Read The Interstellar Age Online
Authors: Jim Bell
The Interstellar Age (40 page)
But the next day when the images were beamed back
:
For some examples of the photos of Earth taken from the surface of Mars, see photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA05547 and also pancam.sese.asu.edu/pancam_instrument/projects_3.html.
Chapter 9. The Edge of Interstellar Space
their “planet” status
:
For lots more background and detail on the controversy over the demotion of Pluto, see Neil deGrasse Tyson,
The Pluto Files
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2009); Mike Brown,
How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming
(New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2012); and the details about the IAU’s decision to demote Pluto to dwarf planet status, online at iau.org//files/06/80/52/f068052/public/themes/pluto.
maybe 50,000 years ago or more
:
See astronomer and science evangelist Phil Plait’s
Bad Astronomy
blog entry titled “The Long Climb from the Sun’s Core” at badastronomy.com/bitesize/solar_system/sun.html for information on how long it takes photons to escape the sun’s core.
are also on escape trajectories out of the solar system
:
For live updates on the speeds and distances of the five spacecraft that humans have launched on escape trajectories from our solar system, see heavens-above.com/SolarEscape.aspx.
“to extend the NASA exploration of the solar system . . .”
:
The
Voyager
Project at JPL hosts an official website describing the goals and achievements of the
Voyager
Interstellar Mission at voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/interstellar.html.
only 0.0000000000000001 watts, or barely a flea’s whisper
:
Kohlhase,
Voyager Neptune
, page 136.
“I feel extremely fortunate . . .”
:
For more about Suzy Dodd, and a list of the nine previous
Voyager
project managers before her, see voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/news/dodd_proj_manager.html.
“porous, multi-layered structure threaded by . . .”
:
M. Swisdak, J. F. Drake, and M. Opher, “A Porous, Layered Heliopause,”
Astrophysical Journal
774, L8 (2013): 1 (online at iopscience.iop.org/2041-8205/774/1/L8/pdf/apjl_774_1_8.pdf).
“We think we are outside . . .”
:
Marc Swisdak interviewed in Richard Kerr, “It’s Official—
Voyager
Has Left the Solar System,”
Science
341 (September 2013): 1158–159.
“When we saw that, it took . . .”
:
Don Gurnett quoted in Ibid., page 1159.
“Now that we have new, key data . . .”
:
NASA’s official September 12, 2013, press release, and Ed Stone’s comments, in “
Voyager
Reaches Interstellar Space” (online at science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2013/12sep_voyager1).
“I don’t think it’s a certainty”
:
McComas quoted in
Science
341 (September 2013): 1159.
“We have not crossed the heliopause.”
:
George Gloeckler quoted in Ibid.
particles and magnetic fields within the heliosphere
:
L. A. Fisk and G. Gloeckler, “The Global Configuration of the Heliosheath Inferred from Recent
Voyager 1
Observations,”
Astrophysical Journal
776 (2013): 79 (online at iopscience.iop.org/0004-637X/776/2/79/pdf/apj_776_2_79.pdf).
Chapter 10. Other Stars, Other Planets, Other Life
“One-hundred-six elements”
:
Glenn T. Seaborg won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1951 for his work on the transuranian elements. See the Prize website’s official biography of him for more details on his life and illustrious career at nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1951/seaborg-bio.html.
spacecraft’s lifetimes beyond the mid-2020s
:
The JPL
Voyager
Project’s official website for tracking power conservation strategies and limitations is at voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/spacecraftlife.html.
only slightly above the plane of the planets
:
See heavens-above.com/SolarEscape.aspx.
modern-day spacecraft forensics
:
For more details, see The Planetary Society’s director of projects Bruce Betts’s April 19, 2012, blog post “Pioneer Anomaly Solved!” at planetary.org/blogs/bruce-betts/3459.html.
just under four light-years away
:
For information about
Voyager 1
’s predicted encounter with Gliese 445, see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gliese_445, and for information about
Voyager 2
’s predicted encounter with Ross 248, see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_248.
“redirect the spacecraft as closely as possible . . .”
:
Carl Sagan, et al.,
Murmurs of Earth
, pages 235–36.
evidence of planets around other nearby stars
:
The
Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia,
online at exoplanet.eu/catalog, contains lists, plots, and links to the now more than 1,800 planets discovered around nearby stars that are (mostly) like our sun, via a variety of ground-based and space-based methods.
Kepler
has found
more than 1,000 planets
:
See the updated tally, and lots more details, on the
Kepler
mission’s website at kepler.nasa.gov.
never wrote up our results
:
Trivia fans can, however, find the Biostronomy Symposium paper that Bill Borucki and I presented back in 1993, “Characteristics of Transits by Earth-Sized Planets in Binary Star Systems,” in
Progress in the Search for Extraterrestrial Life,
ed. Seth Shostak (Astronomical Society of the Pacific Conference Series, no. 74, 1995): 165–72 (online at http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1995ASPC...74..165B).
will remain essentially pristine
:
Sagan et al.,
Murmurs of Earth,
pages 233–34.
“Even as they are celebrated . . .”
:
Stephen Pyne, “Voyager: A Tribute,” The Planetary Society blog, posted September 25, 2013 (online at planetary.org/blogs/guest-blogs/2013/20130920-voyager-a-tribute.html).
Postscript: NewSpace
controlling about thirty different spacecraft
:
For a complete listing of the currently active spacecraft exploring our solar system today, see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Solar_System_probes.
doled out nearly $2.5 billion
:
See NASA’s Commercial Crew & Cargo Program Office website for more details on government support of the emerging “NewSpace” sector at http://www.nasa.gov/offices/c3po/home.
Acknowledgments
The trajectory of my life has been so full of gravity assists from so many people that I hardly know where to begin. I owe the start of my career in planetary science to Carl Sagan’s
Cosmos
, and especially to
Voyager
, both of which got me hooked on the thrill of mission-related science and exploration. It seems appropriate, then, that I issue a blanket thank-you to the men and women who first dreamed up the mission in the 1960s, who built and launched the spacecraft in the 1970s, who flew them magnificently past the giant planets, and who teased scientific discovery after discovery out of their dozen or so science investigations in the 1980s, and to the people who still operate them and enable us to communicate with them today, at the boundary of where the solar and interstellar winds mingle. Although I was only directly influenced by a few of the
many thousands of people who brought these missions to life, I was indirectly influenced enormously by your integrated effort. I wish I could have met and talked with all of you. But at least I can see you all there, looking up and smiling at
Voyager
as part of the Pale Blue Dot.
Among the few
Voyager
team members whom I do mention specifically in this book, I want to specifically thank the following colleagues for generously giving their time for e-mails, phone calls, reviews, fact-checking, and/or in-person interviews: Suzy Dodd, Gary Flandro, Heidi Hammel, Candy Hansen, Ann Harch, Andy Ingersoll, Torrence Johnson, Charley Kohlhase, Jon Lomberg, Jamie Sue Rankin, Larry Soderblom, Linda Spilker, Ed Stone, Rich Terrile, and Randii Wessen. I want to specifically call out
Voyager
Project Scientist Ed Stone’s incredible generosity of time and his enthusiasm for my attempts to try to capture many of the personal thoughts and reactions that he and his team had, and the challenges that they faced, during this decades-long adventure of a lifetime.
I would also like to thank the many friends and mentors who helped me get from small-town Rhode Island to the azure-blue shores of Neptune (and beyond) along with the
Voyagers.
My Coventry High School chemistry teacher, Dr. Barry Manley, helped set me and my best friend, Bobby Thompson—another amazing source of consistent support and camaraderie—on lifelong careers in science, partly by simply asking, “Why don’t you go look that up?” Thank you to Mark Allen at Caltech for giving a freshman a fun research project to work on, even though we were supposed to be concentrating on our classes; and I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my pal and mentor the late Ed Danielson for teaching me some of the arcane art of image processing and for helping me get a fly-on-the-wall
glimpse of the inner sanctum of planetary exploration—the science operations rooms of Building 264 during the Uranus flyby. And thank you, Fraser Fanale, one of my PhD committee members from Hawaii, for giving me a ticket to the same inner sanctum for the Neptune flyby three and a half years later. You were all enablers, but the good kind.
I have enjoyed working with Stephen Morrow at Dutton, Penguin Random House as much on this project as I did on
Postcards from Mars.
Thank you, Stephen, for sharing my vision of robotic exploration as really being human exploration, and driven by strong human emotions and frailties, at that. Thank you also to Michael Bourret at Dystel & Goderich for your constant support and encouragement of my work, especially this, my first attempt at trying to tell a nerdy space story without so many pictures!
Finally, I want to thank my family for their never-ending support in my journey outward, to California, then to Hawaii, and then onward, among the planets. Don’t worry, I still actively seek out grinders, cabinets, bubblers, and Del’s, even on other worlds. Special thanks are also due to my daughter Erin for helping with some of the voice transcriptions of my interviews, and to my wonderful, beautiful friend Jordana Blacksberg for her love, support, encouragement, editing, and spectacular cooking. I am loving this interstellar journey that we are now
on.
Index
The page numbers in this index refer to the printed version of this book. The link provided will take you to the beginning of that print page. You may need to scroll forward from that location to find the corresponding reference on your e-reader.
NOTE
: Page numbers in
italics
refer to illustrations.
Acta Astronautica,
46
Adrastea,
128
Alchemy,
274
Aldrin, Buzz,
8
Amalthea,
128
Ames Research Center,
135
,
283
,
286
Anders, William,
227
–228
Antennas
DSN,
63
,
138
,
199
,
200
,
255
