Dubbed Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, they were designed by NASA to photograph Jupiter and Saturn.
Earth was just a speck at best when photographed late into Voyager 2's journey.
ENGADGET: NASA's Voyager 1 marks 35th anniversary of its launch, gets photo retrospective in tribute
The Great Dark Spot seen by Voyager 2, a probe which investigated the planet in 1989, disappeared within a year.
Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 both have enough power to keep transmitting its findings to scientists here on Earth until the 2020s.
FORBES: Voyager 1 Flies Through 'Magnetic Highway' On Its Way Out Of The Solar System
The laurels for that probably belong to the rescuers of Voyager 2, the second of two probes launched towards Jupiter and Saturn in 1977.
Voyager 2's two computers were also extensively reprogrammed to take advantage of new image-compression software that had been developed since the craft had been launched.
Its twin, Voyager 2, launched a couple of weeks before Voyager 1, is moving on a different trajectory and is some 10.4 billion km (6.5 billion miles) away.
In 1989, after a 12-year, 4-billion-mile space journey, Voyager 2 flew over the cloudtops of the giant planet Neptune and its moon Triton, sending back photographs of swampy areas, frozen lakes and craters.
And yet it is a miracle that Voyager 2 managed to send anything back at all, for its main radio system failed soon after launch, and its back-up system proved to be faulty.
To cap that, having looked at Jupiter and Saturn, Voyager 2's controllers decided to extend the mission by taking pictures of Uranus and Neptune as the craft continued on its journey out of the solar system.
To mark the occasion, Wired has gathered together one heck of a photo album that covers both Voyager 1's trip as well as that of Voyager 2, which technically launched earlier (August 20th the same year) but took a more roundabout route through the solar system.
ENGADGET: NASA's Voyager 1 marks 35th anniversary of its launch, gets photo retrospective in tribute
Voyager-1 was launched on 5 September 1977, and its sister spacecraft, Voyager-2, on 20 August 1977.
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