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Galleries of Images Voyager Took

The Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft explored Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune before starting their journey toward interstellar space. Here you'll find some of those iconic images, including "The Pale Blue Dot" - famously described by Carl Sagan - and what are still the only up-close images of Uranus and Neptune.

Photography of Jupiter began in January 1979, when images of the brightly banded planet already exceeded the best taken from Earth. Voyager 1 completed its Jupiter encounter in early April, after taking almost 19,000 pictures and many other scientific measurements. Voyager 2 picked up the baton in late April and its encounter continued into August. They took more than 33,000 pictures of Jupiter and its five major satellites.

The Voyager 1 and 2 Saturn encounters occurred nine months apart, in November 1980 and August 1981. Voyager 1 is leaving the solar system. Voyager 2 completed its encounter with Uranus in January 1986 and with Neptune in August 1989, and is now also en route out of the solar system.

NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft flew closely past distant Uranus, the seventh planet from the Sun, in January. At its closet, the spacecraft came within 81,800 kilometers (50,600 miles) of Uranus's cloudtops on Jan. 24, 1986. Voyager 2 radioed thousands of images and voluminous amounts of other scientific data on the planet, its moons, rings, atmosphere, interior and the magnetic environment surrounding Uranus.

In the summer of 1989, NASA's Voyager 2 became the first spacecraft to observe the planet Neptune, its final planetary target. Passing about 4,950 kilometers (3,000 miles) above Neptune's north pole, Voyager 2 made its closest approach to any planet since leaving Earth 12 years ago. Five hours later, Voyager 2 passed about 40,000 kilometers (25,000 miles) from Neptune's largest moon, Triton, the last solid body the spacecraft will have an opportunity to study.

This narrow-angle color image of the Earth, dubbed 'Pale Blue Dot', is a part of the first ever 'portrait' of the solar system taken by Voyager 1. The spacecraft acquired a total of 60 frames for a mosaic of the solar system from a distance of more than 4 billion miles from Earth and about 32 degrees above the ecliptic. From Voyager's great distance Earth is a mere point of light, less than the size of a picture element even in the narrow-angle camera. Earth was a crescent only 0.12 pixel in size. Coincidentally, Earth lies right in the center of one of the scattered light rays resulting from taking the image so close to the sun. This blown-up image of the Earth was taken through three color filters -- violet, blue and green -- and recombined to produce the color image. The background features in the image are artifacts resulting from the magnification.

Voyager 2: the story of its mission so far – in pictures

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Since launching in 1977 , the Nasa probe has captured never-before-seen images of the solar system

• Nasa’s Voyager 2 sends back its first message from interstellar space

Mon 4 Nov 2019 17.10 GMT Last modified on Mon 4 Nov 2019 23.12 GMT

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Neptune - Voyager's last picture show: The spacecraft Voyager 2 is leaving the Solar System 12 years after its launch - Its last close encounter showed us clouds on blue and stormy Neptune, and surprises on Triton, the moon with an icecap of methane, vol

By Nigel Henbest

9 September 1989

AS SEEN from Earth through a telescope, it’s a mere speck of light, orbited by two even fainter specks. But now we know Neptune almost as well as we understand the nearer planets – thanks to the doughty spacecraft Voyager 2. On the morning of 25 August, Voyager swept a mere 4900 kilometres from the planet’s cloud tops, its closest encounter with a planet since leaving the Earth in 1977.

Voyager’s last port of call was, ironically, highly reminiscent of its home world – another Blue Planet. Neptune’s deep blue atmosphere is tinted partly by scattering of light and partly because its methane gas absorbs red light.

At about 20 Degree south on Neptune there is a large dark oval, almost the size of planet Earth, and resembling the Great Red Spot on Jupiter. Around the edge of Neptune’s ‘Great Dark Spot’, and stretching away like bright banners, hang wispy white cirrus clouds of methane ice. Near the south pole is a smaller dark spot, with a small patch of cirrus in its centre. Between the two is a small irregularly shaped white patch that the Voyager scientists call ‘the Scooter’ because it shoots around the planet much faster than the other clouds.

All these cloud motions are relative, however, and meteorologists need to know how fast the planet’s core rotates. At other planets, the Voyager scientists have measured the rotation of the planet’s core by detecting bursts of radio waves. These come from Neptune’s magnetic field, which is generated well within the planet.

At Neptune, too, Voyager picked up regular radio bursts, which indicate that the core turns once every 16…

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Emily Lakdawalla & Charlene Anderson • Feb 12, 2010

Twenty years since Voyager's last view

On Sunday comes the twentieth anniversary of an iconic image from the Voyager mission: the "Pale Blue Dot" photo of Earth caught in a sunbeam, which was captured by Voyager 1 as part of a Solar System Family Portrait. This panoramic view of our planetary cradle wouldn't have happened without years of advocacy by Planetary Society founder Carl Sagan, whose vision still inspires our organization.

Nothing like it has been done since. There hasn't been the opportunity -- Voyager 1 is the last spacecraft to have departed the solar system with a functional camera. The next one to be in a similar position will be New Horizons . I asked Alan Stern whether the Pluto-bound craft will take a family portrait from its distant perspective. He told me "Absolutely! But because of the bright Sun, we have to be careful for now, so we can't do it until after Pluto. We can however (and soon will-- this summer!) look back to Jupiter and see it and the Galilean satellites from 2+ billion km away near the orbit of Uranus. It should be quite evocative." Indeed it will.

There are several retrospectives on Voyager's solar system family portrait being posted across the Internet today, including this one from JPL and this really neat story from National Public Radio , featuring an interview of Candy Hansen, who was apparently the first person to spot Earth fixed in that sunbeam. Here's one written by the Society's Charlene Anderson a few years ago, on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Voyagers' launches.

by Charlene Anderson

This article is reprinted from the September/October 2002 issue of The Planetary Report.

Home. Family. This will be Voyager's enduring legacy: It has changed forever the feelings raised by those words. Through its robotic eyes we have learned to see the solar system as our home. Through its portraits of the planets we know that they are part of our family.

Apollo astronauts showed us a tiny Earth alone in the blackness of space. Now, with these images, Voyager has shown us that Earth is not really alone. Around our parent Sun orbit sibling worlds, companions as we travel through the Galaxy.

These family portraits of the Sun and planets were Voyager's final photographic assignment. Planetary Society President and Voyager Imaging Team member Carl Sagan worked for a decade to get these pictures taken. Between the two Voyager spacecraft, they returned some 67,000 images of the four outer planets and their 56 known moons. Voyager 1 had the slightly easier assignment: It encountered Jupiter in March 1979 and swung by Saturn in November 1980. Then it headed out in search of the heliopause, the edge of our Sun's sphere of magnetic influence, and where the solar wind gives way to the wind from the stars. In August 1989 Voyager 2 flew by Neptune, completing its reconnaissance mission, having visited Jupiter in 1979, Saturn in 1981 and Uranus in 1986. After passing Neptune, Voyager 2 joined its twin on the way to interstellar space.

The Voyagers had been launched in 1977 to take advantage of a planetary alignment that occurs only once every 176 years. The outer planets were lined up so that a spacecraft could swing from one to another, threading its way past the 4 gas giants in only 12 years. Mission planners at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory could select their paths from among many possible trajectories and targets.

For Voyager 1, they chose to send the spacecraft close by Titan's south pole to obtain close-up data on Saturn's largest moon. Titan's thick nitrogen atmosphere proved to be heavy with complex, carbon-rich organic molecules, and its surface is possibly dotted with lakes of liquid hydrocarbons. For carbon-based lifeforms living in a primarily nitrogen atmosphere - such as ourselves - a world like Titan is well worth a close look.

But to fly close to Titan, the project team had to sacrifice Voyager 1's encounters with Uranus and Neptune or a close-up look at Pluto. Its path around Saturn swung the spacecraft up and out of the ecliptic, the plane defined by Earth's orbit about the Sun. Looking from its Pasadena home on Earth's northern hemisphere, the spacecraft now appears to be coasting above our solar system.

Voyager 1 was chosen to take the family portrait because fewer instruments might be damaged by looking back toward the Sun. And, to Voyager 2, now beyond Neptune and traveling much closer to the ecliptic, Jupiter was too close to the Sun to be picked up by the spacecraft's cameras.

So on February 14 - Valentine's Day 1990 - Voyager 1 aimed its cameras at a string of small colored dots clustered just to the right of the constellation Orion - the Hunter. The spacecraft was then 32 degrees above the ecliptic and nearly 6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles) from the Sun. It took 39 wide-angle views and 21 narrow-angle images. The narrow-angle camera, with a lens resembling a telephoto, took three consecutive images through colored filters of seven of the nine planets. This enabled image processors at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to construct the colored portraits of the planets seen on pages 16 and 17. The Multi-Mission Image Processing Laboratory then pasted together the wide-angle images into the mosaic on the next page.

Voyager had produced the first portrait ever of our Sun and planets together.

But like shy family members at a holiday gathering, the smallest planets avoided having their pictures taken. Mars and Mercury were lost in the glare of the Sun. The outermost planet, Pluto, was too tiny and far away. So this family portrait is incomplete. The next generation of spacecraft will be unable to take another family portrait. Magellan and Galileo, and the planned missions, such as the Soviets' Mars '94 and NASA's Mars Observer and Comet Rendezvous/Asteroid Flyby, plus the joint NASA/European Space Agency Cassini mission, will be locked in orbit about their target planets. None of these will ever gain a perspective from which they could see the solar system as Voyager did.

Voyager alone could look homeward and capture our family of planets as they looked on February 15, 1990. Voyager alone could so graphically show us how Earth and the planets are inextricably linked to our parent Sun.

Home is now a corner of space brightened by a small yellow star. Family is now a company of planets circling that star together. Our home and family now encompass an entire solar system.

Thank you, Voyager.

Let’s Go Beyond The Horizon

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See the 10 Best Photos Taken by Voyager 2

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30 Years Ago: Voyager 2's Historic Neptune Flyby

Humanity's first and (so far) last visit to the outermost giant planet in our solar system was a monumental event for scientists and the public alike.

Thirty years ago, on Aug. 25, 1989, NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft made a close flyby of Neptune, giving humanity its first close-up of our solar system's eighth planet. Marking the end of the Voyager mission's Grand Tour of the solar system's four giant planets - Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune - that first was also a last: No other spacecraft has visited Neptune since.

"The Voyager planetary program really was an opportunity to show the public what science is all about," said Ed Stone, a professor of physics at Caltech and Voyager's project scientist since 1975. "Every day we learned something new."

Wrapped in teal- and cobalt-colored bands of clouds, the planet that Voyager 2 revealed looked like a blue-hued sibling to Jupiter and Saturn, the blue indicating the presence of methane. A massive, slate-colored storm was dubbed the "Great Dark Spot," similar to Jupiter's Great Red Spot. Six new moons and four rings were discovered.

During the encounter, the engineering team carefully changed the probe's direction and speed so that it could do a close flyby of the planet's largest moon, Triton. The flyby showed evidence of geologically young surfaces and active geysers spewing material skyward. This indicated that Triton was not simply a solid ball of ice, even though it had the lowest surface temperature of any natural body observed by Voyager: minus 391 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 235 degrees Celsius).

The conclusion of the Neptune flyby marked the beginning of the Voyager Interstellar Mission, which continues today, 42 years after launch. Voyager 2 and its twin, Voyager 1 (which had also flown by Jupiter and Saturn), continue to send back dispatches from the outer reaches of our solar system. At the time of the Neptune encounter, Voyager 2 was about 2.9 billion miles (4.7 billion kilometers) from Earth; today it is 11 billion miles (18 billion kilometers) from us. The faster-moving Voyager 1 is 13 billion miles (21 billion kilometers) from Earth.   

Getting There

By the time Voyager 2 reached Neptune, the Voyager mission team had completed five planetary encounters. But the big blue planet still posed unique challenges.

About 30 times farther from the Sun than Earth is, the icy giant receives only about 0.001 times the amount of sunlight that Earth does. In such low light, Voyager 2's camera required longer exposures to get quality images. But because the spacecraft would reach a maximum speed of about 60,000 mph (90,000 kph) relative to Earth, a long exposure time would make the image blurry. (Imagine trying to take a picture of a roadside sign from the window of a speeding car.)

So the team programmed Voyager 2's thrusters to fire gently during the close approach, rotating the spacecraft to keep the camera focused on its target without interrupting the spacecraft's overall speed and direction.

The probe's great distance also meant that by the time radio signals from Voyager 2 reached Earth, they were weaker than those of other flybys. But the spacecraft had the advantage of time: The Voyagers communicate with Earth via the Deep Space Network, or DSN, which utilizes radio antennas at sites in Madrid, Spain; Canberra, Australia; and Goldstone, California. During Voyager 2's Uranus encounter in 1986, the three largest DSN antennas were 64-meters (210 feet) wide. To assist with the Neptune encounter, the DSN expanded the dishes to 70 meters (230 feet). They also included nearby non-DSN antennas to collect data, including another 64-meter (210 feet) dish in Parkes, Australia, and multiple 25-meter (82 feet) antennas at the Very Large Array in New Mexico.

The effort ensured that engineers could hear Voyager loud and clear. It also increased how much data could be sent back to Earth in a given period, enabling the spacecraft to send back more pictures from the flyby. 

Being There

In the week leading up to that August 1989 close encounter, the atmosphere was electric at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, which manages the Voyager mission. As images taken by Voyager 2 during its Neptune approach made the four-hour journey to Earth, Voyager team members would crowd around computer monitors around the Lab to see.

"One of the things that made the Voyager planetary encounters different from missions today is that there was no internet that would have allowed the whole team and the whole world to see the pictures at the same time," Stone said. "The images were available in real time at a limited number of locations."

But the team was committed to giving the public updates as quickly as possible, so from Aug. 21 to Aug. 29, they would share their discoveries with the world during daily press conferences. On Aug. 24, a program called "Voyager All Night" broadcast regular updates from the probe's closest encounter with the planet, which took place at 4 a.m. GMT (9 p.m. in California on Aug. 24).

The next morning, Vice President Dan Quayle visited the Lab to commend the Voyager team. That night, Chuck Berry, whose song "Johnny B. Goode" was included on the Golden Record that flew with both Voyagers, played at JPL's celebration of the feat.

Of course, the Voyagers' achievements extend far beyond that historic week three decades ago. Both probes have now entered interstellar space after exiting the heliosphere - the protective bubble around the planets created by a high-speed flow of particles and magnetic fields spewed outward by our Sun.

They are reporting back to Earth on the "weather" and conditions from this region filled with the debris from stars that exploded elsewhere in our galaxy. They have taken humanity's first tenuous step into the cosmic ocean where no other operating probes have flown.

Voyager data also complement other missions, including NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer ( IBEX ), which is remotely sensing that boundary where particles from our Sun collide with material from the rest of the galaxy. And NASA is preparing the Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe ( IMAP ), due to launch in 2024, to capitalize on Voyager observations.

The Voyagers send their findings back to DSN antennas with 13-watt transmitters - about enough power to run a refrigerator light bulb.

"Every day they travel somewhere that human probes have never been before," said Stone. "Forty-two years after launch, and they're still exploring."

For more information about the Voyager mission visit:

https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/

For more images of Neptune taken by Voyager 2 visit:

https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/galleries/images-voyager-took/neptune/

News Media Contact

Calla Cofield

Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

626-808-2469

[email protected]

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45 years ago, NASA's Voyager spacecraft flew past Jupiter. See how the iconic video compares to photos of the planet today.

NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft flew past Jupiter 45 years ago, capturing iconic footage.

The Voyager probe's movie of Jupiter made history, revealing the planet like never before.

See how those images compare to Jupiter pictures from NASA's Juno mission today.

Voyager was one of NASA's most ambitious missions , and Jupiter is arguably our solar system's most beautiful planet. So when the two met for the first time, it was history — and art — in the making.

NASA launched its twin Voyager spacecrafts in the summer of 1977. Voyager 1 was first to approach Jupiter, entering the gas giant's orbit in March 1979.

As the probe approached our solar system 's largest and swirliest planet that spring, it captured the iconic video below. It's a time-lapse movie made of 66 images.

"Jupiter is far more complex in its atmospheric motions than we had ever imagined," Bradford Smith, who was leading the imaging team, said in a press briefing that February, even before Voyager had gotten close enough to make this video, according to Astronomy.com .

He added that his team was "happily bewildered."

The spacecraft made its closest approach to Jupiter on March 5, 1979.

The footage was monumental. To put it in perspective, prior to Voyager, the best close-up images of Jupiter were from the Pioneer 10 spacecraft. They looked like this:

Voyager was a major upgrade.

The first probe photographed Jupiter for 4 months, capturing 19,000 pictures. Voyager 2 entered Jupiter's orbit as Voyager 1 was on its way out and took an additional 14,000 photos before completing its Jupiter encounter in August 1979.

That was 45 years ago. Today we have a wealth of stunningly detailed, colorful snapshots of Jupiter and its moons , thanks to NASA's more modern Juno spacecraft, which has been orbiting the gas giant since 2016.

Compared to Voyager's first glimpse of Jupiter, Juno's portraits capture its intricate features in finer detail. With the help of modern image processing, Jupiter's colors, patterns, and violent weather are on full display.

The planet's iconic Great Red Spot is an anticyclone large enough to swallow Earth. Juno data has revealed that it extends up to 310 miles below the visible surface of the Jovian atmosphere.

That's greater than the distance between you and the International Space Station when it's overhead.

Juno even spots Jupiter's moons up close sometimes — such as Io, which Voyager discovered to have active volcanoes spewing lava into space .

Juno has even spotted Io's shadow gliding over Jupiter's turbulent surface.

The Voyager spacecrafts are now in interstellar space, the only human-made objects to ever leave our solar system. They are both slowly losing their power supply.

Juno should still be circling Jupiter, and sending back gorgeous images like this, until at least September 2025.

That's when Juno's current mission ends, but if it's still functional NASA might keep it going for more years to come.

Read the original article on Business Insider

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Revisiting decades-old voyager 2 data, scientists find one more secret.

Miles Hatfield

Vanessa Thomas

A wobbly magnetic oddball, the bubble escapes.

Eight and a half years into its grand tour of the solar system, NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft was ready for another encounter. It was Jan. 24, 1986, and soon it would meet the mysterious seventh planet, icy-cold Uranus.

Over the next few hours, Voyager 2 flew within 50,600 miles (81,433 kilometers) of Uranus’ cloud tops, collecting data that revealed two new rings, 11 new moons and temperatures below minus 353 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 214 degrees Celsius). The dataset is still the only up-close measurements we have ever made of the planet.

Three decades later, scientists reinspecting that data found one more secret.

Unbeknownst to the entire space physics community, 34 years ago Voyager 2 flew through a plasmoid, a giant magnetic bubble that may have been whisking Uranus’s atmosphere out to space. The finding, reported in Geophysical Research Letters , raises new questions about the planet’s one-of-a-kind magnetic environment.

Planetary atmospheres all over the solar system are leaking into space. Hydrogen springs from Venus to join the solar wind, the continuous stream of particles escaping the Sun. Jupiter and Saturn eject globs of their electrically-charged air. Even Earth’s atmosphere leaks . (Don’t worry, it will stick around for another billion years or so.)

The effects are tiny on human timescales, but given long enough, atmospheric escape can fundamentally alter a planet’s fate. For a case in point, look at Mars.

“Mars used to be a wet planet with a thick atmosphere,” said Gina DiBraccio, space physicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and project scientist for the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, or MAVEN mission. “It evolved over time” — 4 billion years of leakage to space — “to become the dry planet we see today.”

Atmospheric escape is driven by a planet’s magnetic field, which can both help and hinder the process. Scientists believe magnetic fields can protect a planet, fending off the atmosphere-stripping blasts of the solar wind. But they can also create opportunities for escape, like the giant globs cut loose from Saturn and Jupiter when magnetic field lines become tangled. Either way, to understand how atmospheres change, scientists pay close attention to magnetism. 

That’s one more reason Uranus is such a mystery. Voyager 2’s 1986 flyby revealed just how magnetically weird the planet is.

“The structure, the way that it moves … ,” DiBraccio said, “Uranus is really on its own.”

Unlike any other planet in our solar system, Uranus spins almost perfectly on its side — like a pig on a spit roast — completing a barrel roll once every 17 hours. Its magnetic field axis points 60 degrees away from that spin axis, so as the planet spins, its magnetosphere — the space carved out by its magnetic field — wobbles like a poorly thrown football. Scientists still don’t know how to model it.

This oddity drew DiBraccio and her coauthor Dan Gershman, a fellow Goddard space physicist, to the project. Both were part of a team working out plans for a new mission to the ‘ice giants’ Uranus and Neptune, and they were looking for mysteries to solve. Uranus’ strange magnetic field, last measured more than 30 years ago, seemed like a good place to start.

So they downloaded Voyager 2’s magnetometer readings, which monitored the strength and direction of the magnetic fields near Uranus as the spacecraft flew by. With no idea what they’d find, they zoomed in closer than previous studies, plotting a new datapoint every 1.92 seconds. Smooth lines gave way to jagged spikes and dips. And that’s when they saw it: a tiny zigzag with a big story.

“Do you think that could be … a plasmoid?” Gershman asked DiBraccio, catching sight of the squiggle.

Little known at the time of Voyager 2’s flyby, plasmoids have since become recognized as an important way planets lose mass. These giant bubbles of plasma, or electrified gas, pinch off from the end of a planet’s magnetotail — the part of its magnetic field blown back by the Sun like a windsock. With enough time, escaping plasmoids can drain the ions from a planet’s atmosphere, fundamentally changing its composition. They had been observed at Earth and other planets, but no one had detected plasmoids at Uranus — yet.

DiBraccio ran the data through her processing pipeline and the results came back clean. “I think it definitely is,” she said.

The plasmoid DiBraccio and Gershman found occupied a mere 60 seconds of Voyager 2’s 45-hour-long flight by Uranus. It appeared as a quick up-down blip in the magnetometer data. “But if you plotted it in 3D, it would look like a cylinder,” Gershman said.

Comparing their results to plasmoids observed at Jupiter, Saturn and Mercury, they estimated a cylindrical shape at least 127,000 miles (204,000 kilometers) long, and up to roughly 250,000 miles (400,000 kilometers) across. Like all planetary plasmoids, it was full of charged particles — mostly ionized hydrogen, the authors believe.​

Readings from inside the plasmoid — as Voyager 2 flew through it — hinted at its origins. Whereas some plasmoids have a twisted internal magnetic field, DiBraccio and Gershman observed smooth, closed magnetic loops. Such loop-like plasmoids are typically formed as a spinning planet flings bits of its atmosphere to space. “Centrifugal forces take over, and the plasmoid pinches off,” Gershman said. According to their estimates, plasmoids like that one could account for between 15 and 55% of atmospheric mass loss at Uranus, a greater proportion than either Jupiter or Saturn. It may well be the dominant way Uranus sheds its atmosphere to space.

How has plasmoid escape changed Uranus over time? With only one set of observations, it’s hard to say.

“Imagine if one spacecraft just flew through this room and tried to characterize the entire Earth,” DiBraccio said. “Obviously it’s not going to show you anything about what the Sahara or Antarctica is like.”

But the findings help focus new questions about the planet. The remaining mystery is part of the draw. “It’s why I love planetary science,” DiBraccio said. “You’re always going somewhere you don’t really know.”

• NASA Completes Study of Future ‘Ice Giant’ Mission Concepts
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By  Miles Hatfield NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center , Greenbelt, Md.

At Least 6 Dead in Mall Stabbing That Horrifies Australians

The attack, Australia’s deadliest in eight years, stunned a nation where mass violence is rare. A police officer shot the attacker, preventing worse carnage.

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Victoria Kim ,  Yan Zhuang and Isabella Kwai

Here are the latest developments.

Six people were killed and several others injured in a stabbing rampage Saturday afternoon at a crowded major mall in Sydney, Australia’s deadliest act of mass violence in at least eight years.

The attacker was shot and killed by a lone police officer who was directed into the mall by people fleeing the scene, police said. The officer was following the man with the knife, trying to catch up to him, when he turned and lunged at her with the weapon, according to the police. The officer then opened fire, saving lives, Anthony Cooke, assistant commissioner for the New South Wales Police, said.

The man stabbed people as he moved through the mall, the police said. Four women and one man died at the scene. Emergency responders said eight people were transported to area hospitals, and the police said that one of them, a woman, later died. A 9-month-old baby was among those injured and has been in surgery, Karen Webb, the New South Wales Police commissioner, said.

The police said they have not formally identified the man but believe they know his identity. They believe he was 40 years old and acted alone. There is no continuing threat and the attack was not motivated by terrorism, Police Commissioner Webb said.

The attack has stunned and horrified a country where acts of mass violence are rare. “Australians will be shocked tonight,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said at a news conference on Saturday afternoon.

Here’s what you need to know:

The police said the attacker’s motive was unclear, but there were no immediate indications that it was a hate crime. He did not appear to be targeting any specific person, the police said.

The attack happened in Bondi Junction , a busy commercial district in Sydney’s Eastern Suburbs, a wealthy area near the coast.

Multiple calls about a stabbing began coming from people at the mall, the Westfield Bondi Junction, shortly after 3:30 p.m.

Damien Cave contributed reporting.

Acts of mass violence are rare in Australia.

The stabbing attack in a Sydney shopping center that left at least six people dead on Saturday was Australia’s worst act of mass violence since 2017, when a driver killed six people by deliberately plowing his car into pedestrians in Melbourne.

In a country where mass stabbings and shootings are rare — in part because of strict gun laws — the latest attack has horrified Australians.

Here is how it compares to other acts of mass violence in the country in recent years:

June 2019: A gunman killed four people in a shooting spree across the main business district of Darwin, in the Northern Territory.

January 2017: A man with drug-induced psychosis drove his car into a busy shopping street in Melbourne’s central business district, killing six people and injuring more than 20 others.

December 2014: A gunman held 18 people hostage in a cafe in Sydney’s central business district. The standoff with the police, which lasted 16 hours, ended with the deaths of two hostages and the gunman . The authorities later labeled it a terrorist attack.

November 2011: Fourteen people died when a nurse set fire to a nursing home in Quakers Hill, near Sydney.

April 1996: Australia’s worst mass shooting occurred at Port Arthur, Tasmania, when a gunman killed 35 people. Just weeks later, the country’s leaders brought in strict gun laws.

Andrew Reid was shopping for a bed when he heard that people had been stabbed at the mall. He used his training as a lifeguard to help treat two women who had been stabbed on the mall’s fourth floor. “We grabbed some clothes out of the clothes store, trying to stop the bleeding,” he said, adding that he had managed to stop one of the women from bleeding further.

John Yoon and Isabella Kwai

Witnesses describe harrowing scenes as shoppers fled or huddled in stores.

Witnesses to the stabbings at a mall in a Sydney, Australia, on Saturday described a scene of terror as shoppers fled from the knife-wielding man or huddled in stores as panic spread through the shopping center.

Some shoppers hid inside as alarms blared. Others ran out, screaming as they passed by bodies on the floor.

When Gavin Lockhart, 37, saw people running as he sat inside a coffee shop at the mall, there was a moment of confusion. “Is it a celebrity?” he first thought. “Is it because of a gunman?”

Then he fled when he heard, “He’s got a knife! He’s got a knife!”

He followed the coffee shop’s owner, Michael Dunkley, 57, who also brought his wife, who was cooking, and two baristas into a staffroom where they could lock the door. Mr. Dunkley said afterward that just one thought was in his mind when the screaming began: “I have to get my wife and staff to safety.”

Mr. Dunkley left the room to try to chase down the attacker, whom he described as a thin man with a beard and short hair, wearing dark green pants and a green jersey.

Then, Mr. Dunkley recounted, he saw a police officer attempt to stop the assailant. When the officer told the man to put his knife down, he lunged toward her with his weapon, the cafe owner said.

“He didn’t say anything,” Mr. Dunkley said. “He seemed determined.”

The officer then shot the attacker on the fifth floor of the mall, on a walkway near a phone store and a clothing alteration shop, Mr. Dunkley said. When the attacker fell, the officer immediately began administering CPR on him, the cafe owner said.

“In this country, this stuff shouldn’t happen,” Mr. Dunkley said. “People come here because it’s safe.”

Andrew Reid, 44, had been shopping for a bed when he heard that people had been stabbed at the mall and shoppers were told to evacuate. Many of the stores were in lockdown, but after seeing people lying on the floor, bleeding, he said, he used his training as a lifeguard to help two women.

One had a wound in her back, he said, expressing outrage that the attacker would stab someone from behind. “It’s so cowardly,” Mr. Reid said.

“We grabbed some clothes out of the clothes store, trying to stop the bleeding,” he added.

About 30 yards away, the second woman lay unconscious, he recounted. He ran over to find a deep wound on her chest just above where he needed to do compressions, which made CPR difficult.

“There was a lot of blood around her,” he said. “I honestly don’t think she made it.”

Even hours after the attack, witnesses were struggling to process what had just happened.

In his 20 years working as a lifeguard at nearby beaches, Mr. Reid said, he had mostly dealt with drownings. While he had experience with wounds, he said he did not usually treat several stab victims in succession. He said that he was horrified, but tried not to be affected while trying to save people’s lives.

“You just detach emotion from that sort of stuff,” he said. “You just got to.”

Mr. Lockhart, who said he had seen the officer shoot the attacker, sounded dazed. “The one positive I’m looking at is the police officer probably saved my life,” he said.

Witnesses struggled to process what had happened at the mall even hours after the attack. “I don’t think it’s really sank in,” Lockhart, who also saw the officer shoot the attacker, said in an interview. “The one positive I’m looking at is the police officer probably saved my life.”

Gavin Lockhart was sitting in a coffee shop at the mall when he suddenly saw people running. “Is it a celebrity?” he first thought. “Is it because of a gunman?” Then he said he fled when he began hearing, “He’s got a knife! He’s got a knife!”

The officer appeared to shoot the attacker in the chest two to three times on the fifth floor of the mall, on a walkway that bridges two buildings, near a phone store and a clothing alteration shop, Dunkley said. When the attacker fell, the officer immediately began giving him CPR.

Michael Dunkley, 57, who runs a coffee shop at the mall, said he witnessed the moment the police officer apprehended the attacker. The officer told the man to stop and put the knife down, then he lunged forward with his weapon. The attacker “didn’t say anything,” Dunkley said. “He seemed determined.”

The police “became aware of who we believe the offender is,” but have not formally identified him, the New South Wales police commissioner said. “If it is in fact the person we that believe it is, then we don’t have fears for that person holding an ideation — in other words, it’s not a terrorism incident,” she said.

The shopping mall will be closed tomorrow as police conduct their investigation.

Isabella Kwai

“It looked like he was on a killing spree,” said a witness, describing the moment that a police officer fatally shot the attacker. “If she didn’t shoot him, he would have kept going.”

The police commisioner added that it did not appear that the victims were specifically targeted. Among those injured in the attack was a 9-month-old baby, who has been in surgery.

The victims are five women and one man. Five people died at at the scene, and one woman died later in a hospital.

The attacker was a 40-year-old man, said Karen Webb, the police commissioner for New South Wales. The police believed they knew his identity but were still in the process of confirming it, she said.

People evacuated from the shopping center said they were terrified as they huddled in place. “I thought I was going to die,” one woman told the national broadcaster, ABC, adding that she saw a woman lying on the floor in the Chanel store. “It was insanity.”

Routine bus routes have been rerouted around the Bondi Junction area, with transport authorities warning of lengthy delays.

Local officials have postponed several events in the area in response to the police investigation, they said, including a concert at Bondi Beach and a film night at a nearby park.

Following the ongoing police operation at Westfield Bondi Junction, we have postponed tonight's Bondi Beach Bash concert for Youth Week at Bondi Pavilion as well as Movies in the Park at Varna Park. New dates will be announced in the coming days. — Waverley Council (@WaverleyCouncil) April 13, 2024

Bondi Junction is a popular meet-up spot and transit hub.

Tourists wandering the sprawling mall for gifts. Beachgoers picking up sunscreen before heading to the water. Friends meeting for coffee.

Bondi Junction, the area of Sydney, Australia, where Saturday’s stabbings took place, is a bustling hub that regularly draws crowds on weekends. They can go to the glossy Westfield mall complex and buy from high-end stores like Chanel and Gucci, catch a film at the cinema or buy their weekly groceries at major retailers.

The shopping area’s early development in the 1970s made it one of Australia’s largest development projects. And during a major renovation in 2005 , it was known as one of the largest shopping centers in the Southern Hemisphere. An array of small businesses, including cafes and yoga studios, have sprung up in the area, making it an attractive meeting ground.

It is also a major gateway that funnels beachgoers and residents from central Sydney to the wealthy eastern suburbs that are home to many of the city’s most popular coastlines. That includes the famous Bondi Beach, which means that on any given weekend, tourists and backpackers are in the mix along with residents of the area.

The New South Wales Police commissioner, Karen Webb, will address the media at 8:30 p.m. local time (in about half an hour), the police said in a statement.

One more person injured in the attack has died, taking the total number of stabbing victims from five to six, according to a statement from the New South Wales police.

Mass acts of violence are rare in Australia. In 2019, a gunman killed four people in Darwin, in the Northern Territory. In 2017, six people died in Melbourne’s central business district when a driver plowed his car into a pedestrian zone. And in Sydney in 2014, a gunman held 18 people hostage in a cafe in a 16-hour standoff, which ended with the deaths of two hostages and the gunman.

“This was a horrific act of violence indiscriminately targeted at the innocent people going about an ordinary Saturday, doing their shopping,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese praised the courage of the police officer who confronted and shot the attacker. “She’s certainly a hero; there’s no doubt she saved lives through her actions,” he said.

“The devastating scenes at Bondi Junction are beyond words and understanding,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said at a news conference on Saturday evening. “Australians will be shocked this evening.”

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