Titan IIIE-Centaur

Assembled from 11 blocks · 1 evidence · 27 related

1. Story
2. The launch vehicle that put both Voyagers on their Jupiter trajectories: a Titan III core with two large solid rocket boosters and a Centaur upper stage burning liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. The Centaur is the part that mattered — a high-energy upper stage was what made a direct injection towards Jupiter possible with a payload of this size, and it was the only such stage available to the United States in 1977. The vehicle flew only a handful of times and was retired at the end of the decade. Voyager 2's launch was not clean: the vehicle performed, but the spacecraft's own fault-protection software misread the launch environment and had to be recovered by the flight team in the first days of the mission.
3. Knowledge
4. Titan IIIE-Centaur
5. Connections
6. Voyager 1
7. Voyager 2
8. Voyager 2 launches
9. Voyager 1 launches
10. Evidence
11. The canonical mission record for both spacecraft: launch dates of 20 August 1977 (Voyager 2) and 5 September 1977 (Voyager 1), the Titan IIIE-Centaur launch vehicle, Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral, the eleven-instrument science payload and the three-generator power system. V55 verification basis: THE CATALOGUE WAS NOT REACHED. nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov returned EGRESS_BLOCKED when fetched and the search budget was exhausted before it could be searched; the COSPAR designations and every fact attributed here come from standard mission record held in general knowledge, not from the catalogue. This record names where a curator should check, not what was checked.