Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Looking back on Voyager’s 45th Anniversary

Episode Date: March 8, 2023

Planetary Radio’s creator Mat Kaplan guest hosts for this look back at the Jet Propulsion Lab’s celebration of the 45th anniversary of the Voyager mission. Stick around for his conversation with Ann Druyan, creative director for the Golden Record carried by the probes. Mat and Bruce Betts reunite for this week’s What’s Up and space trivia contest.Discover more at: https://www.planetary.org/planetary-radio/2023-voyager-45th-anniversarySee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Revisiting our celebration of the Voyager anniversary this week on Planetary Radio. Hello again, everyone. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. Yes, I'm back for this special edition of our show that features our 2022 celebration of the Voyager mission, those twin spacecraft that began their journeys more than 45 years ago. Regular Planetary Radio host Sarah Al-Akhmed should be back with you next week. She wants everyone to know she is steadily recovering from the nasty case of COVID she mentioned at the top of last week's show. She's also very grateful for the lovely messages so many of you have shared with her. We rarely repeat a feature, but Voyager's 45th anniversary party at the Jet Propulsion Lab

is worth a second listen. Later, you'll hear me get back together with Planetary Society Chief Scientist Bruce Betts for a brand new What's Up segment. And here are a few highlights from the March 3 issue of The Downlink, our free weekly newsletter. Beginning with a promotion for a good friend of the Planetary Society and space exploration, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson announced that Nicola Fox will serve as the new Associate Administrator of the agency's Science Mission Directorate. Nikki previously ran NASA's Heliophysics Division, a job she got after serving as Project Scientist for the Parker Solar Probe. You'll hear my conversation with her at the Voyager celebration in this week's show. Coincidence? The European Space Agency has also chosen its new Director of Science.

She is astronomer and astrophysicist Carol Mundell. Professor Mundell became President of the United Kingdom's Science Council in 2021 and was the first woman to serve as Chief Scientific Advisor at the UK's Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Congratulations to both of these outstanding leaders. We got more proof last week that old planetary science missions never die. NASA's Magellan spacecraft mapped Venus with radar back in the 1990s. Some of that data has now been used to reveal areas where heat from deep within the planet

may escape to the surface. A spectacular image of one of these so-called coronae, a circular collection of deep surface cracks, is waiting for you along with much more cosmic goodness at planetary.org. Here is our special coverage of Voyager's 45th anniversary that we first presented in August of 2022. Voyager 2 lifted off from Florida on August 20, 1977. Its sister craft, Voyager 1, followed on September 5. Scientists and engineers hoped they'd last at least five years. They've now been exploring and reporting their findings for nine times that span.

Both are now deemed to have reached interstellar space, where most of the influence of our star ends and the forces of the vast Milky Way galaxy take over. Ahead is the Oort cloud of comets that reach halfway to the next nearest star. The Voyagers are unlikely to still be alive by then, but they will go on across the void for perhaps billions of years. Each carries greetings, messages of hope, pictures and sounds from across our life-filled planet, and the best playlist ever created, in my humble opinion. And all this is after they revealed the worlds of our outer solar system as never before, teaching us again that our neighborhood is full of surprises. It was several months ago that I first heard from

Linda Spilker and Suzanne Dodd about their plans for a party. I'm so glad to have been invited. Linda has returned as Deputy Project Scientist for Voyager, even as she continues as Project Scientist for Cassini. And Suzanne is the latest in a distinguished roster of project managers on the Voyager mission. Their party took place in the Jet Propulsion Lab's von Karman Auditorium, right where people have gathered over and over to hear the announcements of Voyager's discoveries for 45 years. Linda and Suzanne took turns as on-stage emcees, welcoming current lab staff, interns born well after the Neptune encounter, media folks like me, and with great honor, members of the mission team who go back a half century.

None were as honored or celebrated as Ed Stone, the only project scientist Voyager has ever had. Ed's health prevented him from presenting, but he enjoyed being greeted by hundreds of attendees, young and old. Here's part of Suzanne's tribute from the von Karman stage. old. Here's part of Suzanne's tribute from the von Karman stage. Ed's been on the project for 50 years as a project scientist, and that almost deserves, I think, a standing ovation. So, Ed, thank you so much. Many of you remember that we talked with new JPL director Lori Leshin on our July 27 episode. Lori took the stage to add her kudos for Voyager and its team. Huge congratulations to this team.

So many of you who have been with this project over many years and all of us who stand in awe of it are thrilled to be here to celebrate you and that incredible, those two incredible spacecraft today. So I'm thrilled to have two of my predecessors here whose shoulders I stand on, and this lab would not be where it is today without them, Ed and Charles. So thank you to you both. Yes. But really this whole field, our whole discipline of planetary scientists,

of which I count myself as one, would not be here without this mission. I think Voyager and Viking really are the foundation upon which all of modern planetary science has been built. And yes, there are other missions we can argue about whether the earlier mariners and the flybys should get that credit and they probably should get some. But those two missions, and especially Voyager, as we look to the outer solar system now, really becoming front and center in so many of our future plans to explore. It's all about the foundation that Voyager laid. 45 years is an extraordinary accomplishment, but the foundation it laid and the legacy it leaves will live forever. This mission will go on forever because it will always be leading to that next level of exploration.

And I've been talking a lot these days. People at headquarters are probably getting tired of me talking to them about the fact that I think we need to be thinking much more strategically about exploration of the outer solar system, more collectively, more how to get there more frequently than once in a generation, more frequently than once in a generation, how to make sure it's accessible because of the worlds, the worlds that Voyager revealed to us are so extraordinarily interesting that we just have a very long to-do list in the outer solar system. And so I'm so grateful to get to be here at a moment when we are really working to build upon the extraordinary legacy of Voyager. I just hope that you all know that the legacy that you have set is safe with us. And we are really, truly committed to carrying forward and building upon this inspirational mission that you have given us. And not just with what follows on to it,

but with these missions themselves. They're still going, right? It's like 50 years. Let's go. We're already planning. So yeah, the party. We're already planning the party for the 50 years. As Carl said, someday humanity will venture

beyond the solar system. We'll venture to the stars and we won't be the first ones there. This craft is the first one. There can only ever be one first and that really is you. So I'm just incredibly inspired to be able to just be in the same room with so many of you who have carried this mission forward and especially add to you thank you for the science and for the incredible discoveries and for 50 years of commitment, because you've been at it for 50 years with this mission. We will carry that legacy forward.

We were also treated to the outstanding sixth episode of a documentary series by JPL's Blaine Baggett about the history of the lab. The footsteps of Voyager featured the encounters with Uranus and Neptune and took us into the Voyager interstellar mission that continues today. You'll hear excerpts from it during my conversation with Andrew in a few minutes, and we have a link on this week's show page at planetary.org slash radio. The party continued long after the formal program ended with the full-size mock-up of a Voyager spacecraft as the backdrop. I ran into Linda Morabito. Linda, delighted to run into a former Planetary Society colleague, a treasured

colleague, but also, you know, we just watched this second episode, The Encounters of Voyager with Uranus and Neptune and Beyond. You must have been in the first episode because of your discovery. Remind us. Long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, I was working on the Voyager navigation mission and completely successful encounter. One of the most exciting times of our lives to see Jupiter up close, its moons. It was an amazing time and to be responsible for a lot, no pressure, but the successful navigation, the whole team that I was on of the voyagers to Jupiter. And it was very, very thrilling, wonderful time. But after it was all the excitement had subsided on March 9th of 1979, after the March 5th encounter,

I was looking at the post-encounter planet pictures that had been taken for satellite ephemeris development, which, of course, was refining the orbits of these moons that we had seen only previously from a great distance. And in doing that, in processing a picture, I was able to see something that it turns out no one had seen before. And that was what now Io is so justifiably famous for, the very first of its volcanoes that you picked out of an image.

volcanoes that you picked out of an image. Absolutely. It looked almost like another moon peeking out from behind Io, and we really had to use the scientific method to consider every possibility of what that crescent was, anomalous crescent. And it was in fact rising about 170 kilometers over the surface of Io, a volcanic plume, and just by the phase angle, the lighting, we were able to see simply a crescent of it. One of the most thrilling moments of my life. And I cannot even imagine how any scientist could have any more wonderful thing happen to them than those first moments of seeing that. Outstanding moment in the history,

the 45-year history of this mission, if you don't count what happened before launch, but also representative of so many other great discoveries. Incredible, you've got four giant worlds, and we rewrote the textbooks. The Voyager scientists, the engineers, took us to these worlds and showed us that they are alive, that the moons represent a phenomenon that we could never even have dreamed about

or imagined one discovery after the next. One incredible mission, now representing all of humanity in interstellar space. 50 years at JPL? Yeah, 50 years. Congratulations. It's wonderful to see you. Thank you.

What a pleasure. Thanks so much. And join the party with big smiles on their faces were at least two JPL interns. I'm Marianne Benny-Fernandez, and I study at Stanford University. I'm Abby, and I study at the University of Cambridge, and I'm an intern here at JPL. How is it, did you just find out about this little celebration and decided to come by? There was an email a week ago, and I thought I would pop by. I didn't expect it to be as amazing as it was.

Yeah, I just could not believe it. I was not sure if I would be able to come in because I was a little late. But then when I came in, I was totally stunned to see the audience and to see the people who actually worked on Voyager sitting over here in the same room where I was sitting. I was totally stunned.

So let me make a wild guess. I bet neither one of you was born when Voyager did most of the work that it's famous for. Of course, it's still doing that work. Am I right? Yes, exactly. Yeah, so I grew up seeing the pictures that Voyager put out, and it was kind of mind-blowing to know that the people who made those pictures

are sitting in the same room as me, talking to me as well. Did those pictures, did that data, and just the mission itself, did it, do you think, have some influence over your decision to go in the direction that you've gone? I mean, the reason you're interns here now. Yes, it did have a lot of influence on me because I think that's how it started with me wanting to always work for NASA someday. I'm an international student. I came to the U.S. to study aerospace, but I never knew the trajectory to turn out would be this amazing that I would one day get to work for JPL as an intern. I am totally stunned. I'm so happy with the way things have turned out for me today.

Yeah, when I was little, I would always look at these pictures of Neptune and Jupiter and be so excited about even seeing pictures of Voyager as well and that's kind of what inspired me, kind of sparked what I wanted to do and now I'm here and it's better than I even could have ever imagined. Well what are you doing now in your internships and what do you hope to be doing as you head on into your career? So at the moment, I'm working on antennas, because that's actually my field of depth and area that I would like to do research on. And I'm trying to see how it can help in deep space exploration, basically. I'm currently working on uncertainty analysis for Mars sample return and future landers as well.

And honestly, that's kind of exactly the sort of stuff I want to be doing in the future. So it's perfect have a wonderful rest of your summer internship here at JPL and I bet you will always remember coming to this little party for Voyager yes definitely I am always going to remember this having all four directors all four of the last four directors in in the room was amazing. Best of success. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Nicola, or Nikki Fox, heads the Heliophysics Division of NASA's Science Mission Directorate. We last heard from her in our January 12, 2022 show when we talked about the Parker Solar Probe.

Pretty nice party. Glad you made it out. I am totally delighted to be here. It was a last minute decision. Flew in last night and I'm getting on a plane in a couple of hours, but it totally was worth it to just be here with the team, celebrate this incredible mission, and of course celebrate the just magic that is Ed Stone, the lead scientist for this mission for 50 years. And so it was just so great to see him and just celebrate everything together. I feel exactly the same. I'm so honored that I was even able to say hello to him again today. So here's a mission that went from planetary science to your bailiwick, heliophysics.

You must be pretty proud to have this as part of your portfolio. I am really proud of Voyager. And it isn't just because, you know, it's an inspirational mission. And it's, you know, all the all the things that we could talk about all the firsts that they've had, but it actually opened up a new area of science for us, taking pictures of the planets, studying all the planets, absolutely fabulous for us, actually going out into interstellar space, leaving the environment that our sun controls, and going out into that, you know, you think of it as like the cold, cold interstellar space

of where that spacecraft is. And just when you think about how far away those spacecraft are, the light speed, the round-trip light speed, 43 hours. I mean, that's out there. That's really out there. Did you see me talking to those two young people, both JPL interns, both born well after most of the big events happened in this mission, and yet they say that they are partly here as interns and going in the direction they are because of this mission? I can believe it. It is an inspirational mission. You know, it's almost like a mission that reinvented itself all the time. You know, you fly past one planetary body, you take groundbreaking firsts, and then what do you do? You go to another one, and then you go to

another one, and then you think, oh, you know what? I'll leave the solar system. I mean, it's just this inspirational mission. It just keeps giving and giving and giving. Just one more question because you mentioned it on stage and I've been reading a little bit lately about how we might someday return to interstellar space with a dedicated mission, one really designed for that. Could you talk about that? Yes, certainly. We have a lot of really exciting mission concepts that are being discussed. Right now we are actually kicking off our decadal survey for heliophysics. And so, you know, what are the next things we're going to do in the next decades to come? And certainly an interstellar probe, a mission that is actually designed to go straight out of the heliosphere and study that environment out there with dedicated instruments for that is

really high up on, I think, the community's priority list, along with other great missions too. But, you know, Interstellar Probe, definitely a big candidate there. Thank you, Nikki. Great to see you again and glad you could make it to the party. Thank you so much. With the party mostly over, Suzanne Dodds and Linda Spilker joined me in the small museum next to von Karman Auditorium. hell of a party you two when did we start to talk about this i mean you told me months ago right linda right we knew the 45th anniversary was coming up several months ago and so we started to plan an event at first low key show a movie have the voyager you know family from jpl there and it suddenly it just started to blossom and bloom and inviting retirees and and the event really grew.

And you had cake, which you had promised at the very beginning. Yes, we had cake, and I got to choose the flavors of the cake. So at least I had some say. It was a great event, and it's great to have retirees come. It's great to mingle with current employees. And I think everybody that was in the room is touched by Voyager, whether they had spent two years on it, 20 years on it, or even just if they're an intern in Voyager was what got them interested in space. We were just talking about some of these, those old timers, those Voyager veterans. I mean,

I saw Charlie Colhaze got to say hi. It really is wonderful to see this group come together again, and it was especially gratifying to see Ed Stone, that he was able to attend and enjoy this, even if he wasn't able to speak. It was great to have Ed here and to recognize him for his 50 years as project scientist for Voyager and really he's sort of the heart and soul of Voyager, you know, keeping the scientists on track and making sure that we got out to the heliopause. That's really a credit to Ed. Suzanne, they showed the second episode in this sort of JPL

history series that your colleague Blaine Baggett has done. And this was largely, not entirely, Voyager at Uranus, Neptune, and beyond. Let me just thank you because there you were doing some kind of, you were anchoring some video coverage for one of those encounters. Thank you for not staying in my business because I don't need the competition. Yes, I don't think I was very good back then. That was probably my first experience on live television. My public speaking is better now. It was certainly enjoyable and a little nerve-wracking, but the Neptune encounter was great. I feel like it was a highlight of my early career for sure. Is that about when you came on board, became part of the mission?

I started before the Uranus encounter. So I worked on Uranus with the science team helping design their observations. And then for Neptune, I moved over to what's called the sequencing team, which is really the group of people that put together the sequences, the command strings that are going to get sent to the spacecraft. And you do your best, you check it, triple check it, quadruple check it, cross your fingers. It gets sent to the spacecraft, and whoa, are you glued to your screen to see if the correct images come down and things are pointed in the right direction? And it was just very gratifying to see it all work at Neptune. Thank goodness all those zeros and ones were in the right place.

Correct. Linda, we've talked about this before, but remind me, you came into this mission much earlier. I actually came in in 1977, straight out of college, my first real job, and actually got here in time to go to the launch of Voyager 2. There was a science steering group meeting at the Cape, and they invited all of us newcomers to come with them and be part of that launch, and it was so exciting. And I think about it, I don't think I could have imagined being here 45 years later with two working spacecraft now exploring interstellar space. It wasn't in the timeline. So what's happening?

What are we continuing to discover out there in the interstellar void? Well, the discoveries are quite interesting, Matt, because it's not what we expected. We had these ideas just from looking from the inside out. And now that Voyager is actually on the outside making measurements, for instance, it seems like the magnetic field from the sun is controlling far out past the heliopause, and we haven't rotated the magnetic field yet into the direction of the interstellar magnetic field, we can measure the actual cosmic ray density for the first time because the heliopause is an excellent shield from those high energy cosmic rays, that radiation. And so it shields quite a lot of them out and now we can measure them directly.

Also, there are shocks that come from the Sun propagate out into the interstellar medium and Voyager sees these shocks in the magnetic field data and the plasma wave data and it's so exciting to see that interstellar space isn't boring. There's a lot to see out there. It's kind of like being in a turbulent sea in a sense and trying to sense the eddies and currents of interstellar space. Suzanne, how are those two old-timers doing? Well, they're hanging in there. They are old-timers.

You may have heard recently we had a little hiccup with Voyager 1, although it looks like we can get over that. We may need to operate the spacecraft slightly differently going forward, but that's what you do with any mission. Once you launch it, you can't go to it and fix it, right? In Voyager's case, it's a little bit of the extreme since it's 15 billion miles from us and it's 1975 technology. But we can make changes to flight software and we can sort of work around issues that there might be with command streams and things like that.

So we're really digging into the problem now, but I think we will be able to work around it. I've asked this question of Linda and others many times, but how much longer do we think we have? Assuming everything continues to work, but those watts continue to fall as that RTG cools off. Right. We lose four watts of power a year. And so over time, we've been turning off different subsystems and we just finished turning off all the instrument heaters. The instruments, miraculously, are still working. They're at temperatures that they weren't designed for, weren't tested for, but yet they work. And all the data that's coming back is still great data. So again, Voyager is a really incredibly remarkable

spacecraft from a longevity standpoint. But looking forward, I would say we have a stretch goal of getting out to 200 AU. As a manager, I say, that's my stretch goal. That's where I wanna get. And that's 15 more years. I definitely think there'll be a 50th anniversary party, and likely with two spacecraft still operating. When we start to get to 2030, it might be a little more iffy.

But every bit of data that Voyager takes now, because it's in situ, it's in interstellar space, is important. It's unique and it's important. And using in situ data with other spacecraft that are looking at the heliosphere remotely from like our Earth's orbit, you put that all together and you get a much better model of what's going on in our heliosphere. And still returning first. Yes, Voyager is definitely the pathfinder. And if you think about it, the two Voyagers are now our first interstellar travelers, collecting data in a place nothing has flown before and revealing new discoveries. And I'm sure there's more to come. Thank you both. Once again, great party. So glad that I could join you

and I'll see you for the 50th. Definitely. See you for the 50th. We'll be right back after this short break. Ready to level up your space game? Hi, I'm Amber, Digital Community Manager for the Planetary Society. And we are launching our brand new digital member community. This is a place that's built exclusively for Planetary Society members. Here you can connect with fellow members from around the world, join live events you won't get anywhere else,

and delve deeper into the wonders of our cosmos and the missions that explore them. It's all about putting the society in the Planetary Society. If you're not yet a member, now's the time to join. At planetary.org forward slash join. I'll see you on the digital frontier. at planetary.org forward slash join. I'll see you on the digital frontier. Ann Druyan is the Emmy and Peabody Award winning creator,

executive producer, writer, and director of the second and third seasons of Cosmos. She's also the founder of Cosmos Studios in Ithaca, New York. 45 years ago, she served as creative director for the Voyager Interstellar Message Project. The result was the golden records that are now headed across the cosmos. She partnered with Carl Sagan in life and in the creation of many of their best-known and most affecting books and other works, including Contact. So, I had many reasons to invite her back to Planetary Radio this week. We talked online a few days ago. You'll hear clips from that terrific new JPL documentary

here and there. Matt, it's always great to be with you. I look forward to our conversations. As do I. It has never been less than both thrilling and delightful. So thank you so much, Anne. My pleasure, completely. 45 years across the solar system and beyond. As of August 23rd, the day before we're speaking, Voyager 1 is nearly 15 billion miles from Earth, which is about 157 astronomical units, traveling at just over 38,000 miles per hour. And though it takes nearly 22 hours for its data to reach us at the speed of light, this old robot is still phoning home to tell us now about interstellar space. Could you be more thrilled? I could not be more thrilled, more proud to have had any relationship to what I consider one of the most significant

missions in the history of our species. And what a great metric that is of the vastness that traveling at, let's say, I'm going to use miles, but let's say at 38,000 miles per hour for 45 years. And yet it's not even a single light day from Earth. from Earth. Does that tell you just how big the cosmos is? And how impressive at the same time, two spacecraft built only 20 years after Sputnik, only 20 years after a simple aluminum bowling ball was the most ambitious and exciting thing we had ever launched into the cosmos. And a mere1970s, and yet still teaching us so much about our neighborhood. I just can't get over the genius of the engineers, the scientists, the technicians who built the Voyagers. And of course, you know, to know that on each of them is our golden record with all of its feeling and artistry, the talent, the musical talent of the world, I just think this is that rare place where our scientific cleverness and our artistic talent are converging in the same place to speak for us, perhaps even 5 billion with a B years from now, when we will not be able to speak for ourselves. How astonishing that is.

And I think you know that I am just as enamored of that convergence of art and science as you are, perhaps in part because of the work that you and Carl Sagan have done that brought those seemingly disparate concepts together so beautifully. We're going to come back to the golden record, of course. But as you know, because I just mentioned it, the day after this, I will be at JPL for this celebration of the 45th anniversary of the launch of both spacecraft. Visiting, I hope, with some of those team members, some of whom, one or two at least, were there at the very beginning. And I just wonder if maybe you have a message, a greeting for them. Oh, I absolutely do. I have more than a greeting, a hug, a very passionate greeting, admiration and solidarity with the current Voyager family and with the greats of the original Voyager family.

the great Carl Sagan and Frank Drake, but also Ed Stone, for whom I have such admiration, and Suzanne Dodd, and so many wonderful people there. You know, I would stand and take off an imaginary hat to them in admiration for this stunning achievement, which not only is that convergence that we talked about of art and science, but also so benign. The idea that we can use our science and high technology for the benefit of all Earth life without hurting any of it is another aspect of Voyager that fills me with pride. Sadly, of course, Ed Stone,

who has been the project scientist for Voyager, still is, since before launch, I am told will be unable to join the celebration that takes place tomorrow. You told me that you didn't have much direct interaction with him, but you did know him. And I assume Carl worked with him more closely. Absolutely. I mean, I didn't work with Ed because my small contribution was confined to the Voyager record. But of course, because of my great good fortune to be married to Carl, we were at every encounter, spending very often months at a time around encounter as the Voyagers made their way from world to world. During those times and in more recent years, my path has crossed with Ed. What a great scientist, what a great person, and what a worthy leader of the Voyager mission Ed is. And eventually, what a great leader of the Jet Propulsion Lab itself, as he was director

there for many years. You must have been exposed on a regular basis to the enthusiasm of your husband as data was returned, particularly during those encounters with the worlds of our solar system that Voyager, the two Voyager spacecraft visited. What was that like? It was exhilarating. It was thrilling to be upstairs on one of the higher floors of one of the buildings at JPL, where the imaging team was looking at the images as they came in from the outer solar system. And to be sitting with perhaps six or a dozen space scientists, astronomers, geologists, looking at the data as it was coming in, our

first close-up look at so many worlds, so many moons. It was thrilling. And then to lie awake at night with Carl, pouring over these pictures, and to hear him thinking out loud of what he was seeing, analyzing it, finding new questions to ask. Wow, it was like a dream, really. You know, the Voyagers outperformed their design specifications in every conceivable way during that phase of the mission. And they still do. That's another reason why I can't help but smile with a sense. Here's a reason for hope.

Because if we can do something as difficult, challenging, and as ambitious at what the Voyagers have accomplished and continue to accomplish against all odds, even greater than the most extravagant dreams of the team members of the mission, that says something about us as a species, that we have what it takes to exceed expectations. And of course, never, in my view, never in our history as a species have we been called upon to marshal those capabilities to save our civilization. So when I think of the Voyagers, I think, you know, we do have what it takes, but what is really needed is a focus for our efforts

and the same kind of determination that the engineers and scientists and technicians brought to the Voyagers. that the engineers and scientists and technicians brought to the Voyagers. You also remind me of how much we could have used Carl right now. I think you know Scott Bolton, the principal investigator for the Juno mission. I mean, he literally grew up with Carl visiting his parents' home and visiting with him. I think you may also know the story about that night at JPL that Scott snuck into a room where he knew that there would be prints because we weren't pre-digital then. Absolutely.

Yeah, they were not being distributed yet. He snuck in with a flashlight. He told us this story. And there he finds Carl doing the same thing because neither one of them could wait until morning to get their hands on his hunger. Because remember, Carl came of age in a time where our closest view of any of the planets were, you know, Earth-bound telescopes. And he dreamed his whole life from, you can see when he was just a child, but he was already dreaming of opportunities such as this one to look far more closely at these other worlds. And so, yes, I well remember, you know, Carl, I remember pouring over the Viking images, the first Viking images of Mars with Carl in 1976. Just the joy of what that was like. So, yeah, that sounds like a true story.

God's telling. Standing in Von Karman Auditorium as a scruffy college radio reporter, watching those first images come in from Viking 1 back in the summer of 76. And Carl was right across the room. Let's talk about that golden record. You see it in that place of pride over my shoulder here in my home office. Officially known as the Voyager Interstellar Message Project. How did you become the creative director for the development of that product? It was a very, actually, very extraordinary series of events and developments for that time. So it's 1977, and Carl and I have worked with our close friends and colleagues on a project for the

Children's Television Workshop that was never produced. But if it had been, it would have been Cosmos for Kids, a kind of Sesame Street, but really Cosmos. That was our first experience of thinking together on an actual project. And I think it inspired Carl to approach me and Tim Ferriss and to ask us to collaborate with him on the Voyager record. Now, in 1977, you know, that was a time where I remember, in most situations, never even getting to finish a sentence, because what women had to say was so completely undervalued. And I know, who was I? I was a 27-year-old without really any credentials. But Carl singled me out as someone whom he thought he could work with. And so when he asked me to be the creative director of the project, that was just such an amazing development because I knew that if I had that title on a NASA project,

then my search for the sounds and the music and the various elements of the record was much more likely to be successful just because of the great prejudice against women at the time still exists, but then it was a kind of, it was accepted as the norm. Even with that title, when I would actually show up to try to get these sounds from the various sources, there were many times where I was literally kicked out of the office. And I remember one guy saying, you're telling me that NASA sent a little girl to get my sound samples? How dare they? And so that was the norm.

But Carl was magnificently free of any of the blindnesses of that time. He didn't rule anyone out. And in fact, if you look, and I think it's the cosmic connection, under chauvinisms, the only entry is carbon-based life, because that's who he was genuinely. And that's one of the He was genuinely. And that's one of the countless reasons I am so proud of his life. He's one of the few people who you can look at all of his speeches, all of his articles, all of his books, all of his interviews, and you need not make any excuse for him. This is going back to the 1960s, because he was so free of those sicknesses. And I think that's another reason why he's probably more beloved now than even back then.

I suspect that his hunch about you back then when he gave you that job proved to be an even better choice than he realized when he made it. Thank you. I think back also to, and you didn't have much time to do all of this. How in the world did you work through all of this content and then figure out what could actually be included on the record. I mean, now we could have included so much more because digital technology has come so far. But back then you had a real limit, right, on what you could put on this message to the stars. Matt, you're absolutely right, as usual. Yes, we only had six months time for the entire project. Very limited budget.

In fact, the entire project cost NASA $18,000. Oh, my gosh. And that was with Tim Ferriss and four or five other people and myself working full time on this project. You know, it wasn't that we were rich or anything like that. I had, you know, a very, you know, sort of entry level jobs and was working to support myself. But here was a chance to confer the closest thing to immortality on the sounds and the music and the images of our beautiful planet. And so the idea that we could touch this message in any way, it was more than enough reward. And so we were under a lot of

pressure. We didn't have any of the capabilities. I mean, now, very often I'm asked to work with people who are preparing new messages for sending beyond Earth. And I always demur because I always feel, you know, I gave it everything I had in 1977. And this is, it's a time now for new generations to send their own messages. But if I was doing it now for the first time, I would send the whole world wide web. I would just, the good, the bad, the ugly, everything about us. That's because, first of all, there's no point in lying. You know, no lie is so well constructed that it can live longer than what 20 years 30 years a century they're very easily usually um they fall apart because reality has so many so many skeins of causality

that it's really doesn't matter like what we pretend to be so um yeah i would just send everything about us because then you'd be sending the contents of all the libraries on earth, and much more. So it would be a completely different thing. I think the moment for sending that particular message was then, but I'm really gratified and delighted that so many people who are young now embrace the contents of the record. And many have said that it's the beginning of world music as a concept and a value for the United States. Because remember, in 1977, the only time we ever heard music from another country was really the odd one hit novelty piece that people would take to their hearts. But there was not this popular cultural search for the music of other cultures. the music of other cultures.

And in Voyager, that's exactly what we aspired to do, was to give representation to as many of the great musical traditions of the world as we possibly could. Sagan also led the team that designed Voyager's golden record. It is a greeting card containing sights and sounds of our planet. It is a greeting card containing sights and sounds of our planet. Should one day somewhere in interstellar space, a wayfarer were to stumble upon the spacecraft and wonder who had sent it on its adventure. the time, does anything stand out among those pieces of art, bits of sound, images that you simply could not include that you wish you could have? I mean, what was your biggest regret? Well, I had a couple. One was that NASA at the time would not let us send the image of the frontally naked couple that was very carefully thought out.

The woman was pregnant, and so there were overlays and successive images of the fetus within her. And they were frontally naked, of course, and NASA was, you know, and there were members of Congress who stepped in who were like, you want to send smut to the stars? hatred. You know, the idea that we hated ourselves so much that we didn't dare stand naked before the universe in this story that we were trying to tell about who we really are. I've often thought of that image and what a shame that wasn't included. A personal favorite of mine is Bob Marley, and a personal favorite among his just remarkable treasury of great music is No Woman, No Cry. And so I had this sort of personal feeling that I wished we could have sent his music. But apart from that, I'm so proud of what we did send and the fact that we were successful in making this a non-nationalistic presentation, but something that really reflected the whole tapestry of world music. Two thoughts come to mind. One, it's a good thing it's too late to recall Pioneers 10 and 11 with their nude depictions. And two, I don't think we have to wait for E.T. to send us that message, send more Chuck Berry. It's delightful to know that Chuck is out there among the stars as well. Yes. You know, Chuck told me that he was in a period of tremendous despair when the

Voyager records were sent. And that lifted him up out of this feeling that all of the work he'd done and all of the music he'd created was possibly not going to be valued as highly as it should be. At the end of the encounter at Neptune and Triton, a celebration organized by Carl Sagan and the Planetary Society was held on JPL's mall. The evening featured a surprise appearance by rock and roll great Chuck Berry. It was a fitting choice as Berry's music was now sailing outward toward the stars aboard Voyager's golden record. That was only one of many reasons to celebrate. Yeah, and Blind Willie Johnson, who, you know,

no one had ever heard of at the time, aside from the connoisseurs of Delta Blues and the great music of the past. But the idea that this human being whose genius was so disregarded that he died of exposure to the rain because he didn't even have a shelter to protect him from the elements. And that his music lives on in Dark Was the Night as close to forever as we get. That and the great Louis Armstrong and the Peruvian pad pipes and the Japanese shakalachi and the Japanese gamelan and the Senegalese percussion piece and some 25 other pieces of music will really never die. And one woman's brain waves, right?

Yes. Yeah. Well, personally, that's the thing that really gets me, is to have fallen in true love with Carl Sagan during the making of this record, and then to have had my brainwaves, rapid eye movement, heart sounds, every single signal that I was giving off at that time during an hour of meditation about the history of the world and the meaning of love. A mere three days after Carl and I had fallen deeply into true love. The idea that that's on the Voyager record, my brainwaves, in a kind of joyfulness that has proven every day since to have been completely well-founded and valid. That's really meant everything. The essence of one human being's physical presence in the universe, I would say. You know that we love, whenever we get the opportunity at the Planetary Society and here on this show, to listen to or repeat what I am going to call the pale blue dot soliloquy.

If you could take us back to that fight that Carl and you waged to turn Voyager around when it was past Neptune and look back at our home planet. Well, that was all Carl. That wasn't me. I, of course, I'm sure I encouraged him, but it was Carl's brilliant idea in 1981 to appreciate that when Voyager had taken its last pictures of the worlds of the outer solar system. After the Neptune encounter, Voyager 1 could now turn its cameras homeward to look at the sun

and its red new planets. He started lobbying NASA in 1981, eight years before the last Voyager encounter, saying, would they please arrange to take these last pictures of the home planet and its sibling planets? And NASA, for the first six, seven years, was completely resistant to this idea. And they would say things like, it'll fry the lenses of the camera to look towards the sun.

Of course, the camera was not going to be used ever again. Or they would say, what's the scientific value of such a picture? And Carl understood that here was the potential for the greatest teachable moment, perhaps in human history, at the time it was most urgently needed to actually see our true circumstances, to understand the Earth as a mere pixel in the solar system, let alone the Milky Way galaxy and the universe, to take us, to wean us from our delusions of importance and centrality, but also to wean us of the delusion that this earth was infinitely plunderable and exploitable, and that we could go on ruining the environment that sustains us without ever having to be held accountable for these crimes. And so he would schlep to Washington, D.C., to NASA headquarters on numerous occasions. And when he was out at JPL pleading to have this picture taken.

And it wasn't until, I believe, around the time of the Neptune encounter that he was first told that they had decided to do it. And so on Valentine's Day, 1990, as imagine the beautiful Voyager 1 rising from the plane of the solar system and all the dust and looking down, looking back to the sun and its family of planets to see that even the mightiest among them was essentially a dot. It was soon after that, sitting in our living room, in the same house I'm in right now, that we stared at the pictures of the family album of the sun, he called it, each picture, and then focused particularly on the image of Earth. And the two of us had a kind of meditation, which became the pale blue dot, soliloquy, mostly Carl, but a phrase here and there for me.

Anecdotally, the input that I get every single day from all over the world requesting the rights to reproduce in one fashion or another, the pale blue blue dot soliloquy is any indication. It hit its mark. People, it's another thing that gives me hope. I think there is a coalescing community of people on Earth who really want to see us cherish and treat each other more kindly and take care of this tiny planet and so that in the long term our children grandchildren and theirs will be able to enjoy the beauty of this world. In 1990, Voyager 1, over three and a half billion miles away from its home, snapped these images.

This first ever family portrait of the solar system was the idea of scientist Carl Sagan. Consider again that dot. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. For the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand. For the moment, the earth is where we make our stand.

It underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known. I think it will live on for a very, very long time. We're nearing the end of our time together. Just a couple of other questions. I, you know, last night I went on the Cosmos Studios website and watched the trailer for Cosmos Season 3 for the first time

in maybe a couple of years. Watched the whole series, of course. I'll tell you, it's on the DVR downstairs. It pulled me right back in. It was just spellbinding. Can we hope for a continuation? Is there hope for a fourth season? Or is there anything else you're up to?

I know you told me about one thing we can't really talk about yet, but you're obviously staying very busy. I am very busy, as busy as ever. Thank you so much for what you said about season three of Cosmos, Matt. That means so much to me. Yes, I have been working with Brandon Braga and Sam Sagan, whose new series is out this week for Bill Nye. We have been collaborating on a new season of Cosmos, so let's hope that that comes to fruition. And there are actually four other projects that are in very vigorous shape,

and I think they all have excellent chances of materializing. And so I can't really announce anything yet, but I have a lot of hope for these projects that are keeping me very busy. You know, I just feel so strongly that what we need is to awaken to the glory of nature as revealed by science. That's what will make us act in defense of our little part of it. And science is delivering the goods. It's warned us of the dangers we face for more than 100 years. And it got those things right, which is a predictive power unrivaled like any other human enterprise.

And then there's the joy of the Webb telescope and all of the great things that the scientific community is doing. And so I see as my lifelong passion, communicating the power of the scientific perspective, and doing it so painlessly that it just becomes kind of a natural experience. So let's see. I hope I get to do a lot of these projects. Painlessly and beautifully. I'm glad to hear that we have more to look forward to. I'm going to push my luck here in a couple of ways,

both in terms of time and sort of shot in the dark, with one more question. Oh, please. Thank you. Have you ever seen the movie Things to Come, the 1936 film? I sure have, yes. Okay. It has meant a lot to me my whole life.

I've been a fan my whole life. In the closing scene, the character played by Raymond Massey is watching a spacecraft carry his daughter and some other young people toward the moon. And his closing speech about why we must explore has always inspired me. Like the whole film, there are portions of that speech and the film itself that are, you know, awfully dated now. Still, when he says, I think the line is, all the universe are nothingness, which shall it be? Yes.

And, in fact, I think also H.G. Wells said something like, the stars are nothing, something on that same theme, which was so prescient of the creators of that amazing film and of H.G. Wells, who was a visionary, unparalleled. Either we use our cleverness to learn how to take care of each other and the planet and venture forward to explore, or we turn those powers into destruction, into a kind of internecine, suicidal civilization that does not take our species forward, does not honor the existence of the other life forms with whom we share this planet? That's the question. That is really the question. Will we put all our resources into ensuring that our civilization survives and brings out the best in the people who inhabit it, or are we going to destroy ourselves? It's been true. We've known this in one form or another for a century now. And to me, this question seems more current, more urgent than it ever has.

more urgent than it ever has. And yeah, I just don't want to go on too long, but I have to tell you that that film and of course the 1939 World's Fair, which was Carl's great moment of breakthrough at the age of five, that there was such a thing as the future and that science was the way to get to it. My own experience in the 1964 World's Fair as a kid from Queens who grew up next to it,

those were really pivotal moments in our lives. And I think with this great shadow hanging over our future right now, we all feel it. And the question is, do we have the courage to imagine the kind of future that's worthy of our children and grandchildren? And to do the hard work right now to make sure that they live to enjoy it. That's the question. Thank you for capturing so much of that optimism. joy? That's the question. Thank you for capturing so much of that optimism in Cosmos, the third season, which had to do with the World's Fair, but also in so much of the other work that you have undertaken with your colleagues and, of course, your great colleague, your life colleague,

Carl Sagan. And let's hope that this work and the Voyager spacecraft continue to be in the vanguard of leading us toward that tomorrow that I think humanity is capable of. Thank you so much, Anne. Oh, Matt, every time we have a chance to have a conversation, I always just feel so uplifted by it. Thank you so much. Anytime, anytime. I look forward to the next one. Back at you, times 10. We've been talking with Andrew Ian. Every human culture has rites of passage.

They mark the transition from one stage of life to another. We are gathered here to celebrate Voyager's rite of passage. A machine designed, built and operated right here at JPL has broken free of the sun's gravity, explored most of the worlds of the solar system and is now on its way to the great dark ocean is now on its way to the great dark ocean of interstellar space. The men and women responsible are gathered here. They are heroes of human accomplishment. Their deeds will be remembered in the history books.

Our remote descendants may live on some of the worlds first revealed to us by Voyager. If so, those descendants will look back upon us as we look on Christopher Columbus. Voyager reminds us of the rarity and preciousness of what our planet holds, of our responsibility to preserve life on Earth. If we are capable of such grand, long-term, benign, visionary, high technology endeavors as Voyager, can we not use our technological gifts and long-term vision to put this planet right?

To take care of one another, to cherish the Earth, and bravely to venture forth in the footsteps of Voyager to the planets and the stars. Now it's time for us to turn to the chief scientist of the Planetary Society, Dr. Bruce Betts, for What's Up. I'm back. Why? No, where's Sarah? And why am I talking in this voice? Sarah, as you know, is recovering. I know. We wish Sarah well and a quick recovery.

Not just because we want to get rid of you, but so she feels better. Yeah, this is her seat now. No, it's good to have you back. Welcome back. Thank you. Thank you. I'm delighted to be talking to you. OG, what's up? The original. That's right. Classic.

So I tried last night. I even drove up and down the coast a little ways here in the San Diego area to try and see that amazing sight. Didn't happen. Beautiful night, beautiful clouds, but they obscured that rare conjunction. So I forgot to tell you it wasn't visible down where you live. It was those pesky clouds.

No, it was clear here. It was wonderful. I took pictures. I'll show it to you. Oh, good. Good. They're bright dots. They're close to each other.

I even got some Jupiter moons. But hey, here's the good news. They will be not much farther apart tonight. We're recording this far ahead just to not confuse people. So when everyone else goes and looks up, continue to look towards the western horizon in the early evening when it's not cloudy, Matt, and you will see super bright Venus and getting lower and lower as the days pass, really bright Jupiter, which over the next weeks will fairly rapidly pass below the horizon. But Venus is with us for a few more months. It just ticked off Jupiter. So Jupiter is out of here. People should still be able to check it out.

And Venus is going to light the sky with the brightest star-like object out there in the night sky that's, you know, not a plane or something like that. If you've still got Jupiter and Venus, draw a line between them, go up and high in the sky and you'll see Mars looking reddish. Now, there's also the reddish star Aldebaran, which is still a little dimmer, but there's just a party of stars in that part of the sky that is easy to see right now, including Orion with its striking Orion's belt, bright stars all over. Go take a look in the evening sky. It's a wonderful time to look and I wish you clear skies, Matt.

Now, Orion was in the clear, and boy, it really was gorgeous last night. I don't know why it just stood out so beautifully. All right, well, let's go on to this week in space history, and you actually remember 1781, right? Oh, of course. So William Herschel discovered Uranus this week, 1781. I remember vividly. Much more recently, in 2006, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter got to Mars, and darned if those orbiters just don't keep going and going. They're still going. And now, for you, would you like to say it?

But it's not right for me to say it. No, I want to hear you say it. That's half the fun. Random Space Facts! That was magnificent. Thank you. Thank you. It was for you, man. It was for you. Voyager, their spacecraft. You've heard about them. As of when this show comes out on March 8th of 2023, Voyager 1 is approximately 60,000 times farther from us than the moon. That is impressive. It's far away.

And they come in pairs. Its sister is out there, too. True. Not as far, but still tens of thousands of lunar distances come in pairs watch out there's always another one and as i always say when they come up the most amazing thing is they're still talking to us and we can still hear them with their little what is it like 27 watt transmitters or something like that? It's amazing. It's incredible. I mean, even with 70-meter dishes, it's still amazing.

All right, we go on to the trivia contest. Going about things in a positive way as I do, I asked you how many missions to Mars tried but failed for any reason before Mariner 4 was the first successful mission at Mars. Here's the thing. We're not going to do the winner this time. We're going to keep you in suspense because Sarah is in charge now of the magic random choices of winners. So we will announce a winner on next week's show or whenever Sarah's back. And we'll have a couple winners next week. Winners, winners, winners everywhere. Next week.

I am confident that Sarah will be back next week. And I would hate to steal the opportunity for her to make some listener out there. Very, very happy. So whoever you may be, please be patient. And as like Bruce said,

while there'll be two people to announce next time, but I think we can go on to another new contest that you can get people started on. Cool. I can do that. For Voyager, what science instrument on the Voyager spacecraft has a name whose acronym is also the name of a part of an eye? Like that thing on your face that you look through to see. Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. You have until the 15th, March 15 at 8 a.m. Pacific time to get us this answer.

I have still a copy of a book that came out last year, Impact, How Rocks from Space Led to Life, Culture, and Donkey Kong. It's very entertaining by Greg Brenica. That'll be yours if you win this latest contest. I do recommend it highly, and good luck, everybody. Donkey Kong! It's fun. I think it may, at least from Amazon, it's only available from Kindle now. You might be able to find it someplace else. It's published by William Morrow, and I do recommend it. I will mention that for members of the Planetary Society out there, we have some amazing stuff coming up for you folks, and I will very much be a part of that. They're keeping me busy with some other things, as you know, Bruce, so I'm really very glad to still be part of the organization

and your colleague. Bruce Levin, Jr.: And I have this thing at the end of shows that we usually zone out and miss it, where I do this silly thing where I tell people to think of stuff and then I say, what should they think about? I think that you can take. Kevin Patton, Jr.: Oh, okay. Let's see. Bruce Levin, Jr.: All right, everybody go out there, look up in the night sky and think about... Kevin Patton, Jr.: Oh, please include that little noise.

Okay. All right. Thank you. My microphone and how I'm going to try to keep it busy over the coming weeks. Thank you. And good night. Thanks for joining us this week on Planetary Radio as we continue to marvel at our place in space.

Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California and is made possible by our stellar members. You can join us as we continue to explore worlds and search for life at planetary.org join. Mark Hilverda and Ray Paoletta are our associate producers. Andrew Lucas is our audio editor. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which was arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. And until next week, Ad Astra.