Inspired by the BBC series, ‘The Planets’, I became fascinated by NASA’s Voyager mission which launched in the Summer of 1977 to send pair of spacecraft on a grand tour of the outer planets of our Solar System - Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. I was intrigued by the opportunity of the rare planetary alignment (which occurs only every 175 years) that made the mission possible.

I decided to see whether I could produce an computer generated animatiion of this planetary alignment which also plotted the trajectories of the two Voyager spacecraft. My initial idea worked so well that I decided to extend my work on this project to become a fully animated and fully interactive website created in Flash.

I have built into the project a range of interactive features that make it possible for the web visitor to operate the site as they will. This includes Play and Pause buttons and also the ability to select each year of the 12-year mission to view the progressive status.

There are also three chart overlays (which operate with a mouse-over) which identify the orbits; show the actual scale of the planets; and which plot the trajectories of the Voyager craft - this last can be left on while viewing the animation.
I have also published here my initial working model of the orbits of all the planets of our Solar System