This is an awe-inspiring account of how the twin Voyager space probes, launched by NASA in 1977, have traveled farthest into the Cosmos than any other human-made machine. Now about 23.5 and 19.5 billion kilometers from home, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 became the first and second spacecraft to exit the solar system in 2012 and 2018 respectively. (Watch live status here: https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/)
Planetary scientist Bell, who worked on the mission from the time he was an undergraduate, chronicles the two probes' journeys, their revelations about our solar system, and the many people who have dedicated their careers to the mission, including an account about orbital dynamics engineer who helped to design many of the critical slingshot maneuvers around planets that enabled the Voyagers to travel so far. A theoretical aspect includes the timing of the launch when the 16-year planetary alignment was just right for the rendezvous with the giant planet.
The book mentions with ache the sleepless times spent over several missions, including its immediate predecessor the Mariners along with Magellan, Pioneer, Galileo, Cassini, and of course, the Hubble space telescope. The Engineers behind all these missions, the author pretends, needed to be paranoids!
The JPL's commands were interesting to read:
Fly to a certain place
Turn on the camera
Point it in that direction
Take 12 photos
Turn off the camera
Turn on the magnetic sensor
Collect those measurements
Transmit
Restart camera
For every mission, this probably was the mantra for success, and the code.
It is here that I came across Carl Sagan's suggestions to include “golden records” loaded with pictures and sounds—from whale songs to Bach to Chuck Berry—to represent our planet to any extraterrestrial beings that might encounter. The lines "Jaat Kahan ho" by Surshri Kesar Bai was included among 27 other songs. Here is the list of other included things that have flown out of Earth:
"Hello to everyone, we are happy here and you there"
Diagrams of DNA - recipe of life on Earth
Maths definitions
Physics unit definitions
Solar system, parameters, and solar spectrum
Egypt and its river Nile - Red sea
Anatomy of man, the fertilized ovum, Fetus, and other 116 items
And we still now know that no one has acknowledged the encounter of these!
The middle part of the book carries interesting aspects of astronomy including how they were looked upon by astronomers in the 1970s because at that time most of the measurements were based on optical telescopes only. There is an account of atmospheres of Saturn and Titan, Tethys and Mimas, Enceladus and Rhea, Io and Dion, and this really instilled a chill interstellar aspects into my inception of what really interstellar is. Jupiter could accommodate more than 300 Earths and has saved the Earth from several meteor hits by swallowing them into its atmosphere (due to huge gravity). One single rotation of Jupiter is about 10 hours despite its size and its magnetic field is great and is about 5 times larger than the moon.
Here are some other highlights:
# The Uranus hemisphere is dark for 42 Earth years and then this reverses between North and South.
# Gofer is the word the author has used to describe persons who go for this and go for that and there were a lot of them at the JPL
# Building images is a stricter part esoterically
# A KB object, Eris is about 1500 miles wide with a moon called Dysnomia
# No particle from any galaxy can pierce the bubble of the suns heliosphere
# Robotic planetary mission cost related with the dog toys for a year by Americans
# Heliopause - edge of the heliosphere
# Discovery of Earth-like planets is by tiny wobbles in stars' motion caused by the gravitational tug of planets orbiting around but with a lot of time!
# The risk of any tiny particle hitting the spacecraft has been described as equivalent to stopping a tractor at 50 mph using a housefly (Voyager's speed is 36000mph)
The Voyager spacecraft are our farthest-flung emissaries moving on still and at about 22 and 18 light hours away from Earth, respectively!
The book has an end chapter "The End?". The author probably means that there is no end in sight to the interstellar (discovery) era as Juno, another spacecraft is presently now inside Jupiter and Voyagers are still moving! Overall, reading this book could give us a feeling of connectivity to Universal Consciousness.
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