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The Interstellar Age
Jim Bell
Inside the Forty-Year Voyager Mission
Dutton
February 2015
On Sale: February 24, 2015
336 pages
ISBN: 0525954325
EAN: 9780525954323
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
The story of the men and women who drove the Voyager
spacecraft mission— told by a scientist who was there from
the beginning.
The Voyager spacecraft are our
farthest-flung emissaries—11.3 billion miles away from the
crew who built and still operate them, decades since their
launch.
Voyager 1 left the solar system in
2012; its sister craft, Voyager 2, will do so in
2015. The fantastic journey began in 1977, before the first
episode of Cosmos aired. The mission was planned as a
grand tour beyond the moon; beyond Mars, Jupiter, and
Saturn; and maybe even into interstellar space. The fact
that it actually happened makes this humanity’s greatest
space mission.
In The Interstellar Age,
award-winning planetary scientist Jim Bell reveals what
drove and continues to drive the members of this
extraordinary team, including Ed Stone, Voyager’s
chief scientist and the one-time head of NASA’s Jet
Propulsion Lab; Charley Kohlhase, an orbital dynamics
engineer who helped to design many of the critical slingshot
maneuvers around planets that enabled the Voyagers to
travel so far; and the geologist whose Earth-bound
experience would prove of little help in interpreting the
strange new landscapes revealed in the Voyagers’
astoundingly clear images of moons and
planets.
Speeding through space at a mind-bending
eleven miles a second, Voyager 1 is now beyond our
solar system's planets. It carries with it artifacts of
human civilization. By the time Voyager passes its
first star in about 40,000 years, the gold record on the
spacecraft, containing various music and images including
Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode,” will still be playable.
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