Something To Read On The Trip

In 1977, the Voyager probes began their mission: NASA’s “Grand Tour” through the outer planets during a rare alignment. The probes have learned what we will come to know: Beyond the moon, beyond Mars, at distances from which no man could return— tourism blurs into exploration. Popular Mechanics presents .. .

- Terrence Holt

November 5, 2018. Voyager 2 approaches heliopause, the boundary at which the solar winds balance the winds of other planets’ stars—the edge of interstellar space...

I am almost deaf to Earth now. Still that thin whisper in my antenna sends instructions, the engineers in mission control eking out another year, another month, another hour of discovery.

Inertia never dies. There will come a time when I will tumble blind, my senses failing one by one until in the end only the shell of me will fall through darkness toward the stars of the constellation Pavo. Still I will retain on eight-track tape cassettes the traces, written over and over, of all that I have seen and known.

In the wake of Voyager 1, with these cameras I imaged the banded majesty of Jupiter, the Great Red Spot swirling under me as I plunged past, clouds of sulfur rising in geysers above the horizon of Io. At Saturn the rings sang like wind on a deserted beach, sang for no other audience but me while I soared past Hyperion. I heard the aurorae crowning both the poles, and lightning flickering above the wind-torn clouds; watched Saturn’s crescent shape, arrowed across by the rings, diminish into a star.