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Our first voyages into space took us to
the Moon, a quarter of a million miles from Earth. We followed
that by sending spacecraft to the other inner planets, most
dramatically to Mars, 35 million miles from Earth. Two Voyager
spacecraft extended our reach to Jupiter, 400 million miles
away. Now, the same two craft have taken us as far as Saturn,
half a billion miles beyond Jupiter. Like ripples on a pond,
our place in the sun has extended outward to encompass some
of the farthest reaches of the solar system.
In November 1980, when Voyager I was due
to rendezvous with Saturn, and again in August 1981, when
Voyager 2 was to encounter the planet, Henry S. F. Cooper,
Jr., covered the missions for The New Yorker. They
were flyby missions, which means they neither landed nor
orbited but continued on their way past the planet and its
moons and rings. A flyby may offer the best chance there
is to observe the process of scientific discovery: the time
and place are known; the duration is short; the scientists,
like runners on their marks, are poised to make new observations;
and indeed, something hitherto unknown is almost certain
to turn up.
Henry Cooper chronicles this expedition,
following how old ideas gave way to new ones as the data
came in, and recording even the wrong turns, which are as
much a part of scientific discovery as the right ones. The
result is a dramatic moment-by-moment account of the way
scientists work, the way science is done.
Voyager is a key marker in the American
space effort that began with the first successful Ranger
missions to the Moon in 1964. For the scientists working
on the Saturn project, the Voyager encounters with that
planet marked the culmination of the great voyages of discovery
begun with those lunar expeditions. Once Voyager 2 travels
on to Uranus and then to Neptune, we will have reached the
outer limits of our universe as we know it. Thus, the Voyager
missions are also the conclusion of that stage in our space
effort.
Henry S. F. Cooper, Jr., is a staff writer
for The New Yorker, where he has specialized in covering
the NASA space missions. His accounts of the Apollo program
were among the most highly regarded reportage of our first
ventures into space and formed the bases of three popular
books: Apollo on the Moon, Moon Rocks, and
13: The Flight That Failed. He is also the author
of A House in Space, a lively account of Skylab in
action, and The Search for Life on Mars, a narrative
about the Viking missions.
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