About this item
The story of the men and women who drove the Voyager spacecraft mission - told by a scientist who was there from the beginning.The Voyager spacecraft are our farthest-flung emissaries - 11.3 billion miles away from the crew who built and still operate them, decades since their launch.Voyager 1 left the solar system in 2012; its sister craft, Voyager 2, will do so in 2015. The fantastic journey began in 1977, before the first episode of Cosmos aired. The mission was planned as a grand tour beyond the moon; beyond Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn; and maybe even into interstellar space. The fact that it actually happened makes this humanity's greatest space mission.In The Interstellar Age, award-winning planetary scientist Jim Bell reveals what drove and continues to drive the members of this extraordinary team, including Ed Stone, Voyager's chief scientist and the one-time head of NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab; Charley Kohlhase, an orbital dynamics engineer who helped to design many of the critical slingshot maneuvers around planets that enabled the Voyagers to travel so far; and the geologist whose Earth-bound experience would prove of little help in interpreting the strange new landscapes revealed in the Voyagers' astoundingly clear images of moons and planets.
About the Author
Jim Bell is a scientist, author, and an extremely active and prolific public communicator of science and space exploration. He is a Professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University, an Adjunct Professor of Astronomy at Cornell University, and President of The Planetary Society. He is a frequent contributor to popular astronomy and science magazines like Sky & Telescope and Scientific American, and to radio shows and internet blogs about astronomy and space. He has appeared on television on the NBC "Today" show, on CNN's "This American Morning," on the PBS "Newshour," and on the Discovery and National Geographic cable channels. He has written a number of books that showcase some of the most spectacular stories and images from the space program: "Postcards from Mars" (Dutton/Penguin, 2006) , "Mars 3-D" (Sterling, 2008) , "Moon 3-D" (Sterling, 2009) , "The Space Book" (Sterling, 2013) , "The Interstellar Age" (Dutton, 2015) , The Ultimate Interplanetary Travel Guide" (Sterling, 2018) , "The Earth Book" (Sterling, 2019) , and "Hubble Legacy" (Sterling, 2020) . In 2011, Jim was the recipient of the American Astronomical Society's Carl Sagan Medal for excellence in the public communication of planetary science. Jim grew up in Rhode Island and received his B.S. in Planetary Science and Aeronautics from Caltech in 1987 and his Ph.D. in Geology & Geophysics from the University of Hawaii in 1992. His research primarily focuses on the geology, geochemistry, and mineralogy of planets, moons, asteroids, and comets using data obtained from telescopes and spacecraft missions. Jim spent 3 years as a National Research Council postdoctoral research fellow at NASA's Ames Research Center in the early 1990s.Jim is an active planetary scientist and has been heavily involved in many NASA robotic space exploration missions, including the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) , Mars Pathfinder, Comet Nucleus Tour, Mars Exploration Rover, Mars Odyssey Orbiter, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, and the Mars Science Laboratory rover mission. As a member of the Mars Exploration Rover team, Jim has served as the lead scientist in charge of the Panoramic camera (Pancam) color, stereoscopic imaging system on the Spirit and Opportunity rovers. As a professional scientist, Jim has published nearly 40 first-authored and nearly 220 co-authored research papers in peer reviewed scientific journals, has authored or co-authored nearly 670 short abstracts and scientific conference presentations, and has edited or co-edited three scientific books for Cambridge University Press (on the NEAR mission, the surface composition of Mars, and techniques for planetary remote geochemical analysis) . He has been an active user of the Hubble Space Telescope, and of ground based telescopes at Mauna Kea Observatory
