The Interstellar Age Read Free Page A

project, it’s critical that the two commanders at the top of the org chart, the project manager and the project scientist, are consistently on the same page and have an excellent working relationship. Each is personally responsible for the success of the mission—to NASA and, ultimately, to Congress and the taxpayers who are footing the bill. Over the course of more than four decades since the Project began, Voyager has had ten project managers. But during that entire time, the mission has had only one project scientist: Edward C. Stone.
    Ed Stone is a space weatherman, a physicist who studies the ways that high-energy particles called cosmic rays travel through space and interact with the magnetic fields and atmospheres of the sun and planets. Cosmic rays are a form of high-energy radiation made of protons and the nuclei of atoms, and they travel through the universe at nearly the speed of light. Exactly where they come from is still a mystery—they could be caused by massive supernova explosions of dying stars, or by the powerful black holes in the centersof active galaxies, for example. Regardless of how they formed, scientists like Ed can use the properties of cosmic rays to understand the details of the ebb and flow of the solar wind (the stream of high-energy particles coming off the sun) and the way that wind is carried by the sun’s magnetic field and interacts with the magnetic fields of the planets. Measurements of this kind of “space weather” were some of the first scientific measurements ever made from space satellites, and Ed Stone has been a prolific scientist in this game since the beginning.
    In 1972, Ed was appointed as the project scientist for Voyager . Over the course of the mission he’s had other important roles as well, including serving as the director of JPL from 1991 to 2001 and as the PI for Voyager ’s Cosmic Ray Subsystem (CRS) instrument, which is making the measurements that are most closely aligned to his scientific background and interests. Project scientists have to figure out how to achieve the optimum match between the science needs of a mission and its engineering and budget constraints. They also sometimes have to make tough decisions about which experiments and which observations will or will not be done. If members of the science team can’t agree on how to carve up available resources (power, time, data volume) for competing measurements, it is the job of the project scientist to step in to arbitrate, or to just plain decide.
    “It turns out,” Ed reflected, “that’s a much more critical role than I had thought ahead of time, and that’s because ultimately what science is all about is making discoveries. By deciding to make this observation rather than that one, you’re effectively deciding that that group of scientists gets to make a discovery and this group doesn’t.”
    Ed Stone’s impeccable record as a careful and thoughtful scientist, his patient and friendly demeanor, and his ability to work fairly with ten project managers and hundreds of Voyager scientists and engineers have established him as an effective and respected project scientist, as well as a widely recognized spokesperson for the entire Project during press conferences and media appearances. Voyager is run by committee, and consensus is most often the ruling doctrine. But if things were different, I can easily envision Ed Stone as the king of Voyager , ruling benevolently over an empire that extends out to the farthest reaches of the known solar system, and beyond.
    REMOTE SENSING
    Astronomers traditionally study stars or galaxies; geologists typically study rock outcroppings or map oil and mineral deposits; meteorologists study the weather and climate and try to make forecasts—these are relatively traditional and established fields of scientific study. But what do you call a person who studies the science of the planets, moons, asteroids, and comets around us and has to use the theories and