The Interstellar Age Read Free

own moon (which had also, only recently, become a bona fide place, rather than a two-dimensional icon in the sky). The ability to ride along with Voyager , to be a passenger on this trailblazing journey destined to discover entirely new worlds, to see history made , was irresistible to the young me. In fact, it still is.
    EXPEDITION LEADERS
    Famous ships of exploration are usually led by a famous captain or commander, like Christopher Columbus, Ferdinand Magellan, James Cook, Ernest Shackleton, or Neil Armstrong. The Voyagers , however, are led by a committee of captains—managers, engineers, and scientists from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and elsewhere who were tasked with overseeing the design, manufacture, and operation of the most ambitious robotic planetary exploration mission yet attempted—and a pair of equally powerful commanders, a project manager and a project scientist.
    In NASA and JPL parlance, Voyager is a “Project” (capital P ), run by a Project Office (capital O ) and divided organizationally into a number of subsidiary offices. These include the Mission Planning Office, where the detailed spacecraft trajectories were designed; the Flight Science Office, which includes the science team and which is responsible for making sure the mission achieves its scientific objectives; the Flight Engineering Office, with the engineers and managerswho designed and built Voyager ’s power, thermal control, communications, and propulsion modules; the Flight Operations Office, which provides the procedures and software needed to plan and actually operate the spacecraft and its science instruments (and which includes two teams of JPL scientists and engineers: the spacecraft operations team, who directly communicate with the spacecraft and who monitor its status and health over time, and the science support team, who serve as the interface between the science team and spacecraft operations team); and the Ground Data Systems Office, which provides the hardware and software needed to send commands up to the spacecraft (“uplink”) as well as to receive and process data back down from the spacecraft (“downlink”).
    The project manager leads the Project Office and is the engineering and management commander of Voyager , responsible for getting the spacecraft built and tested, keeping the mission safely operating on time and on budget, and overseeing the hundreds of contractors and several thousand engineers, technicians, and other managers on the Project. The project scientist runs the Flight Science Office and the science team—a group of scientists, engineers, technicians, managers, and students from around the world who designed, built, and operate the science instruments and who interpret the downlinked data. The project scientist is the scientific commander of Voyager , responsible for making sure the mission achieves its science goals on time and on budget and for coordinating and herding (like cats) the hundreds of scientists on the Project.
    Each Voyager carries scientific instruments for eleven investigations. These include wide-angle and high-resolution cameras for imaging and spacecraft navigation; radio systems for studyinggravitational fields and planetary radio emissions; infrared and ultraviolet spectrometers to measure chemical compositions; a polarization sensor for surface, atmosphere, and planetary ring composition; a magnetometer measuring magnetic fields; and four devices for studying charged particles, cosmic rays, plasma (hot ionized gases), and plasma waves. Scientists conducting each investigation are organized into instrument teams, and the leader of each instrument team is called the principal investigator (or PI). The PIs are responsible for the design, construction, and operation of each of their instruments, and together they form the Science Steering Group, which is chaired by the project scientist and which reports to the project manager.
    In this kind of committee-led