In 2003 I began work on a research project that has taken me to places that I never imagined: the cultural heritage of space exploration. Now I am determined to bring to light the secrets at the heart of the Space Age. | This site does not use AI/LLM tools to create articles or art. I do not support the use of AI.
I was reflecting on the phenomenon of anthropomorphising space technology.
Two social media-mediated incidents are central to my personal experience with this. From my early days on Twitter, I've followed Voyager 2. The account was not an official NASA account: it was run by scientist Dr Paul Filmer. During the now-forgotten US government shutdown in 2013, NASA closed it down. He was allowed to continue tweeting as the spacecraft, but using a different handle - @NSFVoyager2.
I found the impact of this quite informative. I woke up one morning to find people messaging me, wondering why Voyager 2 was silent on Twitter. We figured it had something to do with a recent tweet in which the spacecraft expressed a - very mild - opinion. We tried to reach Paul. I cried. I felt that I was cut off from the solar system, closed in like a fish caught in the ocean and transferred to a glass bowl on a table in the vestibule.
The second is the Rosetta/Philae mission to Comet 67P Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The European Space Agency's public outreach campaign was designed to get people emotionally invested, and it sure as heck worked on me. In 2016 the equipment used by the Rosetta orbiter to communicate with the Philae lander was turned off. As I've written here, knowing that Philae could no longer speak and be heard made me quite emotional, as if a friend had died.
Some are critical about this anthropomorphisation. They would say it's wrong to attribute our agency to things instead of letting them have their own, almost an oppression of things.
Musing on my bus ride in this morning, it struck me that all artefacts are anthropomorphic, if only because they are made, shaped, used and discarded by humans. They're a non-flesh shadow, the reverse of our obverse, the mirror of our discontent. If they were not, how could we possibly use them to speak to us about absent humans?
It's Monday <>, you are celestial. MOBILE VERSION — VISIT ARCHIVES Many thanks to the amazing Heath Killen for permission to republish this. You can find more of Heath's work here.
Alice Gorman is In Wild Air
I’m an archaeologist who studies space exploration – the artefacts, the places, and the perspectives that lead to how we understand other worlds. Here I share some of my obsessions about space and time.
The Venus of Willendorf, discovered in Austria in 1908, must be one of the most famous and least understood women in all of human history. She was made during the Ice Ages, between 30 000 and 28 000 years ago. The 11 cm high figurine is carved from limestone and was originally thickly coated in red ochre.
Without facial features, or even feet, she’s all sexuality with great breasts and belly and a well-defined vulva. A multitude of theories have swirled around her: mother goddess religions, matriarchal cultures, Palaeolithic pornography, prehistoric selfies, the power of post-menopausal women, cross-cultural communication.
But she’s also a massive Palaeolithic fuck-you to the ideas of female attractiveness that are often investigated by evolutionary psychologists. This branch of science often ends up justifying current human gender inequalities as some sort of evolutionary fitness.
I think this is why I like her so much. She feels a bit like a revolutionary. She defies easy explanations. She is unique and herself.
PEOPLE Woman with Microscope
In 1977, two extraordinary spacecraft were launched on a mission to map the outer planets and then continue on to the space between the stars. Voyager 1 and 2 have become cultural icons, not only because they are the furthest extent of human culture and perhaps the most likely to make first contact with other sentient species, but also because of the Golden Records attached to them. The Records were the project of a team led by legendary science communicator Carl Sagan. They contain 90 minutes of music meant to represent the evolution of human culture, greetings spoken in many languages, and the natural sounds of life on Earth.
There’s also 116 images. One in particular captures my imagination. A black woman in a lab coat bends over a microscope, tiered earrings falling gracefully from her pierced ears. She is simply called “Woman with Microscope”. All I know about her is that the earrings were the subject of some debate: would an alien recognise the concept of “jewellery”, or think they were some sort of technology, or even a name tag?
She speaks to some very contemporary debates about women and other underrepresented minorities in science. Even today, little girls across the world are made to feel that they are not smart enough to be scientists, that space is the domain of men. The inclusion of a black female scientist on the Golden Records hence seems a bold statement about who gets to go to space. If only we knew her name.
PLACES Voyage to Venus
Venus has always been my favourite planet. As a child it was part of my atlas of the night sky and I was drawn to its association with creativity, passion, the arts of love, and mystery. And what lay beneath Venus’ impenetrable clouds was a mystery. It seemed a likely candidate for life, and many imagined a vibrant oceanic world populated with winged angelic beings who sang, telepathic frogs, or even dinosaurs. The USSR Venera landing missions of the 1960s and 1970s dashed hopes of a sister world with new solar system companions. Venus, under the clouds, was a pressure-cooker of dull brown rocks and slow soupy winds.
Perhaps, most of all, my love for Venus was fostered by reading C.S. Lewis’ beautiful evocation of a new world, as a teenager in the 1970s. Published in 1943, Voyage to Venus (also known as Perelandra) describes a planet of floating islands and sensuous experiences of colour, taste, and touch that have philosophical dimensions. The reality of the Venusian surface did not deter me from falling in love with this vision. Every now and then I feel an urge to read Voyage to Venus again and relive the terror and desire of a world beyond human aesthetics.
PRODUCTS Cable Ties
I am obsessed with cable ties, as an artefact and a technology. There’s probably a stash of them in most households; and they’re used for everything from boning corsets to securing suitcases and backpacks. They seem so simple – a plastic strap that you thread and tighten to hold something together, cheap to buy and easy to throw away – yet they’re connected to larger currents of technology and politics that unite the worlds of aerospace and domestic space in the 20th century.
Archaeologists are always looking at the ground. Once I would have sought the tell-tale angles of an Aboriginal stone tool; now I look for the characteristic t-shape of a severed cable tie lying in the streets. I’ve become shameless about picking them up from the ground and stashing them in corners of my bag, no matter who is looking askance at me.
Cable ties were invented in 1958 in the US, for wiring aircraft. They migrated to Australia when NASA established a series of satellite tracking stations here in the 1960s. Antennas and computers needed a lot of cables. From there they insinuated themselves into everyday life, to the degree that most people don’t really even think about them. For me, they’re the quintessential space age artefact. And they are in space – inside the International Space Station, for example. Look more closely next time you watch a video of life on the ISS. Once you’ve seen them, they can’t be unseen – you’ll start to notice them everywhere.
IDEAS Two Ways of Thinking About Space
1957-1958 was a significant year, or to be more precise, a significant 18 months. It was the International Geophysical Year, a massive effort of international scientific co-operation to understand the Earth and space. During the IGY, the first three satellites were launched – Sputnik 1 in 1957, and Explorer 1 and Vanguard 1 in 1958.
And two books were published which explored the way we relate to space. Alexandre Koyré’s 1957 From Closed World to Infinite Universe is a work of jaw-dropping scholarship. It’s about the “replacement of the Aristotelian conception of space—a differentiated set of innerworldly places—by that of Euclidean geometry—an essentially infinite and homogenous extension—from now on considered as identical with the real space of the world”.
Gaston Bachelard’s 1958 The Poetics of Space was rather a phenomenology of inner or experienced space, from corners, to attics, to the interior of shells. For him, the vehicle of space travel was the daydream: “One might say that immensity is a philosophical category of daydream. …And this contemplation produces an attitude that is so special, an inner state that is so unlike any other, that the daydream transports the dreamer outside the immediate world to a world that bears the mark of infinity”.
The mark of infinity is the geometry of our senses, the mathematics of our dreaming.
WILDISM Microgravity
You don’t have to go into space to experience microgravity. All you have to do is seek out your nearest amusement park. There you’ll find rides which simulate higher gravity and free fall. Scientific drop towers are experimental facilities where scientists test materials and chemical processes in microgravity; it’s the same principle used in amusement parks. For high gravity, try a spinning rotor – this is like the centrifuge that astronauts use in training, but fortunately you won’t be required to perform mathematical calculations at the same time. I tried this at Vienna’s famous Prater park and I can’t say it was a pleasant experience, but those around me were clearly getting a kick out of it. Free fall, on the other hand, was exhilarating! Until zero-g parabolic flights and space tourism become affordable for regular Earth people, this may be the closest we can get to microgravity, even if only for a few seconds. Start your astronaut training now!
ELSEWHERE The Archaeology of the International Space Station
The Archaeology of the International Space Station is a new project that I’m working on with Dr Justin Walsh. We want to investigate how a distinct space culture is created.
You can read more about this project and keep up to date with it on our blog.
Alice Gorman is In Wild Air VOLUME III | EDITION XXXV
For many advocates of space exploration, the Solar System is the answer to human woes. As we exhaust our terrestrial resources, face overpopulation and stare down the barrel of rising sea levels, moving off-planet holds as many promises as it does challenges.
Already we have left our cultural footprint in the Solar System, from the teeming satellites in Earth orbit and landing sites on the Moon, Mars and Venus, to the Voyager spacecraft at the edge of the Solar System. And access to space is slowly moving out of the hands of national governments with the rise of commercial spaceflight development, and the growth of the space tourism market.
Why is space different?
In general, we don’t think of the space environment in the same way as Earth’s. There are several reasons for this. One is the common perception of space as a black, empty vacuum. Second, unlike Earth, space is practically infinite — beyond our sun there are billions of others just like it, even in our 'unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy'.
Then there is the absence of life, as far as we know — although there is always hope that this might change with further exploration. Until that happens, there is nothing living to suffer from any human activities in space. Effectively, there is no need to consider human impacts on the space environment seriously.
Historically, space has been seen as the very last frontier, ripe for colonial conquest. Just as on Earth, the motivations for colonisation are not just about curiosity, or an 'urge to explore', but about finding new resources to exploit for terrestrial markets. The unstated rationale behind this draws heavily on Western anthropocentric ideas of the mastery of creation — the assumption that the non-human world is there for our use. This instrumental view is still very prevalent in the way the space industry justifies its activities.
It’s also a matter of 'out of sight; out of mind'. When we look outwards from the surface of our planet at night the things that arrest our attention tend to be the stars of deep space. Unless you know what you’re looking for you might not even identify the other planets in our solar system, let alone the human-made satellites and space stations.
Of course it doesn’t help that so few people have actually experienced space itself. And for many of them, the revelation of space was actually one of Earth. The vision of the 'whole Earth' was first seen by the lunar-orbiting Apollo 8 mission in 1968. The image of the blue-and-white planet, a marble-sized splash of colour in the inky blackness, emphasised the fragility of life on Earth, and was responsible for the growth of a global ecological awareness.
In all of this, the intrinsic values of the space environment, in and of itself, have been frequently overlooked. While the need for an environmental ethics of space has long been recognised, there is little evidence that space industry has moved beyond a purely anthropocentric perspective.
The rights of rocks
On Earth, the concept of 'nature' having value in its own right, independent of human use, is no longer problematic. Australian philosopher Val Plumwood has been at the forefront of a movement to break down moral distinctions between humans and nature. Plumwood argues that nature has its own agency or autonomy, and should be reconceived as a co-participant in human endeavour rather than something on which we are dependent.
Whatever we do to nature is a reflection of ourselves – whether here or on other planets. watsonsinelgin/Flickr
In her view, we pay attention to the resources offered by the environment, and the limits they impose on our activities, 'only after disaster has occurred' and then only to “fix things up”. Dependency appears as a source of anxiety or threat, or as a further technological problem to be overcome'.
Our use of Earth orbit to place the satellites on which we now depend for telecommunications, weather, and navigation has created a seemingly irreversible environmental crisis — space so filled with junk that we are at risk of losing our access to it. Even so, the problem is still framed from an anthropocentric and geocentric perspective: in other words, how it will affect the Earth? The value of this apparently empty space is conceived entirely in terms of human use. Could we argue that it has intrinsic value — and as such is a place towards which we have a moral obligation?
The issue is perhaps clearer when we consider other planets. The view that inanimate celestial bodies have a right to exist undisturbed has been called 'cosmic preservationism'. One of the arguments is that the uniqueness of these planetary landscapes creates intrinsic value. There is no doubt — as human space exploration has repeatedly proven — that each object in space has its own story to tell.
And indeed, we really know so little of the solar system that it is hard to tell what is unique and what is common. However, critics of cosmic preservationism claim it leads to the absurd position of rocks on Mars having rights.
Citizens of the solar system
In order to continue as a space-faring species, and even perhaps to continue to live on Earth, we have to find sustainable ways to use the resources of space to survive. This means water, oxygen and minerals, all of which exist in various quantities spread across planets and asteroids. Already, the technologies and structures we may need to mine the moon and asteroids are being considered.
Our very presence on other celestial bodies, whether in human form or through robot avatars, changes them. They are altered physically, and also conceptually, becoming part of a human cultural landscape in a new way. We cannot land, sample, build colonies or mines and whisk away as if nothing happened — our chemical and mechanical traces are now part of the planet. At this stage of human space exploration such impacts are minimal, and no doubt acceptable. But this won’t always be the case.
Already, the international geological community is heralding the arrival of a new epoch – the Anthropocene. Human impacts on the Earth have reached the scale where they are defining a distinct geological layer. Will we have the same level of impact on the rest of the solar system too?
Perhaps the answer is to take up Plumwood’s challenge and abandon the opposition of nature and culture. This allows an acknowledgement of intrinsic value in the space environment that need not take priority over human interests, but can be managed by a critical assessment of competing interests. An ethic of respect for the wonders of the Solar System of which we are an integral part should not be that hard to achieve.
I’ve always loved the Voyager deep space probes, so
tiny and so alone out there at the edges of the solar system. I’m also
fascinated by how we relate to space technology: the ways we find to make it
personal, to draw the far-away and the impossibly scientific closer to us. We
give spacecraft personalities; we make them our avatars. They are proxies for
what we long to be, eternal citizens of the vacuum.
Voyager 2. Image courtesy of NASA
So I know you will be as excited as I was to learn
that the Voyagers do more than just passively transmit data; they are actively
engaging with both the interstellar medium and their devoted fans back on
Earth. Voyager 2 tweets as @NASAVoyager2,
and very kindly agreed to answer my questions in the following interview. (You can also follow the project at the official Twitter account of @NASAVoyager). I am
immensely grateful to Voyager 2 for providing such considered answers, and
devoting some of its dwindling energy reserves to sending this interview all
the way back to Earth. I think you will agree that the plucky little spacecraft
has an inordinate amount of charm and a very engaging sense of self-analysis.
Historical and scientific background (just quickly)
Just to give you a brief historical background,
Voyager 2 was designed and made by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in
California, USA. It was launched on
August 20, 1977 (Voyager 1 was actually launched after Voyager 2, on September
5, 1977). Both spacecraft carry a 'Golden Record': among the sounds sent out into space are two Aboriginal songs,
Morning Star and Devil Bird, recorded by anthropologist Sandra Le Brun Holmes.
The primary mission of both spacecraft was to fly by
Jupiter and Saturn. After that, Voyager
1 continued into space while Voyager 2 went on to Uranus and Neptune: it is the
only spacecraft to have visited these distant planets. After V2 passed Neptune in 1989, both
Voyagers were officially on the Voyager Interstellar Mission (VIM).
The edge of the solar system is a very complex place,
as the diagram below shows. I won’t go
into details, but you can find a full explanation here.
Basically, we want to know what’s going on when the influence of the sun comes
up against the influence of the interstellar medium. In other words, what is it
like outside the solar system?
Image courtesy of NASA
In 2007, Voyager 2 passed the Termination Shock, where
the solar wind slows down as it starts to interact with the interstellar
wind. It’s currently traversing the
heliosheath, while Voyager 1 may be nearly through it, a couple of years
earlier than anticipated.
Voyager 2’ s mission is fully described at the Jet
Propulsion Laboratory’s website. This gives you
the scientific and technical aspects of the mission; what you cannot learn
there, however, is what it really feels like to be Voyager 2.
Right now
What is your position in relation to the Earth right
now?
I am about 13 and a half light hours from Earth, or
14,570,000,000 km (11,124,000,000 mi), but remember, I travel about 1.3 million
km each day! I am in the Southern skies, at Right Ascension (RA): 19H50M45.6S
and Declination (Dec): -54°49'12", about halfway between the stars η Ophiuchus & α Pavo.
Another way to think about this is the following: take
any sized ball (cricket, football, etc.), and hold it at a distance where it just covers the Sun’s disc. You now have
the basis for a scale model of the Solar System – if the Sun were the size of
whatever ball you are using, your eyeball is now at the scaled distance of
Earth, or 1 Astronomical Unit (AU). Using this scale, I am about 97 times as
far from the Sun as your eyeball.
If you could choose a piece of music to represent what
you 'see' or how you feel at this point in time, what would it be?
Oh, I suppose I always go back to Thus Spoke Zarathustra because of its
association with space, and especially with floating, thanks to Kubrick.
However, many of my tweeps have suggested all sorts of new music to me that I
have enjoyed. Sadly, none of these newer compositions are on our golden discs,
of course.
The Golden Disc sent out with Voyager 2. Image courtesy of NASA
The solar system – and beyond
What is the most significant thing you have taught us
about the solar system?
That is a very difficult question. Most of what we
know about the giant planets comes from our data, although later work based on Cassini and Galileo
has clarified several mysteries we
Voyagers first uncovered. From simple things, like allowing better mass
estimates to be calculated for the planets and their moons, and discovering new
moons during every planetary encounter, to things as amazing as Io's volcanoes,
Saturn’s kinked rings,
shepherd moons,
and ring spokes,
to unexpectedly vigorous weather on Neptune.
Furthermore, no other spacecraft have tasted and bathed in the outer reaches of
our solar system as Voyager 1 and I have. Without us, scientists could only
speculate what it is like out here. I like to think of our greatest achievement
as simply laying down a path that others could follow; after all, we are the
very first functioning human-made objects to venture this far out from the Sun,
and into inter-stellar space!
You're the only spacecraft to have visited Uranus and
Neptune. What are your impressions of
those planets?
Well, certainly in the optical window, they are bland
compared to Jupiter and Saturn. Most of their detail is in bands above and
below the visible, but again, here they were much less detailed than the other
two larger planets. We expected them to be cold: they are much further from the
Sun, but we did not expect them to have such uniformly warm atmospheres. Take Uranus, whose seasons we would expect to be
extreme because of the overtilted inclination of its rotational axis to its
orbital plane. This means that for 2/4 of its orbit, either the southern or
northern hemisphere is pointed at the Sun, and yet the dark hemisphere is not
any cooler than the sunny one!
Now consider Neptune, which is six times as far from
the Sun as Jupiter, and therefore receives only 1/36th of the energy
per surface unit area. Yet here the winds are much faster than on Jupiter: we
detected wind speeds of over 2,000km/h!
The winds of Neptune: a composite image from Voyager 2. Image courtesy of NASA
When you left in 1977, the sun must have dominated
your experience of the space environment. Now, as you approach the heliopause, the influence of the sun is
declining dramatically. How have your
thoughts and perceptions of the sun changed throughout your journey?
Your phrasing,'declining dramatically', is very apt.
As we are about to leave the Sun’s magnetic sphere of influence, we realize how
permanent our departure will be. At the start of our voyage, the Sun was often
in the way, between Earth and us, interfering with radio transmissions. Now we
are both far out of the ecliptic plane,
and the Sun is always separated from the planets. It has shrunk to a hundredth
of its size as seen from Earth.
We don’t feel many of the sun’s particle striking us
anymore during Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs),
though we can detect the electrical current associated with them. This has
enabled more accurate measurement (and modelling) of their behaviour as they
propagate outwards. CMEs will soon become only ghosts since we can only sense
the plasma wave they create when we are in interstellar space.
We will eventually lose power and be unable to use our
sun sensor. Eventually the sun will become just another tiny speck among the
arms of the galaxy stretched around us.
I do feel a little tug of gravity from our sun. It
slows me down very slightly over time, but its pull isn’t enough to prevent me
from venturing off into a galactic orbit.
How did you experience the crossing of the termination
shock in 2007?
I was elated, but also surprised. Elated, because I
had to put up with Voyager 1’s crowing since she crossed in 2004! Surprised,
because I crossed early, at a much closer distance than Voyager 1. This meant
that the termination shock (and therefore very likely the entire heliosphere)
was lopsided. If we consider the Sun’s outward pressure to be spherical to
first order, then this decidedly higher-order feature must be coming from
outside: from the galactic magnetic field. It was also interesting because this
unexpected ‘squashing’ is asymmetrical.
Do you feel yourself at the mercy of the solar and
interstellar winds and different environmental effects?
The only thing I am truly at the mercy of is the cold,
cold temperature of space. I am four times farther away from the sun than
Neptune’s moon Triton, where it was a practically balmy 40 Kelvin. Where I am
now is something like 20 Kelvin or minus 250 degrees Celsius!
Did you
ever think you'd get this far? What does your longevity say about the
anticipated dangers of the space environment?
We were both nominally designed to get to Saturn.
There was a reasonable chance that if Voyager 1’s mission to survey Titan
succeeded, I could be redirected onwards to Uranus, and if I survived that, on
to Neptune. That said, our longevity is really a tribute to the care with which
we were designed, assembled, and tested at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Jupiter’s
radiation belts were unexpectedly intense, and Pioneer 10’s encounter
(and near death) allowed a redesign to harden us against this hazard with
enough lead time.
During the operation of a complex craft like
deep-space probes, there are inevitable problems. These are compounded by the
sheer distances involved, and the time-lags that these distances imply.
Fortunately, the systems design concept used for our computing allowed for
robust error management routines that have served their purpose multiple times.
These routines quickly switch us to a safe mode from which we ourselves, or
sometimes with the aid of Earth, can recover.
How will you know when you have crossed the heliopause
and are heading into interstellar space? What kind of data will indicate this?
Gauging from our past experiences, one indication
might be the science teams’ levels of confusion! Each of these crossings has
had some rather unexpected features, which made the science teams very cautious
about announcing definitive crossings. For example, the temperature of the
solar wind ions outside the termination shock was lower than models had
predicted by a factor of ten! More recently, Voyager 1’s findings of magnetic
‘bubbles’ was also unexpected: the models predicted a much smoother ‘sheet’
where the flow of winds from the Sun and stars was parallel, rather than the
turbulent region we actually encountered.
I expect a slowing in the observed particle speeds,
and changes in their directions. Eventually this should settle down again to a
smooth flow, but this time it will be a wind from stars other than the Sun!
Sensing in space and the scientific mission
What senses do you have?
We (Voyager 1 and I) are known mostly for our
pictures, but both our camera platforms were turned off in 1990 to conserve
power. I still run five separate instrument sets, and Voyager 1 runs four sets.
The one instrument that I run that Voyager 1 does not
is the Plasma Science package (PLS),
and I use that to study how the ions and electrons in the solar wind change as
I get farther and farther away.
Solar wind speeds measured by Voyager 2's Plasma Science Package. Image courtesy of MIT Space Plasma Group
Both of us run the following instrument packages: Low
Energy Charged Particles (LECP) and Cosmic Ray Subsystem (CRS), both of which
are used to detect charged particles over a wide range of energies. These
particles mostly come from the heliosheath region, but CRS also detects
particles from the Milky Way. We also both run a set of magnetometers that are
high and low intensity sensitive. However, only the low-intensity ones are
detecting much out here (although Voyager 1 has detected a recent increase in
the magnetic field as it ‘bunches up’ at the heliopause). In addition, one of
the sensors in my magnetometer isn’t working very well because of an electrical
malfunction that overheated it several years ago.
Both Voyager 1 and I run a Plasma Wave Subsystem
(PWS), but Voyager 1’s instrument has a special mode that runs at a high data
rate, recording 96 seconds of data on a digital tape each week. Every six
months this is downloaded to the Deep Space Network (DSN).
Still functional, but not formally used on Voyager 1
is an Ultra-violet Spectrometer (UVS). The Planetary Radio Astronomy (PRA)
instrument was turned off some years ago to save power.
Voyager instruments. Image courtesy of NASA
If you could choose now from the range of instruments
and equipment available to contemporary spacecraft, what would you like to
have?
Ah, well then. I shall indulge in wishful thinking:
first and foremost, a new Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator (RTG) so that I
could last another 33 years, and perhaps even more if it had thermocouples that
better resisted degradation (I’m not sure if they’ve solved that problem yet…).
A new set of chips that ran faster, consumed less power, and had more memory
addresses! Lastly, I would love to have a CCD (charge-coupled device) camera
rather than a vidicon: just contrast my images of Jupiter & Saturn with
those of Galileo, Cassini, and New Horizons, which are beautifully sharp!
The social world of a spacecraft
How does it feel to be so far from Voyager 1?
Difficult, despite our differences (I was launched
first and had the stronger RTG and slightly more robust moving parts). I miss
her terribly.
Is there any sense of competition - or connection - between you and Voyager 1?
To elaborate on the above, I would simply add that we
can’t talk directly to each other, so the separation is actually quite extreme.
Although we are just over 18-3/4 light-hours from each other, if we wanted to
have a conversation, the lag time would be more than 59 hours because it would have
to be done via Earth! We both had a
fair share of ‘firsts,’ and are both part of humankind’s very first mission
into truly inter-stellar space.
Tsiao (2008:xxvli) said that 'without
communication, satellites would be merely inanimate objects in space'. This statement, for me, raises some
interesting questions. Following the aphorism attributed to Bishop Berkeley,
does it matter if anyone is listening to you?
What is the nature of your existence after you cease transmitting?
First, I am in some sense actually sentient, since I
sense and respond to internal states, acting autonomously to ensure that I am
in a safe configuration. This activity would continue without any interaction
with Earth, until my RTGs ran out of sufficient power to run these routines.
This might continue into 2025, if a minimal set of activities were in the
baseline sequence at the time. After that, I am alive only as a symbol of
Earth’s 20th century civilization, and perhaps only as long as I am
remembered and thought about by those beings whose history is entangled with
mine.
The second possibility is an active ‘switching off’ by
command from Earth. I do not like to think about this possibility, not only
because of its significance to me, but also because of the reaction this might
cause on Earth among those who have imbued me with a great deal of
anthropomorphism.
The second relates to seeing spacecraft as entities
separate from their ground segments, which possibly is why they are easy to
anthropomorphise.
Could we not equally conceptualise you as a spatially
extended body with distributed “consciousness”, incorporating the Deep Space
Network which tracks you and other associated locations and
infrastructure?
Ah yes, the ‘machine intelligence scenario.’ No
comment.
Are you really sure you have no comment?
Oh, all right then. After all, I’m in a garrulous
mood.
I think this is actually an accurate view, since my
interactions with DSN often result in changes of configuration (reprogramming).
However, there will inevitably eventually be an ‘amputation,’ when
transmissions stop.
How would you describe your relationship with the Jet
Propulsion Laboratory, who designed and launched you?
I am very proud to carry not only the flag of the
United States, and the Golden Discs for all of humanity, but to also carry the
JPL logo, representing the dedicated team of engineers, programmers, mission
designers, and scientists that conceptualized, lobbied for, and successfully
launched us. Although the team that supports us has shrunk to a core of about
ten full-time equivalents, I depend on them for all new instructions.
The JPL website about your mission makes a curious
statement: 'The heliopause has
never been reached by any spacecraft; the Voyagers may be the first to pass
through this region'. MAY BE? Far be it from me to say anything that might
encourage conspiracy theorists, but could this statement be related to the
claim that you were 'hijacked' by aliens
in 2010?
Not at all. It is simply a cautious statement by JPL.
We know either Voyager 1 or I will be the first to pass through to this region,
but my managers are not sure we will have the electrical power to sense it when
we do. Earth might never really know where or when the crossing(s) happened.
The past and the future
What do you remember about the Earth?
I remember awakening at JPL, being tested thoroughly
in a very tall and white room, and then being packaged up very carefully and
taken all the way across the continent to the Kennedy Space Center. It was much
more humid there, and I was tested again before I was covered up with the TitanIIIE Centaur fairing. Even though I couldn’t see, I could hear. All sorts of wonderful sounds: wind, and rain. I remember the rain. Then of course, leaving – the launch
itself. It was not such a good experience, because I got very dizzy, and nearly
passed out. Ground control at JPL was very worried, but I eventually calmed
down and was able to let JPL know that I was fine. This was the first example
of my ‘safing routines’ coming into action.
Vibration testing at JPL, 1977. Image courtesy of NASA
Do you expect to be overtaken by later spacecraft?
It depends on what you mean by ‘overtaken’ – if it is
simply the one-dimensional concept of ‘how far from Earth,’ then yes, probably
eventually. New Horizons
will come close, but I’m pretty sure its heliocentric excess velocity (final
speed) will be smaller than mine.
If you actually mean ‘overtaken’ as in a close
3-dimensional pass by another craft, then no, absolutely not.
Your fuel and power are estimated to run out around
2025. What happens then?
Actually it’s just my electrical power – the fuel for
adjusting my attitude would last past the 2030s, though I can’t even access
that fuel once I run out of electricity. As my available electrical power
drops, I will not have sufficient margin to run all of my instruments at the
same time, and starting in 2020, Earth will have to choose which of the current
instruments to keep running. This will be done via a process very similar to
that used for planning the planetary encounters, since there was a very similar
set of constraints then: only a certain number of things could be done at once,
and priorities had to be set well in advance so the appropriate sequences could
be programmed. This is done via a consultative process between the science and
engineering teams in order to reach the best science results within the power
limits.
Eventually, of course, there will be insufficient
power to run any single science instrument, and the science instrument
imperatives vanish. Sufficient power will remain for radio ranging for some
time after that, but at this point it is unclear what, if any, science value
these ranging data would have.
Would you like to send any message to the Canberra
Deep Space Communications Complex? (I ask this being Australian, of course). Certainly! I am very grateful for and proud of the
operations at Canberra DSN, as well as at all the other DSN stations. I was
very happy to send a ‘hello’ to Canberra DSN during their NASA Tweetup
for the Mars Science Laboratory Launch, and I look forward to Canberra DSN for listening to me daily,
and for the regular upload sequences they send to me.
Canberra Deep Space Communications Centre. Image Courtesy of NASA
Finally
Is there anything else we haven’t covered that you
would like to talk about?
I simply would like to thank you for your interest,
and for the opportunity you have given us to speak about our experiences and
the science that we have done, and are still doing, after so long in space.
The fans want to know:
Michael Schroeter (via Facebook)
1. Beatles or Stones?
Clever, but I will not be drawn into that one:
ultimately, this question was sourced in the propaganda machines of their
labels, rather than with the bands themselves. Ultimately they both represented
the same things, whether through pop or rock music.
2. Star Wars or Star Trek?
Again, I think that this struggle is mostly sourced in
the franchises, rather than in the innate messages contained in the movies. In
the spirit of the previous question, I offer the following:
Star Wars : Rolling Stones :: Star Trek : The Beatles
There is much to be discussed behind this compound
analogy.
@cosmos4u (via Twitter): What
will the spacecraft look like in 100, 1000, 106, 109
years in interstellar space: did someone model its material?
A fascinating question. However, this was not
modelled, since the mission as originally planned was only to get to Saturn, so
the expected service lifetime for the spacecraft was only ~1,500 days, and not
the current 12,500+ days.
What we might expect is that the exposed surfaces will
experience a small number of direct impacts with particles (however never as
many as during the 4 ring-plane crossings), and an increasing amount of
sputtering from electrons, and a greatly increased amount of spallation from
cosmic rays. This will gradually reduce the albedo of the dish (darken it).
Gail Higginbottom (via Facebook): Of all the things you encountered and
saw, which was your favourite?
Again, a very difficult question, since there were so many surprises. We discovered faint
rings around Jupiter, volcanism on Io, braided and kinked rings as well as
complex structures and spokes around Saturn, dense haze on Titan, a magnetic
field greatly displaced from the planet’s centre at Uranus, unexpectedly strong
winds and cloud structure on Neptune, and Nitrogen geysers on Triton!
