space, still ticking after decades of flight, and still sending back new science on the power of a single Christmas-tree light bulb!

Or Cassini, exploring the Saturn system, giving us our first closeup views of its moons.

Or Galileo, which survived a major antanna malfunction which forced it to send data via a backup antenna at teletype speeds, yet which carried on to explore the Jupiter system. After having been delayed for years by the Shuttle program, and then being launched with a sub-performance booster that forced it to take the slow route to Jupiter.

Or the Opportunity rover, given a 90-day warranty, but still running after 9 years.

It's pretty hard to choose.

[MG1962]

Are we humans a funny lot or what..........these devices are machines. Nothing more nothing less, yet we put so much of ourselves into these amazing journeys of discovery. The two Martian rovers actually had fan clubs. And the team running Spirit was inconsolable when they realized it was truly over for that piece of machinery. Maybe we just love living vicariously though the actions of these machines

[pikaia]

Voyager 2, the only one to visit four planets, and Cassini, for its endless stream of amazing images of the most beautiful planet.

I am also looking forward to New Horizon's fly-by of Pluto - only three more years!

[chrisel]

Cassini, because i got the privilege of working on a tiny little piece of it at jpl in 1993-94.

Chris.

[warpfactorx]

New Horizons for me. We have known definitely the existence of Pluto for over 80 years, and I'm ready to see what the darn thing looks like.

[Modlerbob]

New Horizons for me. We have known definitely the existence of Pluto for over 80 years, and I'm ready to see what the darn thing looks like.

I hope you won't be too terribly disappointed if Pluto and it's moon just turn out to be a couple of big chunks of icey rock with not much going on. But you never know til you get there. Do you?