Name: The Interstellar Age
ISBN: 9780525954323

Jim Bell

An award-winning Cornell astronomer traces the story of the men and women behind the Voyager spacecraft mission to share insight into their motivations, describe the human artifacts the first spacecraft contains and discuss the mission's potential. By the author of Postcards From Mars.

Inside the Forty-Year Voyager Mission

The Interstellar Age

Timeo Williams

A detailed look of the Voyager 1 and 2, and the accomplishments and feats achieved by the probes that are still operating and flying through space today. 

- The photos included in the book were stellar, giving a glimpse of what it would be like to put yourself inside that probe and see our solar system for a mere second. 

Some notable quotes:
"But the history of pushed forward mostly by key individuals goes back much farther in time and crosses many cultures, including notable Greek, Arab, Persian, Chinese, Indian, and other thinkers..... Or the academics working together on early models of calculus to propose some of the first models for a sun-centered universe in the sixteenth-century Kerala school of mathematics in India(167)

There was an opportunity during the voyage to take a photo of our solar system from Neptune -backwards. This was an especially difficult task given the levels of luminosity present and the speed at which the Voyager was travelling and the time required to send signals. Candy Hassen, in charge of observation/imagery, recalls, " Found Neptune-check. Saturn-check.No Mars-as expected, the crescent view would be too dim...... I finally got to the photo that was pointed at Earth. At first I couldn't find it-there was a lot of scattered light in the image-but then I spotted it, in a ray of that scattered light." Our world was "a pale blue dot..... a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam," Carl Sagan poetically intoned.(236)

The Interstellar Age Inside the Forty-Year Voyager Mission