The Interstellar Age: Inside the Forty-Year Voyager Mission
Jim Bell
Language: English
Pages: 336
ISBN: 0525954325
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
*Chosen as one of Amazon's Best Books of 2015!*
*An ALA Notable Book of 2015*
The story of the men and women who drove the Voyager spacecraft mission— told by a scientist who was there from the beginning.
The Voyager spacecraft are our farthest-flung emissaries—11.3 billion miles away from the crew who built and still operate them, decades since their launch.
Voyager 1 left the solar system in 2012; its sister craft, Voyager 2, will do so in 2015. The fantastic journey began in 1977, before the first episode of Cosmos aired. The mission was planned as a grand tour beyond the moon; beyond Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn; and maybe even into interstellar space. The fact that it actually happened makes this humanity’s greatest space mission.
In The Interstellar Age, award-winning planetary scientist Jim Bell reveals what drove and continues to drive the members of this extraordinary team, including Ed Stone, Voyager’s chief scientist and the one-time head of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab; Charley Kohlhase, an orbital dynamics engineer who helped to design many of the critical slingshot maneuvers around planets that enabled the Voyagers to travel so far; and the geologist whose Earth-bound experience would prove of little help in interpreting the strange new landscapes revealed in the Voyagers’ astoundingly clear images of moons and planets.
Speeding through space at a mind-bending eleven miles a second, Voyager 1 is now beyond our solar system's planets. It carries with it artifacts of human civilization. By the time Voyager passes its first star in about 40,000 years, the gold record on the spacecraft, containing various music and images including Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode,” will still be playable.
Orbital Mechanics and Astrodynamics: Techniques and Tools for Space Missions
Crescas' Critique of Aristotle: Problems of Aristotle's Physics in Jewish and Arabic Philosophy
Binocular Astronomy (The Patrick Moore Practical Astronomy Series)
291–292 Pythagoras, 224–225 Radial velocity method, 282–283 Radiation, 16, 52, 92, 109–111, 185, 200, 246 Radioactivity, 274 Radio communication, 15–16, 54–55, 63 Radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs), 56–57 Ranger, 50 Rankin, Jamie Sue, 267–270 Reagan administration, 21–23 Record, onboard Voyager. See Golden Record Red dwarf stars, 280–281 Reducing environment, 139 Remote sensing, 19–20, 29 Reseau marks, 175 Resonance, orbital, 115, 120, 126 Rhea, 142, 150, 243 Rings
conductor. 4:40 Java, court gamelan, “Kinds of Flowers,” recorded by Robert Brown. 4:43 Senegal, percussion, recorded by Charles Duvelle. 2:08 Zaire, Pygmy girls’ initiation song, recorded by Colin Turnbull. 0:56 Australia, Aborigine songs, “Morning Star” and “Devil Bird,” recorded by Sandra LeBrun Holmes. 1:26 Mexico, “El Cascabel,” performed by Lorenzo Barcelata and the Mariachi México. 3:14 “Johnny B. Goode,” written and performed by Chuck Berry. 2:38 New Guinea, men’s house song, recorded by
so few impact craters on its surface left no doubt that its surface was geologically young—maybe only 100 million years old,” he explains, being sure to note that 100 million years truly is “young” to geologists. “Europa formed about four and a half billion years ago along with the rest of the solar system, so 100 million years is only about 2 percent of its lifetime. Surely, we all thought, its surface must still be changing today. But what causes those changes? We all wished we’d had a chance
the project manager. In this kind of committee-led project, it’s critical that the two commanders at the top of the org chart, the project manager and the project scientist, are consistently on the same page and have an excellent working relationship. Each is personally responsible for the success of the mission—to NASA and, ultimately, to Congress and the taxpayers who are footing the bill. Over the course of more than four decades since the Project began, Voyager has had ten project managers.
then grad student Edward “Ted” Dunham, and other colleagues were “occultation hunters,” astronomers who could very accurately predict when a planet or moon or asteroid would pass in front of a bright star, allowing them to study the object’s surface or atmosphere by the way that star’s light was blocked, or occulted, as it passed behind. It was a neat trick, but it meant being nimble and flexible, because such occultations occur only rarely, and are visible only from certain very specific places
