The Farthest Page #4

CASANI:
As the launch vehicle

leaves the launchpad,

it has to roll through a certain angle

to get to the right direction

for departure,

and the rate that it rolls at

is a much higher rate

than the spacecraft would ever

normally experience flying,

and so the gyro hits the stops.

HANSEN-KOHARCHECK:

Us poor people on Earth,

we're like what is it doing?

CASANI:
For a couple of days

it was a real nail-biter.

People were asking us,

have you lost the spacecraft

and we would say we don't know for sure

because we didn't know for sure.

LINICK:

And the headline read "Mutiny in Space".

The Voyager spacecraft had decided

it just didn't want

to follow the instructions

that its human controllers

were giving it

and it was going to do

what it wanted to do.

BELL:
So early in the

mission it's like, oh, man,

is this mission going to be

plagued with problems?

Is there some fundamental flaw

in the design?

LOCATELL:

That was a cliff hanger.

That was the end of the mission.

It could have been

the end of the mission.

HANSEN-KOHARCHECK:

Fortunately, the person

who had written that code

was able to say this is OK,

it's doing this, it tried that,

it's doing this, it tried that

and calm everyone else down.

[bird sounds]

The limits were set simply too tight.

It needed to be able

to wiggle more and vibrate more.

[bird sounds]

NARRATOR:
Finally stabilized,

Voyager 2 was bound for Jupiter.

The launch of Voyager 1

was coming up fast,

so the team scrambled

to fine-tune the spacecraft's software

to head off another mutiny.

With the launch window closing soon,

Voyager 1 finally took off.

But rocket science

is famously complicated.

SPEAKER:

Centaur 6, Titan Centaur 6

has lifted off at 8:56 from here

at the Cape Canaveral

Air Force Station...

KOHLHASE:

We're thinking everything's OK,

and then we begin to hear

that something wasn't right.

CASANI:

I looked over at him

and he looked like he was

a little worried, you know.

And I said what's the matter, Charley?

And he says I don't know,

I don't think we're

going to make it, you know.

There was a leak in the propellant line,

and we were losing propellant overboard,

so while it was burning,

propellant was escaping

from the launch vehicle

and second stage never got

to deliver its full thrust

because it ran out of fuel.

STONE:
And so, the upper stage

which was a Centaur...

liquid hydrogen and oxygen stage...

had to make up for that.

CASANI:

And the Centaur is the stage

that's doing the guidance,

so the Centaur knows

that it's not reaching

the required velocity,

and when it separates

from the second stage

it knows it has to burn longer

to add more velocity.

KOHLHASE:

The Centaur had to use

1,200 pounds of extra propellant.

Now we're all thinking

is it going to have enough

left in the tanks

or is it going to run out of fuel?

Fortunately, it had three and

a half seconds of thrusting left

before it had run to fuel depletion.

Three and a half seconds,

so Voyager 1 just barely made it.

CASANI:

It wouldn't have gotten enough velocity

to get to Jupiter, you know,

so instead of getting

to Jupiter, you know,

we'd have gotten almost to Jupiter

and then we'd come back toward the sun,

which would not have been good.

[laughs]

[Gallagher & Lyle "Breakaway"]

I watch the distant lights

go down the runway

Disappear into the evening sky

Oh, you know I'm with you

on your journey

Never could say goodbye

LOCATELL:
And then of course,

you know, there's the thought

that it's out of our hands.

Now the major reason for this

mission was about to unfold,

that is the science.

But our role as keepers,

as progenitors, as...

our role had been finished.

[Gallagher & Lyle "Breakaway"]

Though I won't stop you,

I don't want you to

Break away

Fly across your ocean

Break away

Time has come for you

Break away

Fly across your ocean

Break away

Time has come

[radio signals and white noise]

NARRATOR:

Thanks to the dedicated work

of hundreds of the world's best

scientists and engineers,

the twin Voyagers had at last

embarked on their odyssey

across the solar system.

The first leg was almost

400 million miles to Jupiter.

SODERBLOM:

You can never really imagine...

you can try, but you can

never really imagine

what mother nature

will actually have in store

when you get there.

[classical music]

[classical music]

LAWRENCE KRAUSS:
It's worth

realizing that a human life ago,

less than 100 years ago, 87 years ago,

the universe consisted of one,

of one galaxy,

our Milky Way galaxy,

in a static eternal universe

with eternal empty space.

We didn't know about the other

hundred billion galaxies

a single human lifetime ago.

[classical string melody]

NARRATOR:

In January 1979,

Voyager 1 was coming up on its

first planetary encounter,

and Voyager 2 was four months behind.

[classical string melody]

SODERBLOM:

It seems like time really flew.

SMITH:

I don't think we really fully understood

before the first Jupiter encounter

just how intense it was going to be.

No, we didn't.

We found out.

[laughs]

STONE:

You start working on a mission in 1972,

you launch in 1977,

all of that there's no science,

it's all getting ready.

And then March '79... the flood.

[piano music]

[piano music]

TERRILE:

The encounters, they creep up on you.

LINICK:
When we were

approaching, every picture

was the greatest picture

ever taken of Jupiter.

HANSEN-KOHARCHECK:

In the beginning,

it would be just a little dot

getting bigger on the screen every day,

and as we would get closer and closer

the images became more dramatic.

BELL:

Incredibly strange and beautiful,

and now by Voyager revealed

in all of its splendor.

TERRILE:
That acceleration

as you're approaching encounters

is really something that becomes

very, very exciting.

We called it drinking

out of a fire hose, you know,

you're trying to take a little sip,

and this torrent of data is coming out.

JOURNALIST:

Would someone care to speculate

what you would say to Galileo Galilei

if he walked into the room today?

SMITH:
How... how,

how are you able to live so long?

[laughter]

STONE:

I think Galileo...

STONE:
Jupiter is more than

ten times the diameter of Earth,

it's huge, and it's mainly

hydrogen and helium,

there are no solid surface

on these planets.

These planets are liquid,

gas and liquid deep inside.

ANDREW INGERSOLL:

The gas is compressed

the farther down you go,

and it gets very hot indeed

and you would melt, vaporize, in fact,

if you tried to fly through Jupiter.

INGERSOLL:

Let me first modify your statement,

not that it was wrong...

INGERSOLL:
The atmospheric

scientists got long-range views

because we weren't looking

at tiny moons,

we were looking at the big planet,

and so we could see things going on

before the other groups

could see things,

and we were always the first

to start shouting.

SMITH:
Even to this day

we don't fly color detectors.

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