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Title details for The Interstellar Age by Jim Bell - Available

The Interstellar Age

The Story of the NASA Men and Women Who Flew the Forty-Year Voyager Mission

by Jim Bell
Jim Bell
Audiobook
3 of 3 copies available
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3 of 3 copies available
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.

  • Creators

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  • Awards

  • Release date

    February 24, 2015

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781101887905
      • File size: 222991 KB
      • Duration: 07:44:33

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Astronomer and space scientist Jim Bell is obviously comfortable behind a microphone. As an insider in the Voyager space program and other NASA projects, he's lectured at more conferences, symposia, and college classrooms than he can probably count, so his matter-of-fact approach is both friendly and professorial. Here he gives a carefully detailed play-by-play on the development, launch, and planetary encounters of the two Voyager spacecraft. Because he's "been there--done that," his narration has the voice of authority. Listen and take a tour of what follows: Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and now, interstellar space. Fascinating. D.R.W. © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      January 19, 2015
      Bell (The Space Book), president of the Planetary Society, delivers a lucid account of the magnificent scientific accomplishments of the Voyager Missions with a cheerfulness that it deserves. Both probes were launched in 1977; Voyager 1 left the solar system in 2013, after returning breathtaking photographs of the outer planets, and Voyager 2 will do so in a few years. They should be able to “stay in communication with Earth and operate at least one instrument until sometime around 2025.” The Voyager probes exploited a rare alignment of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, which made it possible for a single spacecraft to pass by all four. Approved in 1972 after more ambitious probes were rejected, their construction was a miracle of improvisation by workaholic engineers and brilliant project managers, working with budgets so inadequate that some defects were not fixed after it was decided they would not spoil the mission. Bell describes the flybys, which produced an avalanche of new discoveries, but he gives equal space to the craft themselves, whose instruments (analog tapes, feeble computers) are museum curiosities today. Nevertheless, they worked to a marvelous degree, and readers will have no trouble sharing Bell’s exuberance at a remarkable human accomplishment.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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