The Farthest Page #9

There was no Internet,

there was no news stream

going out to live CNN.

The only way to experience

that sensation

of being one of only

a small group of people

who saw a point of light become a world,

the only way to experience it

was to be in that room.

STONE:

Well, just about two minutes ago,

Voyager 2 passed through

its closest approach to Uranus.

[applause]

SMITH:

The new ring is right here.

Now, I don't...

[laughter]

you're telling me you can't see it.

I can.

JOURNALIST:

Dr. Soderblom,

as you whizzed through your explanation,

I couldn't put it all together,

could you try that again?

SODERBLOM:
Slower?

[laughter]

JOURNALIST:

Slower and a few more details.

SODERBLOM:

I thought that was pretty slow.

[guitar and strings music]

STONE:

Every time we arrived at a new planet

there were always surprises,

even though we had gotten a lot smarter.

For instance, before Voyager,

all the magnetic fields

have the magnetic pole near

the rotation axis of the planet,

and that was true for Jupiter,

it was true for Saturn,

and then we flew by Uranus and

the pole was near the equator.

BAGENAL:

There's been a lot of speculation

about the magnetosphere of Uranus.

Would there be one,

what would it be like?

And the magnetosphere of Uranus

is far more weird and wonderful...

BAGENAL:
We found

the planet's tipped on its side,

but the magnetic field is then tipped

relative to the spin axis,

so you have this huge contortion

in the magnetic field

as the planet spins around,

just bizarre.

HAMMEL:

At that point in its orbit,

the planet didn't look exciting,

and part of that is Uranus itself,

holding its secrets back.

SMITH:

That had to be, I guess, one of the...

well, disappointments in that Uranus

was not more photogenic than it was.

It was actually pretty blah.

HAMMEL:

Ah... poor Uranus.

[laughs]

Poor Uranus.

[guitar and piano music]

[guitar and piano music]

TERRILE:

The big stars of the Uranus encounter

were actually the moons.

[guitar music]

KOHLHASE:

If you're going to go to Neptune,

you still have to use Uranus

for gravity assist.

The gravity assist aiming point

at Uranus

just happened to be pretty close

to the orbit of Miranda.

If Uranus has been the last stop,

the scientists might have wanted

to go to a larger moon,

which ironically, I don't see

how anything could have been

any more interesting than Miranda...

[string music]

It looked like a jumbled-up mess.

[string music]

HAMMEL:
This moon looked like

it had been ripped to pieces

and then just sort of shoved

back together again.

SMITH:
Whoa!

Come look at this.

SPILKER:
Going up to the screen

and pointing and saying,

"did you... look at that, look at that."

HAMMEL:

No... nobody was ready for Miranda.

SODERBLOM:

There were enormous cliffs and gashes,

one of them, you can see

the edge of a cliff,

it's got to be ten kilometers tall.

The gravity on Miranda is so weak,

if you jumped off that cliff,

you could read the newspaper

on the way down,

but when you hit the bottom

you'd still be going

a hundred miles an hour,

so it probably wouldn't...

it would be the last newspaper you read.

NARRATOR:
At Uranus, Voyager

detected intense radiation belts

and discovered two new rings

and ten tiny moons.

BAGENAL:
We were just about

to present all our results,

we were all about to have

the big final finale

press conference and...

came back from breakfast,

and I went to go watch

the shuttle being launched...

VO IN ARCHIVE:

We have main engines start...

4... 3... 2... 1... and lift-off!

Lift off of the 25th

space shuttle mission,

and it has cleared the tower.

BAGENAL:

...and we thought, OK, great,

we'll watch the shuttle launch

and then we'll go

to the press conference,

but of course that was Challenger.

VO IN ARCHIVE:

Engines throttling up.

Three engine now at 104%.

Challenger, go with throttle up.

Roger, go with throttle up.

[soft piano music]

SPILKER:

People were just like astonished.

This gasp of like, oh, my,

did you see that,

did it really blow up?

Because we had stopped in our meeting

so everyone could watch it,

and then there was just silence,

people were crying.

[soft piano music]

SMITH:

Well, what can you say?

You knew right away that

a bunch of people were dead.

VO IN ARCHIVE:

Flight Throttle. Go ahead.

RSO reports vehicle exploded.

Copy.

DODD:
And then of course

they showed replays and replays

and replays over and over

and over again.

MAN IN ARCHIVE:

We have no downlink.

OK, everybody, just stay

off the telephones.

Make sure you maintain all your data,

start pulling it together.

SPILKER:

The Challenger accident happened

as we were receding from Uranus.

I have this vivid memory

of picture after picture

of the crescent Uranus coming back

and the replay

of the Challenger explosion,

and it was just devastating.

RONALD REAGAN:
Today is a day

for mourning and remembering.

Nancy and I are pained to the core

over the tragedy

of the shuttle Challenger.

We know we share this pain

with all of the people of our country.

This is truly a national loss.

I know it's hard to understand,

but sometimes painful things

like this happen.

It's all part of the process

of exploration and discovery.

It's all part of taking a chance

and expanding man's horizons.

The future doesn't belong

to the faint hearted,

it belongs to the brave.

[sad string music plays]

DODD:
During these closest

approach time periods,

we would have hundreds

of reporters come to JPL,

and when the Challenger

exploded, everybody just left.

[nearly silent save for ring

of unattended microphone]

[piano music]

KRAUSS:

Those cosmic questions we hope to learn

by sending our machines out,

the very same questions

that you and I and every child

has asked themselves.

Where do we come from, are we alone,

what's the universe made of,

how will it end?

All of these basic questions

are the questions that drive science.

[piano music]

[traffic]

[machines beeping]

STONE:

Finally at Neptune, Voyager has begun

the last of a decade's worth

of encounters

with the outer planets.

BELL:

It was another three and a half years

to get out to Neptune.

They had to reprogram

the spacecraft again,

give it, teach it some new tricks,

to work in this even darker environment,

even colder environment.

BAGENAL:

If we take the Earth

being one astronomical unit

from the sun, or AU for short.

Neptune is 30 times that distance.

STONE:

When we launched Voyager,

there was no capability to get

any images back from 30 AU.

That capability happened

all after launch.

It involved taking two 34-meter antennas

and adding them to a 70-meter antenna.

VLA RADIO CONTROL: Copy, we're

ready to run that observation.

STONE:
It meant using the entire

Very Large Array in New Mexico,

27 antennas to collect

the very weak signal

that we could get back from 30 AU.

BELL:
The flybys past Jupiter,

Saturn and Uranus

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