Happy birthday, Voyager.

[saxikath]

mabfan points out an anniversary that I would have been sorry to miss: Today is the 30th anniversary of the launch of Voyager 1.

I grew up with the Voyager project. I was 6 (yes, now you know how old I am!) when Voyager 1 launched. I remember reading about the Jupiter and Saturn flybys in the paper. Later on, I got to work with actual Voyager 2 data from Saturn in a mentorship sort of thing with Larry Esposito at the University of Colorado. The Voyager 2 Uranus closest encounter came just days before the Challenger disaster. I got to see photos from that when a Denver Post reporter came to our school district planetarium group and showed them to us. (And god bless you, Jim Moravec, wherever you are, for that group.) The CU planetarium showed live feeds from JPL during the Neptune encounter.

The Voyager missions strongly fed my childhood love of astronomy, and I hope I never lose the ability to be wonderstruck by space as I was by those amazing pictures as they came in.

Comments

[meranthi.livejournal.com]

The CU planetarium is AWESOME! My dad brought me down a bunch of times when he was teaching classes in there. So neat!

[fizzixrat.livejournal.com]

My wedding was in there. ;)

(I did volunteer work there for a couple of years at the end of my uni days.)


I spent a lot of my childhood at Fiske taking in the various Voyager encounters. One of the Voy/Jupiter encounters coincided with 6th grade parent-teacher conferences, so I rushed home on those half-school days, grabbed my bicycle, and headed to the university. The same thing occurred the next year with one of the Voy/Saturn encounters. My parents arranged some time out of school for me in 11th grade to head over to Fiske for Voy/Uranus (and I ended up taking extensive notes and writing them up for a research project for my physics teacher). Voy/Neptune happened near the end of a summer at uni, so I just hung out at the planetarium and worked as a de facto volunteer, taking some of the Voyager-related load off the regular staff. (A year later, I reminded them of all the questions I answered back then when they were hiring me on as a regular volunteer.)


My favorite Voyager memory comes from a conversation Larry Esposito and I had during the Voyager/Neptune encounter (he had popped back into town for the night to give a talk at the planetarium and see his family, before heading back to JPL in the morning).

There were some early pictures coming in of the clumpy areas in the Neptunian rings (the clumps had been spotted from Earth a few years before, which gave rise to some interesting theories about ring arcs and segments) that reminded me of his theory for ring formation, that he had mentioned in his Planets, Moons and Rings class the year before. I suggested to him that what we were seeing fit his theory to a T. He said, "Unfortunately, we'll never know."

The next morning, a little cock-up with the camera's tracking system, which should have worked like a telescope's clock drive and kept the camera pointing towards the same object, accounting for the spacecraft's motion, but instead got a bit of synch and caused some blurring/stretching to occur, revealed the existence of ring fragments in the a few to twenty km diameter range within those clumpy ring areas. The resolution of the camera would not have been able to pick up such small objects in the "still" picture, but with the errant time lapse effect caused by the shaky camera, the streaks they left behind became quite apparent. (This is the same effect used to discover tiny asteroids, which would be difficult to spot as point objects otherwise.) Vindication! and evidence for the theory, in other words. :)

[meranthi.livejournal.com]

My wedding was in there. ;)

Now why didn't I think of that. That's so cool!!!!!

And I love your memory. I honestly don't remember all that much about Voyager (though with astronomers for parents, you'd think I would).

[in-parentheses.livejournal.com]

Very cool!

What's your icon from? It's intriguing.

[saxikath]

It's Derek Jacobi as the Chorus in Branagh's Henry V.

[fizzixrat.livejournal.com]

Was Carolyn doing that report for the Denver Post at the time? I guess I hadn't realized that.

We actually had a class together at uni later on -- Esposito's Planets, Moons, and Rings class. She ended up doing her journalism master's at CU while working for one of the other LASP professors, and she's had some books about HST published since then.