THE PRESS WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 30, 1989. Close to Neptune

Press, 30 August 1989, Page 20

THE PRESS WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 30, 1989. Close to Neptune

The successful completion of the 12-year trip of Voyager 2 to the planet Neptune is one of the great achievements of science and technology. In space exploration it lacked the human and dramatic interest of the walk and drive on the surface of the Moon, yet it was a great accomplishment to send off a spacecraft in 1977 and have it reach its goal, over the north pole of Neptune, 2.7 billion miles from its launching almost exactly at the predicted time. Voyager 2 also sent back pictures of Neptune and its astonishing moon, Triton. They took four hours to get back to Earth. This was exploration of the reaches of the universe and the excitement of some of the space scientists was infectious.

The American space programme received a tremendous boost after the successful launching of the first Soviet satellite, Sputnik 1, on October 4, 1957. By January, 1958, the United States had launched four satellites. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration developed a series of programmes, the manned missions being Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo., culminating in 1969 when Apollo 11 enabled men to land on the moon. A series of robot space probes was also developed. Among the first was the Mariner series, of which Mariner 9 sent back huge amounts of information about Mars. Mariner 10 gave the world the first close-up views of Venus and Mercury. The Viking series followed and touched down on Mars. Later, the exploration of deep space began with the Pioneer probes of Jupiter. The rapid development of space technology was demonstrated when Pioneer 10 passed the orbit of the Moon 11 hours after lift-off, compared with the three days it had taken the Apollo spacecraft to get to the Moon. After passing Jupiter, Pioneer spacecraft examined Saturn. All of this space exploration required the development of faster spacecraft, instruments that continued to function over years, and the sending and reception of signals. Pioneer 10 was the first spacecraft to leave the solar system. The Voyager project began as a dual spacecraft mission. Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were launched in August and September, 1977. The immediate aim was to explore the planets of the outer solar system. Voyager 1 encountered Saturn in November, 1980, and Voyager 2 enabled scientists to have a second look at it, in August 1981. The Voyager spacecraft included not only scientific equipment but cultural messages describing life on Earth just in case the spacecraft are found by aliens in another world. A “Sounds of Earth” recording contains four hours of

sound and music. It contains greetings in 60 languages and 118 photographs of the Earth and its civilisation. It is improbable that the messages will ever be examined by another civilisation, but the billions of bits of information sent back to Earth will take years to understand in full. The technological advances of Voyager 2 may be gauged from the fact that it consists of 65,000 major pieces of equipment, equal to 2000 television sets. It manoeuvres 30 times more slowly than a clock’s hour hand to allow photographs to be taken at light levels 900 times fainter than those of Earth. It has cameras that can read a newspaper headline nearly a kilometre distant, and has a tape recorder durable enough to produce a two-hour video cassette once a day for 22 years. - The successful trips of the Voyagers will almost certainly give an impetus to the American space programme. Just what direction it will take is not yet clear. In a speech on July 20, President Bush recommended a return to the Moon as the first step on the way to a manned flight to Mars. It was an interesting speech for another reason; President Bush was not justifying the space programme on commercial or military grounds but on the ground of exploration. He talked a great deal about the destiny of the human species to spread beyond Earth. Mr Bush’s plan has been treated with derision by some people. “You can’t go to Mars on a credit card,” said Mr Leon Paretta, a member of the House of Representatives; and Mr Richard Gehardt, another member of the House, said, “There’s no such thing as a free launch.” Nevertheless, Mr Bush’s approach seems far healthier than the Reagan “star wars” plan, which was not a N.A.S.A., but a Pentagon project, and is being slowly buried. Many scientists would be content to continue to use unmanned spacecraft like Voyager. It seems probable that N.A.S.A. will attempt to recapture some of the excitement associated with having humans in space. This will entail the establishment of space workshops and various forms of space stations on the moon. The United States hopes that the Soviet Union will co-operate in some of the projects and there may also be cooperation from Western Europe and Japan. Mr Bush seems determined nevertheless to make sure that it is the United States which is pre-eminent in space exploration. Meanwhile, Voyager 2 will continue on its journey into inter-stellar space, probably still functioning and transmitting signals of its observations into the next century.