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.
Voyager 1 left our solar system in 2012; its sister craft, Voyager
2, did so in 2018. 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, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune; 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 and Voyager 2 are now beyond our solar system's planets, the first
man-made objects to go interstellar. 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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*An ALA Notable Book of 2015***
