The Farthest Page #10

had sped up the spacecraft too,

so it's going even faster,

so enormous amounts

of pressure, and one shot.

[light keyboard music]

NARRATOR:

In the summer of 1989,

Voyager 2 finally came up

on the ice giant Neptune.

Thanks to slingshots at Jupiter,

Saturn and Uranus,

the trip was almost 20 years

shorter than a direct approach,

one without gravity assist.

[music playing]

HANSEN-KOHARCHECK:

There it was just sitting

out on the edge of our solar system

waiting for somebody to come out

and appreciate its beauty.

Just waiting for the day

that humans would get out there,

and go wow!

HAMMEL:

I had been taking pictures of Neptune

from the ground where

we couldn't see very much.

You know, in my head imagining

what it might look like

and seeing that turned

into reality, it's a rush.

BAGENAL:

Looking at this blue, bright blue orb,

it was evocative of the Earth,

which was bizarre for the last

planet that we were flying by.

HAMMEL:

I was a meticulous log taker

and I would make little

notations in these logs

and I would draw little pictures,

and you could see

what's this little dark spot,

bright clouds, I'm like wow!

Wow! Exclamation point!

And I'd draw pictures and arrows.

The most surprising thing

was a giant dark spot.

Nobody had any idea that would be there.

It's huge.

It's like a hole in the planet.

So we called it The Great Dark Spot

because we're not very original

when it comes to names.

[electric guitar music]

INGERSOLL:

We had to basically make a forecast

of the storms on Neptune

in order to point the cameras

during the last day,

and at the same time

there was a hurricane

off the east coast of the US,

and the weather forecasters

were trying to forecast that hurricane,

but they were trying to forecast

it twelve hours in advance

and they were having a lot of trouble

because the storm

kept changing position.

And we were just calmly plotting

points on graph paper

and then said, OK, two weeks from now,

this storm is going to be

right here and it usually was.

[electric guitar music]

BAGENAL:

At Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus,

the goal was to do a flyby

that would take the spacecraft

on to the next planet.

When it came to Neptune

we knew that that was the last planet

that we were going to fly by,

and so we could take

a different trajectory.

This allowed us to get a really

spectacular view of the rings

and then look back on the system

in a way that was quite beautiful.

TERRILE:
Think about imaging

the rings of Neptune.

They have reflectivity which

is twice as dark as soot,

and the light that's falling on them

is a thousand times fainter

than on Earth.

So you have one one-thousandth the light

and you're trying to image something

which is twice as dark as soot

against a jet-black background.

SMITH:
More than one ring can be

seen even in the raw images,

the so-called ring arcs,

and it seemed reasonable that

this was indeed the lost arc

that our imaging team raiders

were looking for.

CROWD:
Oh dear!

SMITH:

Now you're going to turn on me, right?

[laughter]

KOHLHASE:
We knew at Neptune

we wanted a close flyby of Triton,

which was a huge world around Neptune.

SODERBLOM:

If you looked at them on the way in,

they weren't lined up.

One's up here, one's down here.

And so, what are you going to do?

Well, there was a way...

fly over the north pole,

very close to Neptune

to bend the spacecraft

so it would go down.

BELL:
But the meant getting to

within just a few thousand miles

of the cloud tops skimming the surface.

And they had to hit that,

you know, exactly right.

SODERBLOM:

There was a lot of concern

that we didn't know enough

about Neptune's atmosphere

to really be sure that

the spacecraft would not tumble.

BELL:

Just a slight error in the calculations

and instead of skimming

across the cloud tops,

you're skimming into the clouds

and the spacecraft burns up.

Slight error the other way,

you go a little too far,

you don't bend enough,

maybe you run right into Triton

and crash, and that's the end

of the mission.

You don't have enough time,

you have to make your last best guess,

hit the send button.

[atmospheric suspenseful music]

It would have been just fascinating

to be hanging on

to that spacecraft, right?

Skimming over these beautiful

blue cloud tops of Neptune

and then as you come

over the pole of Neptune

seeing that big moon Triton rise up...

[atmospheric suspenseful music]

TERRILE:

After several billion miles of journey

to get us to within a few kilometers

of where we needed to be,

it's just absolutely remarkable.

You know, threading

an incredible needle.

SODERBLOM:

Southern hemisphere of Triton

is entirely covered with nitrogen ice,

and as we flew past,

we were able to look down

at markings on the surface

of the polar cap.

We were putting together

a mosaic of Triton's globe,

but we couldn't get things

to line up quite right.

Some of the dark streaks, two

in particular would not line up.

BELL:

He's like just scratching his head,

like I have no idea

what's going on here.

This guy's one of the world's experts

on anything having to do

with planets and moons,

and he can't figure this out.

SODERBLOM:
I said, well,

let's put it in a stereo viewer,

red and blue glasses.

And the images fused

into a three-dimensional model

and up popped these geysers.

[atmospheric suspenseful music]

SODERBLOM:
And I said holy moly,

and so we knew what we had.

[music playing]

[music playing]

BAGENAL:

These plumes.

Black geysers spewing out this stuff.

HAMMEL:

The plumes extending out of the surface

for like kilometers.

TERRILE:

We were seeing eruptions on a world

which should have been

just a frozen cinder.

The last place we would have expected

to see further dynamics,

further eruptions

was at a moon this remote

in the solar system.

SODERBLOM:

Just because an idea's crazy,

it's not necessarily wrong.

CROWD:
[laughter]

NARRATOR:
Geysers.

Volcanoes on Io.

Hints of a giant ocean of liquid water

under Europa's icy crust.

Each of these features is

evidence of a source of energy.

And that's a prerequisite

for life as we know it.

SPILKER:

We knew this was the last planet,

Voyager would explore

before it headed on

for the rest of its journey,

and so I think

the times together as a team,

the times to look at the pictures, talk,

meet together, became more precious.

HANSEN-KOHARCHECK:

I was passing by the secretary's desk

and she said, oh, Candy,

there's a reporter

that wants to talk to you.

And he said, the countdown clock

just went from minus,

counting down, to counting up.

Voyager's now leaving Neptune.

And he said how does that make you feel?

And in that moment,

I dissolved into tears.

[piano music]

BELL:

After the spacecraft went past,

it turned around and looked back,

and there's this beautiful

crescent Neptune and Triton,

and people realized that's the end

of the planetary part of Voyager.

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