The Interstellar Age Read Free Page B

methods of some, many, or all those fields at once? The term “planetary scientist” is a relatively new one among academic professions, and it’s one that the Voyagers have helped establish. We’re a sort of jack-of-all-trades kind of people, thinking about science questions on scales from the planetwide (like from a mapping camera on an orbiting spacecraft), to the minuscule (like individual little rock piles or sand piles studied by a rover). Some ofus are more interested in astrobiology—the study of life in space—than anything else. A common approach among planetary scientists is to use remote sensing , very remote sensing, to do our science, because except for those lucky dozen astronauts who’ve had theprivilege of walking on another world, none of the rest of us can actually set foot on the places we’re studying.
    We use technology to experience the place remotely. Everyone actually uses remote sensing of a sort all the time in our daily lives, using our senses to interrogate the world out of our reach to, for example, judge distances and sizes or to identify objects from their shapes or colors or smells. All animals do it one way or another; plants, too. The difference for planetary scientists is the use of robotic sensors: cameras acting as eyes to provide sight, spectrometers or sampling probes acting as organs for smell and taste, arms and scoops and drills providing a sense of touch, radio antennas for “hearing” and “talking.” And even a sixth sense comes into play sometimes, one that is familiar to hikers or geologists working out in the field: a sense of place or context enabled by mobility—the ability to roam and climb and explore a place from multiple perspectives, or to leave it entirely and head for new ground. Flyby and orbiter spacecraft, and rovers on the ground, provide these essential remote-sensing capabilities for us, sending back the pictures and sensory data from remote places.
    It’s easy to think of spacecraft like the Voyagers as being alive, imparting to them feelings and other human attributes. They are so far away, and it is so cold and dark. They must be lonely. Some of them, like the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity , areso cute with their long necks and bulging eyes! They must be plucky, intrepid,courageous, and a dozen other grand adjectives of exploration, in order to survive and thrive for so long. They are out there, working tirelessly, making discoveries and braving dangerous environments with no rest, no vacation, and no pay. We’ve got robots exploring the solar system for us!
    Well, as fun (or creepy) as that is to imagine, it misses the point. They are machines, built and launched and operated remotely by smart and clever people. Spacecraft like the Voyagers are high-tech, to be sure, but not sentient or any more capable than their relatively primitive (by our twenty-first-century standards) software. “Don’t anthropomorphize the spacecraft,” Voyager imaging team member Torrence Johnson recalls Project Manager John Casani saying. “They don’t like it.”
    “The sense of exploration we get with these missions is a very ‘human explorer’ kind of feeling, even though our senses are on the distant spacecraft,” my friend, planetary science colleague, and Voyager imaging team member Heidi Hammel says. “I feel like an old-fashioned mountain climber when I am making discoveries, seeing something for the first time, realizing that no human before me has ever seen what I am seeing. It takes your breath away—for just a moment you feel a pause in time as you know you are crossing a boundary into a new realm of knowledge. And then you plunge in, and you are filled with childlike joy and wonder and delight.” Like me, Heidi cut her teeth in our business with Voyager , and like me, she got hooked on the thrill of exploration and discovery. “And then you get serious again, and start thinking about how it fits into what you already know,” she