Voyager 2 was the real beneficiary of the rare outer planet alignment, as it went on the famous Grand Tour, visiting all four of the giants. It did gravity assists at Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus. [1] shows the rough heliocentric speed of V2 over time.

Voyager 1 was directed to perform a flyby of Titan, at the cost of being thrown out of the ecliptic and being unable to visit the ice giants like its sister. But this was deemed acceptable due to Titan's high science value.

[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Voyager_2_-_velocity...

And that love letter came with a very nice mixtape. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record

> No, not "About to". It's this time "next year".

48 years in space and a light-day from Earth? I think it qualifies for "about to" :)

(At this point 1 year is ~2% of total time in space)

You might need to increase your connection timeout to at least 172800 seconds.

Nah, the whole second-Earth, terraforming nonsense is pure rationalization for whatever they want to do. If they weren’t using that as a post hoc justification, they’d just land on something else.

It gets even better when you think about all the damage we've done in ~200 years of industrial revolution.

We can't keep our perfect home in working order after so little time but they believe we'll transform dead rocks with no atmospheres in paradise...