Grand Tour
A proposal, first put forward in the late 1960s, for a single spacecraft
to fly by all four major outer planets – Jupiter,
Saturn, Uranus,
and Neptune – by taking advantage
of a once-in-179-year alignment of these worlds and the multiple gravity-assists
this celestial configuration allowed. The Grand Tour, as originally planned,
was a budget casualty of 1970. However, shortly after the cancellation,
JPL proposed a more modest mission, tentatively called Mariner Jupiter/Saturn.
The two-spacecraft project thus developed was eventually approved and renamed
Voyager (see Voyager 1 and Voyager
2).
Related category
• SATELLITES
AND SPACE PROBES
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