THE FANTASTIC VOYAGE OF "VOYAGER"
“You asked the impossible of a machine and the machine complied.”
Cold and lonely, the outer planets roam the skies. Wanderers (planetis) the Greeks called them because they seemed adrift in the cosmos. Through his telescope, Galileo saw Jupiter with sparkling moons, Saturn with perfect rings. But even through bigger and bigger telescopes, they were blurs, until.. . .
In the winter of 1979, as humanity bickered over oil, Africa, and the Middle East, a spacecraft the size of a small sailboat made front page news with close-ups no one had seen before. Jupiter’s red spot, swirling, raging. Moons with ancient Greek names — Io, Europa, Callisto. And the giant planet, a marble spinning in a black void.
“We have just started to think about the implications of what we're seeing,” said a scientist at Pasadena’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. NASA aimed for the moon, but the visionaries at JPL took us on a Grand Tour of the Solar System. Their tour guide was Voyager.
“Voyager did things no one predicted, found scenes no one expected, and promises to outlive its inventors,” wrote Stephen J. Pyne. “Like a great painting or an abiding institution, it has acquired an existence of its own, a destiny beyond the grasp of its handlers.”
The fantastic voyage began back when astronauts started circling earth. In 1963, a grad student at JPL calculated how a craft could use gravity as a slingshot, whipping past Jupiter and on towards Saturn. Then another visionary noticed a rare alignment of outer planets set for the early 1980s. A “Grand Tour” could boldly go where no man. . . Well, that was science fiction. This was fact, a project named Voyager.
Each Voyager craft was a miniature marvel. Weighing less than a Volkswagen, each had 65,000 parts. Sixteen thrusters powered by plutonium. Three gyroscopes. Assorted instruments to measure gravity, radiation, magnetic fields, and more. Design and assembly took years.
With little fanfare, Voyager 2 launched from Cape Canaveral in August 1977. Voyager 1 with a shorter trajectory, set out a few weeks later.
By Christmas, flying at 40,000 mph, the Voyagers were dodging asteroids. Back home, the public focused on a gold record. No one knew where Voyager 1 might travel, what it might encounter, so astronomer Carl Sagan added a fingerprint.
The gold record, with its own turntable, included sounds of waves, whales, “Hello” in 55 languages, and music by Mozart, Chuck Berry, and bluesman Blind Willie Johnson. Saturday Night Live joked that aliens had found the record and replied — “Send more Chuck Berry!”
Then most of earth forgot Voyager as both starships went on through empty space. Finally in March 1979, Voyager 1 closed in on Jupiter. Pulled by gravity, it hit 80,000 mph. Other planetary probes had lasted only days. And Voyager?
The surprises started with moons. Io had volcanoes, the first found beyond earth. Europa was striated with cracks. Callisto was heavily cratered and crusted. But the biggest surprise was Voyager itself.
Performing perfectly, the spacecraft sent back 19,000 close-ups before cracking Jupiter’s whip and heading for Saturn. “If we’re blown away by Jupiter,” said one JPL official, “just wait till we get to Saturn.” And in November 1980, Voyager began beaming back photos that stunned the most jaded at JPL.
Enormous rings. Dazzling moons. Jaw dropping vistas of Saturn, just a big ball of gas but somehow so beautiful. Then came the biggest surprise. Expected to last 10 years, Voyager just kept working.
Voyager 2 went on to capture close-ups of the blue marbles Uranus and Neptune. Voyager 1, however, showed us — us.
When Voyager 1 reached the edge of the solar system, Carl Sagan urged JPL to capture the moment. Why not turn cameras around and take a picture of the entire Solar System, with earth out there — somewhere?
Scientists worried about sun damage, but Sagan prevailed. In February 1990, Voyager sent back its Family Portrait. There among 640,000 pixels was the Pale Blue Dot.
“Look again at that dot,” Sagan wrote. “That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.”
And on Voyager went. In 2013, it crossed the furthest edge of solar wind and entered interstellar space. Four years later, scientists fired the craft’s engines for the first time since 1980. Voyager is now so far from home it makes your head swim. How far? 14,000,000,000 miles and counting, so far that radio signals take 20 hours to reach it.
No one out there has heard Chuck Berry, yet Voyager, like the planets, is now a wanderer. JPL expects it to work until 2025. Even then, as a symbol of genius and vision, its voyage will continue.
Back on earth, along with stunning planetary images, Voyager has left us one group photo. “This distant image of our tiny world,” Sagan wrote, “underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.”
