The Interstellar Age: Inside the Forty-Year Voyager Mission
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The Interstellar Age: Inside the Forty-Year Voyager Mission
<b>The story of the men and women who drove NASA’s Voyager spacecraft mission—the farthest-flung emissaries of planet Earth—told by a scientist who was there from the beginning.</b><br /><br /> <i>Voyager 1 </i>left the solar system in 2012; its sister craft, <i>Voyager 2</i>, did so in 2015. The fantastic journey began in 1977, before the first episode of <i>Cosmos</i> aired. The mission was planned as a grand tour beyond the moon; beyond Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune; and maybe even into interstellar space. The fact that it actually happened makes this humanity’s greatest space mission.<br /><br /> In <i>The Interstellar Age</i>, award-winning planetary scientist Jim Bell reveals what drove and continues to drive the members of this extraordinary team, including Ed Stone, <i>Voyager</i>’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 <i>Voyagers</i> 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 <i>Voyagers</i>’ astoundingly clear images of moons and planets.<br /><br /> Speeding through space at a mind-bending eleven miles a second, <i>Voyager 1</i> is now beyond our solar system's planets. It carries with it artifacts of human civilization. By the time<i> Voyager</i> 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.<br /><b><br />*An ALA Notable Book of 2015*</b>