> At this time, they wouldn't know what the best instruments to send would be.
There's an interesting BBC documentary series on the planets, called The Planets, that has an episode covering the Voyager probes. They had to do some quick redesigns on them after Pioneer 10 and 11 visited the outer planets and found fun stuff like radiation and unexpected rings. They said that if they hadn't had the earlier probes, Voyager would have been fried when it got to the system.
I second that recommendation, and it's currently on Netflix. It's a good documentary series. A little long in the tooth now, but only for the entirely positive reason that we've done a fair bit more planetary science since it was made.
There's an interesting BBC documentary series on the planets, called The Planets, that has an episode covering the Voyager probes. They had to do some quick redesigns on them after Pioneer 10 and 11 visited the outer planets and found fun stuff like radiation and unexpected rings. They said that if they hadn't had the earlier probes, Voyager would have been fried when it got to the system.