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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 |
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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 -- "No ******* ever won a war by dying for | http://www.io.com/~o_m his country. He won it by making the other | Sergeant-At-Arms poor dumb ******* die for his country." | Human O-Ring Society - General George S. Patton, Jr |
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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. -- Remove spam and invalid from address to reply. |
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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. |
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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 |
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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 |
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