Far Encounter: Voyager closes in on Uranus

It was launched in 1977 and flew by Jupiter in 1979 and Saturn in 1981, sending back spectacular pictures and mountains of data. Last week, still in good health after more than eight years in the void, Voyager 2 had closed to within 46 million miles of Uranus, its next target. The spacecraft's early shots of the mysterious planet, which is four times as large as the earth, were transmitted across 1.8 billion miles of space to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. They depicted Uranus as a fuzzy blue-green ball, showed its five known moons and barely discerned the outermost of its dark rings.

Although light reaching the planet from the sun is only a quarter as bright as it was near Saturn, scientists expect Voyager's cameras (as well as its other instruments) to reveal considerably more detail as the spacecraft draws closer to Uranus and finally swoops to within 66,000 miles of its surface on Jan. 24. Voyager's odyssey will not end there. Accelerated to 45,000 m.p.h. and rerouted by Uranian gravity, it will soar still farther away from the sun, encounter Neptune in 1989, then head out of the solar system on an endless journey to the stars.