Voyager sterilisation?

The work I'm doing at the moment gives me copious free time for my
lunches, but sadly no net connection; it's an opportunity to work down
through the paperback reading pile. (I've gone through about half the
Heinlein juveniles in the past month, it seems...)

So, I turned up a copy of /Journey Beyond Selene/, by Jeffrey Kluger;
quite interesting, although it does seem a bit on the overzealously
enthusiastic side. (OTOH, he's writing about JPL's highest-profile
successes. It'd be hard not to be enthusiastic.)

He mentions that the Voyager 1 flyby of Titan was planned to be at about
4,000km distance; at 10AU, the margins of error involved are trivial,
and there was a real worry they would foul up and have the probe collide
with the planet, rather than skim past.

I assume this was considered before; as I understand things, a close
Titan flyby was seen as the prize of the Saturn stage of the mission.
(Thankfully, it turned out to be scientifically uninteresting, and
Voyager 2 could be retargeted to go on to Uranus and Neptune.) Given
that the great interest in Titan was the prospect of Interesting Organic
Chemistry And All That, does anyone know if the Voyagers were sterilised
lest they enter the atmosphere, or was it assumed that interplanetary
trajectories would mean they'd be going so fast on entry that no spores
would plausibly survive?

--
-Andrew Gray

On Wed, 27 Apr 2005 22:31:28 -0500, rk
wrote:

I am pretty sure that the Voyagers were not sterilized.

....Not that it mattered. As separated as they were in their flight
trajectories, the odds of their breeding were AbZero.

OM

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In message , Andrew Gray
writes

So, I turned up a copy of /Journey Beyond Selene/, by Jeffrey Kluger;
quite interesting, although it does seem a bit on the overzealously
enthusiastic side. (OTOH, he's writing about JPL's highest-profile
successes. It'd be hard not to be enthusiastic.)

He mentions that the Voyager 1 flyby of Titan was planned to be at about
4,000km distance; at 10AU, the margins of error involved are trivial,
and there was a real worry they would foul up and have the probe collide
with the planet, rather than skim past.

I assume this was considered before; as I understand things, a close
Titan flyby was seen as the prize of the Saturn stage of the mission.
(Thankfully, it turned out to be scientifically uninteresting, and
Voyager 2 could be retargeted to go on to Uranus and Neptune.)

Minor correction - I don't think Titan can be called scientifically
uninteresting (it's a major reason why Cassini went) but Voyager 1
showed that there was nothing Voyager 2 could add, given the same
instruments. Voyager 1 presumably returned a lot of "particles and
fields" data and returned interesting results for the atmospheric
composition and the polar hood.
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"Jonathan Silverlight" wrote
in message

Minor correction - I don't think Titan can be called scientifically
uninteresting (it's a major reason why Cassini went) but Voyager 1 showed
that there was nothing Voyager 2 could add, given the same instruments.

That's why it can be called uninteresting - given the same hardware, nothing
new could be learned.

On 2005-04-28, Jonathan Silverlight
wrote:

I assume this was considered before; as I understand things, a close
Titan flyby was seen as the prize of the Saturn stage of the mission.
(Thankfully, it turned out to be scientifically uninteresting, and
Voyager 2 could be retargeted to go on to Uranus and Neptune.)

Minor correction - I don't think Titan can be called scientifically
uninteresting (it's a major reason why Cassini went) but Voyager 1
showed that there was nothing Voyager 2 could add, given the same
instruments.

To a degree, it was scientifically uninteresting *to Voyager* - V1
showed that they couldn't really gather much useful information beyond
the general properties, and it became a mere low-priority target for V2.

--
-Andrew Gray

On 2005-04-28, rk wrote:

I am pretty sure that the Voyagers were not sterilized.

Thanks. I hadn't seen any mention of it, but it occurred to me that
coming so soon after Viking it might have been something they'd have
considered.

Also, good book and well worth reading, but it does read a bit like a
corporate annual report and not a true history.

It is a bit enthusiastic, yeah.

It's very JPL oriented, and lunar-oriented; this is sometimes a bit odd,
since it virtually fails to mention Lunar Orbiter (fine, not a JPL
program) but devotes an entire chapter to Apollo 15... which also had
very little to do with JPL.

I don't think it mentioned Pioneer 3 & 4 either, which were definitely
JPL missions and definitely lunar.

So a bit hit and miss in what it covered, and a bit hit and miss in what
level of detail it went into (the discussion of Galileo was a bit flaky,
I think). Still, nice to see half-remembered anecdotes written out
properly.

--
-Andrew Gray