The Farthest

1

[wind blowing, static radio and chimes]

[wind blowing, electronic sounds,

faint radio chatter]

[wind blowing, electronic sounds]

[radio static, faint radio chatter]

[wind blowing, wolf howling]

[faint Morse code style beeping]

LARRY SODERBLOM:

It is really true

that you can only explore

the solar system

for the first time once.

Ah... Voyager did that.

[whale sounds]

TOM KRIMIGIS:

How could one be so lucky?

It's a dream and it came true.

[Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 in F

(Golden Record)]

BRAD SMITH:

Fifty years from now,

Voyager will be the science project

of the 20th century.

The mission.

The big mission.

[Melancholy Blues (Louis Armstrong)]

CANDY HANSEN-KOHARCHECK:

It opened our eyes to worlds,

to real worlds.

[aircraft/rocket noises]

[faint plucked guitar string]

FRANK DRAKE:

This may in the long run be

the only evidence that we ever existed.

[faint plucked guitar string]

CAROLYN PORCO:

Voyager to me was Homeric,

it was years of passing

across the solar system

from one planet to the other

and then it was a week or two

of frenzied activity

and discovery and conquest

and then it was, well,

back in the boats,

oars in the water and

then on to the next conquest.

[faint white noise]

["Wishing on a Star," Rose Royce]

I'm wishing on a star

to follow where you are

I'm wishing on a dream

SUZANNE DODD:

It is the little engine that could.

Nobody really knows how it does it,

but everybody's rooting for it.

...and I wish on all

the rainbows that I've seen

TOM SPILKER:

Every second, it goes to another place

where we have never been before.

...who really dream,

and I'm wishing on tomorrow

DAVE LINICK:

Voyager takes the cake.

It's the most audacious mission.

Who'd have thought

that we'd actually be able

to do that in 1977?

I'm wishing on a star...

[music finishes with final line]

[soft piano]

NARRATOR:
In 1977, a team

of scientists and engineers

launched a mission

of staggering ambition.

Voyager.

The initial idea was a grand

tour of the outermost planets...

Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

What were their atmospheres like?

Their moons?

At the time, our knowledge

of these worlds was scant.

[mechanical noises

and piano music plays]

ED STONE:
We knew a little

because you can observe

from the Earth with telescopes.

DON GURNETT:

We knew for example at Jupiter

that there were moons...

Io, Europa, Ganymede

and Callisto going around.

[soft piano continues]

STONE:
We knew that

there were winds on Jupiter,

we knew about the great

red spot on Jupiter,

we knew that there was

trapped radiation,

so we knew there was a magnetic field.

[soft piano]

CHARLEY KOHLHASE:

It was big.

No, let's see, what did we know?

We knew they were all gas giants,

mostly made up of hydrogen and helium

and some methane on the outer planets.

[soft piano continues]

TOM KRIMIGIS:

For Saturn, we knew about the rings

and we knew about the major satellites,

but hardly anything more than that,

and it was all very fuzzy.

[soft piano continues

and rattling noise comes in]

HEIDI HAMMEL:

I had been staring at these planets

through some of the best

telescopes on Earth,

and yet all I could see was fuzzy blobs.

[soft piano continues, chain

rattling, squeaking, clanking]

FRAN BAGENAL:

Astronomers had worked pretty hard

to know what the physical make-up was,

there were some basic characteristics,

but their real nature,

what they were really made of

and what the means, moons, were like,

we had none of that,

just little glimpses.

[soft piano continues, now

accompanied by light guitar]

[sea and bird sounds]

HANSEN-KOHARCHECK:

Human beings are a curious bunch.

We want to know

what's around the corner.

We have to go past

that next bend in the road,

so it's some sort

of innate drive, I think,

that we have, as a species.

[light guitar & glockenspiel

music plays in the background]

STONE:
One of the key things

that made this mission possible

was gravity assist.

That is when you fly by Jupiter,

you turn the corner

and you take a little bit

of Jupiter's orbital speed with you.

Like a slingshot,

so you better make sure

Saturn's in the right place.

NARRATOR:

The positions of the outer planets

presented an opportunity.

A rare alignment meant the time

needed to cross the solar system

could be slashed.

[light guitar& glockenspiel music

continues in the background]

SODERBLOM:

It would go Jupiter boom, Saturn boom,

Uranus boom, Neptune boom.

HAMMEL:
The planets had to be

lined up in just the right way

to allow one spacecraft to do that.

SODERBLOM:

And that aligning up only occurs rarely.

HAMMEL:
That only happens

once like once every hundred,

more than a hundred years.

JIM BELL:

...175 years, something like that.

KOHLHASE:

Once every 176 years.

BELL:

The previous time it happened,

exploration was wooden sailing ships.

[guitar music continues]

[ocean]

KRIMIGIS:
It was named

"The Outer Planets Grand Tour,"

and the cost of the mission

was estimated to be

in excess of a billion dollars.

The NASA administrator

went to the President,

and he said the last time the planets

were lined up like that,

President Jefferson was sitting

at your desk, and he blew it.

So, Mr. Nixon laughed

and said all right, just do two.

So, only two planets.

[electric guitar music begins]

NARRATOR:

Jupiter and Saturn were officially a go.

It would be a less grand...

but still ambitious... tour.

Yet the Voyager team

wasn't ready to give up

on going farther.

As they assembled the spacecraft

in a giant hangar,

some of them kept a secret goal alive.

[sounds of light turning on]

KRIMIGIS:

We knew right from the get-go

that we were going to try

as hard as we could

to extend the mission

to go to Uranus and Neptune.

KOHLHASE:

We designed that in from the beginning.

We knew that we were endowing

Voyager with the option

if the chance was there to use it.

[percussion kicks in as music continues]

JOHN CASANI:
We didn't want to

build anything into the design

that would have prevented us

from going further.

So, it was a mission

within a mission, yeah.

[heartbeat, bottle falls,

water splashes]

BELL:
A group of scientists

and visionaries realized

that these spacecraft

would leave the solar system.

They figured don't let

this opportunity pass,

you're going to throw a bottle

into the ocean.

Put a message in it.

[high pitched string music begins]

NARRATOR:
What would we

want to tell intelligent aliens

about our planet?

What would we want

to tell them about us?

The driving force behind the message

was the astronomer Carl Sagan.

WATERS:
Would you expect someone

to find this record out there?

Is there something out there?

CARL SAGAN:

Well, nobody knows.

One of the great unsolved questions

is whether we're alone or whether...

JON LOMBERG:

Carl Sagan has become probably

the best-known scientist

of the late 20th century.

He was a working scientist,

he played a key role

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