Nearly half a century after launch, the Voyager probes are still operating, and the UK's sole member of the original imaging team, Dr Garry Hunt, says the mission almost didn't get that far. In a podcast interview with The Register, Hunt recalled that when the mission was being planned, no spacecraft had yet crossed the asteroid belt, and funding from the Nixon administration only covered Jupiter and Saturn. The rare alignment of the outer planets, which occurs every 176 years, made a fuel-saving trajectory possible, but it also compressed the schedule: Hunt learned of his selection in December 1972, attended the first mission meetings in February 1973, and had until the summer of 1977 to help design the cameras and trajectories before a ten-day launch window.
According to Hunt, the imaging team was an interdisciplinary group of eight scientists chosen from nearly 1,000 proposals, including figures like Carl Sagan and meteorologist Vern Suomi. Hunt represented atmospheric physics, with the goal of understanding the meteorology of the major planets. The team had to design the imaging system and choose trajectories while understanding both the risks and the potential rewards. The source is a single interview, so there are no differing accounts to compare, but Hunt's recollections emphasise the precision required and the uncertainty about whether the spacecraft would even survive the asteroid belt.
Hunt's account underscores how much of Voyager's success rested on hardware decisions made under tight deadlines. The probes were built to last long enough to reach Jupiter and Saturn, yet they went on to visit Uranus and Neptune and continue returning data from interstellar space. For Hunt, the mission was a rare chance to do real physics and chemistry on worlds that had previously been little more than points of light.