The Farthest Page #8

SPEAKER:
OK.

Ladies and gentlemen,

we can start the briefing.

[tapping microphone]

SPEAKER:

I wanted to make a very brief statement.

We do have a problem on board

the Voyager 2 spacecraft.

AL HIBBS:

The spacecraft has a problem.

The scan platform operating mechanism

is not operating properly.

SPEAKER:
Make sure we

understand where we're headed

for the following instruments

are mounted on the platform,

the wide-angle camera,

the narrow-angle camera,

the infrared instrument,

the ultraviolet instrument

and the photopolarimeter.

SODERBLOM:

A frozen scan platform

could be a fatal, crippling event.

SMITH:
Yeah, that was

the darkest, the darkest day

of the whole mission.

SPEAKER:

There is circumstantial evidence...

SMITH:

I came into the auditorium,

and there was just gloom

on everybody's face.

SPEAKER:

You're beginning to speculate.

SMITH:

I quickly learned what had happened.

The scan platform had frozen.

SMITH:

The problem is not with the camera,

it's with the articulated platform

that moves all of the instruments.

Our cameras, as far as we know,

are working just fine,

it's just that we're taking

lots of pictures of black space.

SMITH:

The rest of the Saturn mission

and Uranus and Neptune were dead.

And seeing everything

that we were planning just gone,

just suddenly gone.

All of the science

that we had hoped to do,

and Uranus and Neptune...

there were no other spacecraft

that were going to be going there.

It was up to Voyager to do it,

and all of a sudden it looked

as though Voyager

was not going to do it.

It was devastating, it was...

[electronic inquisitive music]

SPEAKER:

So, we've analyzed the slew data.

HANSEN-KOHARCHECK:

It took a couple of days

while the engineering team went

to work diagnosing the problem.

SPEAKER:

We are going to command an azimuth slew

and an elevation slew

to the Saturn position...

STONE:

It turns out the scan platform

has small motors to rotate it,

and we could run it at slow speed...

tick, tick, tick, tick...

fast... medium speed or very fast.

(makes turning noise)

We were of course wanting

to look at lots of places,

so we had the thing looking

lots of places,

and the lubrication wasn't

adequate and it just jammed.

SMITH:

It was frozen sort of like a car

stuck in the, stuck in the snow.

You try to go forward

or backward little bit...

lil... and keep working on it

and try to get it out,

and that's what we did

with the scan platform.

We would try to push it

a little bit in one direction

and it would yield a little bit,

and then we'd push it

in the other direction,

and it would yield a little bit more,

and then we kept doing that

back and forth, back and forth,

and finally that was enough

to get the lubrication into the gears.

SODERBLOM:
It was freed up

and back came the spacecraft

and back came the imaging system,

and there was Saturn on exit.

SMITH:
[laughing]

Yeah.

["Us & Them," Pink Floyd]

TERRILE:
We were looking at

the shadow of Saturn on the rings,

and it was clearly

from this wild, crazy angle.

Wow. Holy cow, we're on

the other side of Saturn.

["Us & Them," Pink Floyd]

Us and them

And after all we're only

ordinary men...

SODERBLOM:

We felt like we were there.

Nobody even thought about it.

Voyager was part of us.

We...

Me and you...

PORCO:

All of planetary exploration to me

is a story about longing, it's

a longing to know ourselves.

It's a longing to understand

the significance

of our own existence.

It's a longing to communicate,

to say to the universe

we're here, you know, know us.

You know, where are you?

Forward! He cried

from the rear and

the front rank died

And the general sat,

and the lines...

NARRATOR:

In the grooves of the Golden Record

was another gift from us to them.

[guitar music]

DRAKE:
The Voyager record

has a set of pictures on it.

It depicts our civilization,

but we only had the ability

to do about a hundred pictures,

that was as much data as we could send,

so that was kind of hard.

LOMBERG:

It was a process of distillation.

You can't describe the Earth

in a hundred pictures.

You can't describe the Earth

in a thousand pictures,

but what art is about

is taking something that's small

but can represent the whole.

[guitar music]

DRAKE:

We thought it was very important

to put some pictures

of humans nude on the record

to show just what our anatomy

and physiology was really like.

NASA had been seriously criticized

about the Pioneer plaque.

There were actually letters

to the editors of newspapers

saying that NASA

was sending smut to space.

NARRATOR:
For Voyager,

NASA decided to play it safe.

Still, they gave the aliens

some hints about our bodies.

BELL:
Now it's five years

of cruising out to Uranus.

STONE:
Uranus would be

the most remote object yet

visited by a spacecraft,

and it's so remote

that it was not even known

until 200 years ago,

and it's a great distance out there,

and if we'd launched directly from Earth

it would have taken thirty years

to get there,

so we were very fortunate

that we could swing by Jupiter

and Saturn on our way.

SMITH:
I've been trying

to figure this thing out

for the past 25 years,

and it's very frustrating in a telescope

to look at that tiny little disc,

so the next few days

are going to be very exciting.

[piano music]

HANSEN-KOHARCHECK:

Once we got beyond Saturn,

essentially the engineers

threw out the rulebook

and said how are we going

to make this work?

How are we going

to take pictures of planets

this far from the sun?

[piano music]

BELL:

Voyager was the first

of a class of NASA spacecraft

that could be reprogrammed.

They could take what was on the computer

and just wipe it away

and give it a whole new set of software.

They trained the spacecraft to

pirouette like a ballet dancer,

basically you want to take

a picture of that thing

and it's going past you really fast,

so you spin the whole spacecraft

and follow it like this,

and so even though

it was darker at Uranus

and really dark at Neptune,

you could leave the shutter open

without smearing,

and that was just beautiful.

SODERBLOM:

We had all of the rich set of goodies

from Jupiter and from Saturn,

but Uranus was... was unknown.

[xylophone music]

NARRATOR:

In January 1986,

Voyager 2 closed in on Uranus.

It would be by far

the most remote planetary

encounter ever attempted.

[xylophone music]

TERRILE:

It was like taking something

that was almost fictional,

almost mythological,

and then seeing it as a real object.

BELL:
Spacecraft flew through

that system like a bull's eye

because Uranus is tilted on its side,

with this beautiful aquamarine

blue methane atmosphere,

and all these pictures,

every single one of them is like whoa!

And you could hear people just whoa!

And everybody would be doing something

and somebody would go whoa!

And everybody would turn and look up.

Oh, my gosh, look at that!

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