Earlier this summer, on the second anniversary of the New Horizons Pluto flyby, I tweeted that “Pluto became a real place, and we will never see the solar system the same way.” New Horizons was and is a capstone mission, exploring the final major world that humanity set out to explore at the dawn of the space age and is now on its way to making the first close-up observations of an object in the solar system beyond. Much was made of the Pluto encounter occurring fifty years after Mariner 4 began humanity’s quest to see the solar system beyond the Earth-Moon system with remote eyes, the reconnaissance of the solar system known at the outset was complete.

Of the eight planets that received their visits of the first time, four of them - half - were transformed by one mission, as were the overwhelming majority of moons. Consisting of two spacecraft, the Voyagers brought into focus more planetary real estate (or at least cloud estate) than all other missions combined. I am of course aware that Pioneers 10 and 11 were the first to Jupiter and Saturn, but despite my fondness for these missions, they carried no real camera, merely a scanning photometer, that, while showing us fascinating unearthly angles, did not upend our conception of either planet or their moons. While their particle and fields instruments provided a wealth of discoveries, gaining a feeling of what it is like to be in their presence was left to the Voyagers.