The Farthest Page #5

You get a much higher-resolution

image in black and white,

and so when we want to make color,

we take them through different filters

and then on the ground

you put it together

and make a color image out of it.

[low dramatic electronic rhythm music]

INGERSOLL:

You go to Jupiter

and you have a storm that's been

around for more than 300 years,

that's the Great Red Spot.

You could fit two or three

Earths inside it.

When Voyager started getting

close-up images,

we realized that it was very active,

and that deepened the mystery

of how these big storms could even exist

with all this turbulence going on.

SMITH:
It was swallowing up

clouds and spitting out others.

We knew that it was a vortex,

but to see it in action...

NARRATOR:
Another feature

of Jupiter's dynamic environment

posed a great danger to Voyager.

Powerful radiation might destroy

the spacecraft's electronics.

BELL:

Every day you're wondering

did we build the spacecraft well enough?

Did we anticipate

all the possible things

that could go wrong?

[low dramatic electronic rhythm music]

BELL:
You're approaching

this monster magnetic field,

this monster radiation

environment on purpose,

because you need to get close

because you want to see

all the little moons

and the clouds and the storms

and you want to slingshot on to Saturn,

but you just don't know

if you're going to survive.

Thing gets fried, you lose the mission.

Still out there physically

intact probably,

but unable to communicate

with it, the mission's over.

LOCATELL:
Two months before

shipping to the Cape for launch,

the scientists were predicting

that the magnetic fields around Jupiter

were intense enough that they

would accelerate particles.

Whoa! We were hearing

initially 40,000 volts,

that would be the end of our spacecraft.

Cabling on these appendages

were conductors

that would take these destroying pulses

and just feed them right

into our systems and kill us,

so we needed to ground everything.

We didn't have time

to go through the normal design reviews,

so in order to get this

protection done quickly enough,

an ad hoc team was formed

and we did some things

that were out of the ordinary,

very out of the ordinary.

I can remember asking

one of the technicians

to go out and buy aluminum foil.

It was the only material

that was available to us.

Normally our procurement

of spacecraft hardware supplies,

materials, are a much more

sophisticated process.

We're actually cutting continuous strips

and then cleaning them

with wipes and alcohol

and then finally wrapping these

on all of our exterior cabling,

but yeah, same material

that's in your Christmas turkey.

I don't think we created

any shortage per se.

It may have been a local shortage

in the local grocery store

for a few days

until they reordered right.

Your turkey wrapping

is protecting Voyager,

and now fast forward, you know,

did we know whether we had done enough?

[radiation sounds Voyager

recorded at Jupiter]

NARRATOR:

Voyager survived the onslaught

and went on to record signals

that led to a discovery.

DON GURNETT:

If you had the right kind of antennas

on your ears, you could go out

and hear what we record.

I'm going to call them radio sounds

because we have to detect them

with antennas.

Amazingly we heard all kinds of sounds.

[whistling frequency sounds]

Whistlers.

These things that go,

[whistling sound] like that.

Yeah, whistlers mean lightning.

There are lightning flashes at Jupiter

that would go halfway

from the east coast of the United States

to the west coast.

That was the first detection

of lightning

on a planet other than Earth.

NARRATOR:

The two Voyagers were poised

to study Jupiter's little known moons.

[background music,

fast strings with slow piano chords]

[high pitched radio noises]

Having picked up 36,000 miles an hour

from Jupiter's gravity assist,

the spacecraft were now traveling fast.

[background music,

fast strings with slow piano chords]

SODERBLOM:

When you're on a flyby mission,

there ain't no second chance.

KOHLHASE:

We were getting pictures,

they were getting better and better,

and you could begin to see detail

as these moons got bigger.

You know the dread you have

is that you don't want to see

a lot of worlds that look

like Earth's moon.

Let's face it, it's dull.

SODERBLOM:

I think everyone figured they would be

just battered ice-balls, you know,

kind of like the highlands of the moon,

nothing but impact craters.

And when we saw Callisto,

basically it's totally hammered, right,

it's saturated with impact craters.

Ganymede shows a lot of

interesting grooves and ridges,

but it's pretty blasted

with impact craters.

NARRATOR:

Every crater lasts for eons

because no forces were present

to resculpt the surface.

The first two moons were dormant worlds.

SODERBLOM:

And then as we went into the inner two.

KOHLHASE:
You could not see

craters on either one of them.

Well, this was encouraging,

because now we think maybe this mission

is going to find a lot of diversity.

BELL:
Discovering this

billiard ball smooth icy crust

of Europa with cracks in it

and what looked like plates of ice

that might be moving

relative to each other,

the best explanation for that

is that there's a thick ocean

of liquid water, salty water

underneath that icy crust.

More ocean water

than on the entire Earth,

probably two or three times.

It's the largest ocean

in the solar system

in a moon going around Jupiter.

SPILKER:

And then of course, you know,

kind of the showstopper

for Voyager, we get to Io.

TERRILE:
Io, of course,

Io was the star of the show

and we didn't learn that

until after the encounter.

[soft piano music]

INGERSOLL:

Everyone had gone home,

and Linda Morabito,

an engineer whose job

was to find out the positioning

and the orbit of the spacecraft,

noticed some bumps on images of Io.

LINDA MORABITO:

I was on the mission

as a mission navigator,

and our job involved just looking back

over the shoulder of the spacecraft

to say, OK, one more picture

of the realm of Jupiter,

so it wasn't high-priority work.

SMITH:

It was an optical navigation image,

and Linda saw this strange thing

on the limb.

MORABITO:

An enormous object emerged, enormous.

And the first thing I said

to myself... What is that?

And I'm like it looks

like another satellite

in the picture emerging from behind Io.

An object that size,

at that range, at that distance,

would have been seen from Earth,

it was sufficiently large.

I felt with certainty,

it's the only thing I knew,

that I was seeing something

that had never been seen before.

This was an umbrella-shaped plume

rising 250 kilometers

above the surface of Io

with volcanic activity.

[soft piano music]

I found the very first evidence

of active volcanism

on a world beyond the Earth.

[soft piano music]

STONE:
It was so hard

to believe that a little moon

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