Fantastic Voyagers

Two 40-year-old robots pushing past planets into space, sending back ‘postcards’ along the way

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Fantastic Voyagers Illustration
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Fantastic Voyagers Illustration

In the shadow, one might say, of the Great American Eclipse, a major anniversary in the history of space exploration -- and indeed cosmic consciousness -- is being celebrated.

It was 40 years ago, on Aug. 20 and Sept. 5, 1977, that a pair of robots named Voyager were dispatched to explore the outer solar system and the vast darkness beyond.

What resulted was nothing less than a reimagining of what a world might be and what strange cribs of geology and chemistry might give rise to life in some form or other.

It was a real-life Star Trek adventure, but the crew stayed home, communicating with their two spacecraft through a billion-mile bucket brigade of data bits.

New computer programs went one way, and data -- including scratchy photos of new landscapes and the whispering moans of interplanetary plasma fields -- came back the other way. All of it was being carried out by a robot brain with the memory capacity of an old-fashioned digital watch.

The spacecraft had been designed to make what scientists called the Grand Tour, taking advantage of a once-every-175-year planetary alignment. Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were to use the gravity of the outer planets to slingshot from Jupiter to Saturn, and to Uranus and Neptune, and then beyond the edge of the sun's domain into interstellar space.

In the end, only half the tour -- to Jupiter and Saturn -- was actually approved. But the Voyager crew packed for a much longer journey. When they lifted off 40 years ago, the two spacecraft carried golden records inscribed with pictures and sounds from Earth, greetings from President Jimmy Carter and instructions on how to play it all.

The Voyagers would observe the universe, and give something back to whoever might one day find them.

The robot emissaries cruised the solar system through presidential administrations, wars and scandals, and the Challenger disaster, which happened as Voyager 2 was pulling away from Uranus.

At every approach to a planet, the crew members, a little older and a little grayer each time, reconvened at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., for a weeklong marathon of discovery, a circus of science on the fly.

With imagery returned by probes, what had been fuzzy dots in the world's biggest telescopes bloomed into worlds.

Back on Earth, some theoreticians claimed to be homing in on a putative theory of everything, an Einsteinian dream of an equation simple enough to be inscribed on a T-shirt.

But in space, scientists were finding that such theories were no help against nature's endless capacity to invent and surprise. Each new world revealed by the Voyagers was a head-scratcher.

BAFFLING

Once upon a time, it was presumed that the moons of the outer planets, so far from the sun and so close to the origins of the solar system, would be boring ice balls, geologically and in every other way dead.

But then Voyager 2 spotted volcanoes spraying fountains of sulfur from the surface of Jupiter's innermost moon, Io. On close inspection, Saturn's rings -- the jewels of the solar system -- dissolved into 10,000 grooves, like a vinyl record's, braided and kinked and patrolled by tiny moonlets.

Voyager 1 plumbed a fat, smoggy atmosphere of Saturn's Titan moon, where nitrogen and methane rains fall on a frozen slush pile of hydrocarbons and oily lakes, and then headed off toward interstellar space.

Voyager 2 cruised on to Uranus, mysteriously tipped on its axis and surrounded by rings that make it look like a bull's-eye.

The probe passed the restful methane blue of Neptune, besmirched by a dark spot, and its moon Triton, an ice rock flowing like soft ice cream with geysering nitrogen.

PRESS, PARTIES, THEN DISASTER

I've never had more fun as a science writer than during those weeklong encounters in Pasadena, when my colleagues and I -- a little older and grayer ourselves, humbler but no wiser about the tricks that nature might be up to out there in the realm of dark and ice -- gathered to watch the scientists watch their new worlds.

The television screens in the press room showed the latest images as they came in from the Voyager spacecraft. We had the same view as the scientists.

If on some distant world there had been a sign saying "Drink Coke," or a pyramid, what we liked to call "the press room imaging team" would have had a chance to see it first.

Casting aside years of learned reserve and an addiction to speaking and writing in the passive voice, Voyager scientists had to parade to daily news briefings and venture explanations that they knew they would have to take back a few days later about things they had seen for the first time only a few hours before.

Part of the joy of The Farthest: Voyager in Space, a documentary recently shown on PBS, is reliving those moments of bafflement and intellectual ambition.

Some nights were spent in the bluesy, smoky company of science writers and planetary astronomers listening to the space ballads of Jonathan Eberhart, the late correspondent for Science News and a well-known folk singer. A rock band named for a feature of Titan, The Titan Equatorial Band, played at parties.

The music stopped the morning after Voyager 2 passed by Uranus, on Jan. 28, 1986, when the Space Shuttle Challenger blew up with seven crew members aboard, including Christa McAuliffe, a high school teacher. That morning the televisions in a hushed newsroom at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory had Uranus on one screen and the Y-shaped cloud of the explosion on the other. By noon, my newspaper friends had packed their bags and headed for Houston or Cape Canaveral, Fla.

Voyager 2 went on. By the time it reached Neptune -- the gatekeeper of our planetary realm, now that Pluto doesn't count -- the engineers at the laboratory had enlisted antennas around the Earth to listen in unison, catching the trickle of data bits flowing from almost 3 billion miles away.

Chuck Berry, whose music was included on the spacecraft records, came to the lab to play for a Voyager farewell party.

ESCAPE

There would be one last act. In 1990, as it ascended the void, Voyager 1's crew commanded it to turn its cameras backward and snap a family portrait of the worlds it was leaving behind forever.

The Earth appears on this picture as the famous "pale blue dot" in a wash of scattered sunlight, a "mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam," as the astronomer and cosmic sage Carl Sagan later described it.

Voyagers' cameras are now turned off, but the probes continue to report back on the conditions in deepest space.

In October 2012, magnetic field and cosmic ray measurements indicated that Voyager 1 had reached the edge of the magnetic bubble that the sun extends like an umbrella over the planets, blocking outside radiation.

Voyager 1 was in interstellar space, the first human artifact to escape the solar system. It and its twin will go on circling the galaxy, long after it has ceased speaking to us.

In the fullness of galactic time, the Voyagers may be found, but by whom? The Voyager record might be the only physical remnant, the last lonely evidence that we, too, once lived in this city of stars, among these islands of ice and rock.

photo

Courtesy of NASA

This gold aluminum cover was designed to protect the identical gold-plated copper discs carried far into space by Voyager 1 and 2 from micrometeorites. The drawings are meant to show aliens how to play greetings from Earth recorded in 60 languages.

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AP file photo

In January 1986, astronomer Carl Sagan posed beside an image of the Voyager 2 spacecraft at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Sagan died of bone cancer in 1996 at age 62.

Back then, we were looking forward to an exploration of space that would go on forever. It was magic, and we were all on the spaceship.

ActiveStyle on 08/28/2017

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