On this day in space! July 9, 1979: Voyager 2 spacecraft makes closest flyby of Jupiter

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On July 9, 1979, NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft made its closest approach to Jupiter.

On July 9, 1979, NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft made its closest approach to Jupiter. It came within 354,000 miles (570,000 kilometers) of the planet's cloud tops.

Photos from NASA's Voyager 1 and 2 Probes

Voyager 1 snapped three images of Jupiter using three different color filters which were then combined in the Image Processing Lab at Jet Propulsion Laboratory to create this image of Jupiter. Voyager 1 made it to Jupiter a few months ahead of Voyager 2. (Image credit: JPL/NASA)

Voyager 2 was one of two space probes launched by NASA in 1977 to study the outer planets. It discovered a few rings around Jupiter. Also, both Voyager 1 and 2 probes spotted volcanoes erupting on the Jupiter's moon, Io.

Voyager 2 took longer to reach Jupiter than its sister spacecraft, Voyager 1, but also got to visit Uranus and Neptune. This made it the only spacecraft to visit either of the ice giants.

On This Day in Space: See our full 365-day video archive!

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Hanneke Weitering
Hanneke Weitering
Contributing expert

Hanneke Weitering is a multimedia journalist in the Pacific Northwest reporting on the future of aviation at FutureFlight.aero and Aviation International News and was previously the Editor for Spaceflight and Astronomy news here at Space.com. As an editor with over 10 years of experience in science journalism she has previously written for Scholastic Classroom Magazines, MedPage Today and The Joint Institute for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. After studying physics at the University of Tennessee in her hometown of Knoxville, she earned her graduate degree in Science, Health and Environmental Reporting (SHERP) from New York University. Hanneke joined the Space.com team in 2016 as a staff writer and producer, covering topics including spaceflight and astronomy. She currently lives in Seattle, home of the Space Needle, with her cat and two snakes. In her spare time, Hanneke enjoys exploring the Rocky Mountains, basking in nature and looking for dark skies to gaze at the cosmos.