From: Amara Graps (amara@amara.com)
Date: Sat Aug 31 2002 - 12:23:16 MDT
http://www.amara.com/vgr2/snapshots.html
Voyager 2 at Jupiter
A Human's First Snapshots of Another World
(Snapshots found in a twenty year old box)
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I found these snapshots in a manilla envelope last week while
documenting items in an old box. I moved this particular box of
Voyager 2 spacecraft work materials from house to house (and
country to country) in the last twenty years. Even though many of
the items are scientifically valuable today, for me, the most
precious items in the box was a rediscovery of old snapshots taken
by my friend and classmate, Myra Weir, when she saw the first
pictures of Jupiter from Voyager 2 in 1979. The snapshots
themselves are not of particularly high quality, however, I
believe that her notes written on the backside of each photo
convey well the excitement that humans feel at an overwhelming
scientific discovery. These personal snapshots of a JPL TV monitor
are snapshots in a larger sense of some of humans' greatest
achievements, and the emotions that one feels at that instant in
time.
This encounter was the second by the twin spacecraft of the giant
planet, at the time of these snapshots in July 1979. The Voyager 1
spacecraft had already flown by Jupiter, four months earlier, and
the planetary scientists were deep into the data reduction and
excitement of the spacecrafts' first discoveries. The turbulent
clouds were more chaotic and vivid that anyone could have
imagined, and Io's volcanoes were discovered unexpectedly after
closest approach when a navigation engineer used Io's limb for
navigation calculations. Jupiter's ring, was hinted at
(discovered), too, from one Voyager 1 eleven minute exposure, but
no details were seen yet, therefore, Voyager 2 was programmed to
take additional pictures of the ring. Ganymede's grooved terrain
was seen at high resolution with Voyager 1, and Voyager 2 was
programmed to continue with those Ganymede studies.
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Amara Graps, PhD email: amara@amara.com
Computational Physics vita: ftp://ftp.amara.com/pub/resume.txt
Multiplex Answers URL: http://www.amara.com/
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"That's the whole problem with science. You've got a bunch of
empiricists trying to describe things of unimaginable wonder."
--Calvin (& Hobbes)
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