Full disclosure: I an an engineer working in satellite development/launch and initialization so maybe I can appreciate this a little more but…
People today seem to take the imagery from Voyager for granted. Maybe it’s because the images have always “just been there” for most people born after 1970. It seems people are so used to seeing close up images of the planets in our solar system that they can’t appreciate how amazing it is that men of Earth, all the way back in the 1970s, designed and manufactured these 2 probes that have sent imagery back to for us to enjoy and analyze!
Think about that for a minute. Some guys decided a while back that they wanted to take some close up pictures of the planets in our solar system and beyond. What kind of people wake up one morning and say “Yeah, I think we could do that”. I always imagine that I’m riding along on one of those birds staring at Saturn or Jupiter and how awesome that is that humans created something like the Voyager space craft and it just went tooling by Uranus and sent pictures back to us.
These things are still out there, cranking away, doing their thing over 30 years after launch. 30 year mission life. Crazy. And we did that in the 70’s.
I dunno, this just bugs me and I think science classes should spend some time on the Voyager program and the people who made it happen in addition to showing the pretty pictures of the planets and moving on to the next topic.
I we hadn’t fucked up this planet so seriously – politically, environmentally, socially, and every other -ly – we’d probably take more time to examine the others that we haven’t half-destroyed yet. And then we’d start figuring out how to destroy them too.
Cubsfan, several years ago I bought my niece and nephew the HBO series “From the Earth to the Moon,” and they were completely blown away by it. And it wasn’t the acting, or special effects; it was the “We went to the moon. WE went to the MOON!” reaction I saw in them.
Now they knew before they watched it that we had gone to the moon. But they had never contemplated the scope of such a feat.
We live in amazing times, and take so much of it for granted. Look at an iPod. I saw a picture recently of what it would have taken to make an iPod in the 1980’s: it had a guy with a large box (about the size of one of those RedBox video rental boxes) on his back. I now have 4 days of music in a gadget that’s little bigger than a few credit cards.
Cubsfan - I remember when Voyager 2 passed Neptune in the summer of 1989. Our cable TV reserved a channel for the most recent images, interspersed with stop motion animations and updates from NASA on the images and what they implied. Instead of surfing, I just left the TV on that channel and stared in wonder, trying to come up with analogies for how far away that was, and what I was looking at. (“If the earth were the size of a ping pong ball, then this image is the other side of the valley from here” sort of stuff.)
Those images are still as impressive to me, especially now that there doesn’t seem to be the same will to explore that existed in the 1970s.
Watching some of the documentaries on SciHD today. Some pretty good ones. I’ve always thought they should be more explicit about whether images are artistic interpretation or are real photos though. I think sometimes it’s hard for the typical citizen to differentiate between the two.
They’re currently probing the outer regions of the solar wind’s area of influence, and with luck, will precisely document the transition from the solar wind to true interstellar space within the next few years. They really are the Little Spaceprobe that Could.
I was nine years old when the Voyager probes reached Jupiter (and we had a subscription to National Geographic, which ran multiple cover stories about them over the years). I was already one of those little boys who liked science fiction and space science, and the Voyager probes just made the Universe so much cooler–the outer moons weren’t just “dirty snowballs” (as the overtaken-by-events old science books I had read speculated). They were strange new worlds, each one different, some with active volcanoes or (this idea came in a few years later, though based on Voyager data) maybe buried oceans. (The Cassini–Huygens (NASA/ESA) mission to Saturn and Titan was also great–I love the fact that Titan has lakes of liquid methane and ethane and equatorial deserts and methane rain.)
I have a really emotional view of the Voyager probes, strongly influenced by the late Carl Sagan. I’ve long thought of the Voyagers as epic, as a mighty accomplishment that should be remembered through the ages. The way they visited so many places, they way they just keep going and going, the Voyager records (and the earlier Pioneer plaques), the Pale Blue Dot photograph. I love the fact that if you search the U.S. Space Objects Registry, the status of the Voyagers and Pioneer 10 and 11 is “Interstellar”.
Manned spaceflight is at something of a low ebb at the moment, but right now there is an American probe orbiting Mercury; a European probe orbiting Venus; multiple probes (American and European) on or around Mars, including an active rover, and another rover on the way; an American probe in the asteroid belt and a European probe en route to land on a comet; an American probe headed to Jupiter; an American probe orbiting Saturn; and an American probe on its way to Pluto. There are space telescopes, including one looking for Earth-like planets orbiting nearby stars–the progress we’ve made in finding exoplanets also just blows me away.
They dis-listed Pluto instead, I think it was decided cheaper or something. Fortunately they forgot to delist Charon as a moon, so they are sending a camera out there after all to take a few snaps and send us back some picts.
Exciting! Still four years away, but am looking forward to it. The page says its going somewhere after Pluto. Is it just a fly by or will it orbit a few times first?
Big fan of the Voyagers since they launched – I check in with the site on occasion to see if they’ve phoned home recently. I always make sure to talk about the mission and the Golden Records in my music class when we get to Chuck Berry (which was last Thursday, as it happens.) The students are fascinated by it, and a few years back I added the ‘pale blue dot’ image to the lectures – sure, it’s a music class, but the students tend to be awfully interested and want to know more. And there’s invariably one Star Trek fan who gets excited to find out that’s what V-ger is.
I also keep checking in on New Horizons about once a month, too.
Our plans to probe Mars, on the other hand, are proceeding nicely. Note that each new wave in our [del]invasion forces[/del] peaceful missions of scientific exploration is bigger and more capable than the last. (I mean, you probably coulda just stomped on little baby Sojourner there.)
I’m always dwelling on the various probes and new images we get to see because of them. The outter cosmos is fascinating, but many forget our very own solar system is so vastly unexplored and alien yet.
Just the other day, I mentioned to my son how we don’t really know what Pluto looks like yet, since we can’t resolve it, and I’ve been extremely curious to know in detail what it looks like as well, since I was his age (9). My wife overheard and was shocked to learn we didn’t have much to go on as we do with the other main planets. I had to go on the Internet to convince her. Truly this stuff is taken for granted by most.
But, I got to promise my son, when he’s 12, we’ll both watch New Horizons reveal Pluto (and its pals) for the first time, together.
Just fly-bys. The hope is that they can find a Kuiper belt object or objects for an additional fly-by after Pluto. After that, New Horizons is on its way out into interstellar space, like Pioneer 10, Pioneer 11, and the Voyagers before it.
