The Interstellar Age: Inside the 40-Year Voyager Mission

Bell (The Space Book), president of the Planetary Society, delivers a lucid account of the magnificent scientific accomplishments of the Voyager Missions with a cheerfulness that it deserves. Both probes were launched in 1977; Voyager 1 left the solar system in 2013, after returning breathtaking photographs of the outer planets, and Voyager 2 will do so in a few years. They should be able to “stay in communication with Earth and operate at least one instrument until sometime around 2025.” The Voyager probes exploited a rare alignment of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, which made it possible for a single spacecraft to pass by all four. Approved in 1972 after more ambitious probes were rejected, their construction was a miracle of improvisation by workaholic engineers and brilliant project managers, working with budgets so inadequate that some defects were not fixed after it was decided they would not spoil the mission. Bell describes the flybys, which produced an avalanche of new discoveries, but he gives equal space to the craft themselves, whose instruments (analog tapes, feeble computers) are museum curiosities today. Nevertheless, they worked to a marvelous degree, and readers will have no trouble sharing Bell’s exuberance at a remarkable human accomplishment. [em](Mar.) [/em]