The Interstellar Age Read Online Free Page B

again we are rallying the troops, tapping society members (and nonmembers as well—indeed, anyone else who cares) to write letters and e-mails to Congress to express their support for the space program. Astrophysicist and science popularizer Neil deGrasse Tyson, host of the recent television remake of Cosmos and another former president of the society, has called for an increase in NASA’s budget despite the nation’s difficult financial situation, because space exploration represents the very best of what our species does, and because he knows that the value ofinspiration is priceless during tough times. The society’s new CEO, the Emmy-winning TV host, engineer, and science educator Bill Nye (“The Science Guy”), is reaching out to new members, taking advantage of contemporary venues like social media, to help keep the society vital and effective.
    The missions that have come since Voyager , such as the Jupiter orbiter Galileo and the Saturn orbiter Cassini , have revealed those worlds and their rings and moons anew, with more powerful senses, at higher resolution, and over extended periods of time. The time spent by these spacecraft in the Jupiter and Saturn systems has allowed us, for the first time, to see those worlds in motion , active andevolving—by nature a difficult task for a flyby mission like Voyager . These worlds are dynamic, a fact easy to forget when all you get is a short movie of the approach or a few still snapshots of a place apparently frozen in time. The more extensive time-lapse movies that we now have of these worlds from orbiting spacecraft have brought them to life. We can close our eyes and see the colossal storms raging on Jupiter as they morph into reality. Closer to home, rovers like Spirit , Opportunity , and Curiosity and the orbiters high above them are helping us unlock the secrets of ancient, Earthlike Mars, while orbiters circle and map Mercury, Venus, the moon, asteroids, and comets (as well as our own planet!) to help put the story of our origins together. Space exploration used to be dominated by the United States and the USSR, but now it has expanded into a truly global enterprise with significant contributions from Europe, Canada, Japan, China, India, and others. We are in the midst of a golden age of the exploration of space by people across our planet. About thirty active robotic missions are out there plying the ocean of space on our behalf, poised to make some of the most profound discoveries of all time. These missions let us vicariously see and hear and taste and touch the dirt and wind and ice of other worlds, following in the footsteps of the most grand and far-flung of them all, the Voyagers.
    VOYAGER AND ME
    We first crossed paths professionally, me and Voyager , when I was a college student in the 1980s, searching for a way to make a career out of my childhood dreams of astronomy and space. I applied for and—to my amazement—was accepted by both MIT and Caltechto study astronomy (as my friend Bill Nye would joke about his own acceptance by his beloved Cornell, “There must have been a clerical error of some kind”). Against the wishes of family and friends (most of whom had never heard of the place), I chose Caltech, partly because I needed to spread my wings and explore firsthand the things I was hearing about this strange new world called California, and partly because I knew that Caltech was intimately connected to JPL, the epicenter of planetary exploration in the United States.
    The smell of the olive trees the first day I walked onto the campus of the California Institute of Technology in the fall of 1983 was the smell of newness and change . It turned out I had traded an insular, small town and small-state family life for an insular, small dorm and small-campus nerdy life. I had never been so challenged academically (the professors are notoriously merciless there, since many have either invented the field they are teaching and written the textbooks