45 years later, ‘Johnny B. Goode’ is rocking through space, and Voyager mission is still ‘like magic’

Forty-five years after leaving Earth, Voyagers 1 and 2 are far, far away. But in an age of wondrous, stunning images of space, NASA's Voyager — conceived locally — was the beginning of a "golden age" of discovery.

LA CANADA FLINTRIDGE — Visitors entering von Kármán Auditorium at Pasadena’s Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) this month were dwarfed by a spacecraft unfurled against the wall – a colossal satellite dish with a sci-fi nuclear generator on one end and an oversized Bolex camera jutting off the other. Inset in its base sat a large golden disk, strange runes chiseled into its surface.

The model spacecraft represents two famous satellites: Voyager 1 and 2.

Some of the visitors present had helped build the Voyagers. More had spent decades interpreting their transmissions. And everyone in attendance was gathered to celebrate the Voyagers’ successes since leaving Earth — a mission ongoing, but which set a path for much that would come afterward.

Forty-five years after leaving this planet in the summer of 1977, Voyagers 1 and 2 still squeeze enough juice from their plutonium generators to chatter reports back to Earth, over 12 billion miles away.

And Voyager Senior Systems Engineer Fernando Peralta, who regularly communicates with Voyager, still finds himself mesmerized by their longevity.

“It’s like magic,” Peralta remarked, “I work with all these people, I know what they do, I know exactly how it is that we get all that information. But still, to me, it’s like magic.”

This month marks 45 years since the Voyagers, riding Titan Centaur rockets, commenced their epic adventure and 10 years since Voyager 1 became the first human-made object to leave our solar system, entering interstellar space.

Just getting to that point was its own journey, pioneered by JPL scientists.

Throughout the 1960s, satellites had imaged the three inner planets of our solar system: Mercury, Venus and Mars. At the time, the ability to visit the four outer planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune) appeared decades away.

A group of scientists and engineers at JPL changed that with Voyager.

The field of modern planetary science, JPL Director Laurie Leshin told an audience that gathered at a recent celebration of the mission, is “all about the foundation that Voyager laid.”

She pointed to Voyager as predecessor to later missions: “Galileo and Juno and Cassini and the upcoming, fabulous, Europa Clipper mission. All of these are built upon the discoveries of Voyager.”

Peralta pointed out that the largest antenna’s maintained by the Deep Space Network, the engineers who receive data from the James Webb Space Telescope and Mars Rovers among other missions, were enlarged from 64 to 70 meters in diameter to accommodate Voyager’s communications.

Voyager stands out for its broad fanbase. Astronomy nerds recognize the mission as producing the first close-up images of the outer planets, and their moons.

Jim Bell, professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University and author of “The Interstellar Age: Inside the Forty-Year Voyager Mission,” illustrated these discoveries: “What were dots of points of light in telescope pictures became worlds with geology and atmospheres and volcanoes and oceans and ice and rock and metal and hydrogen and methane.”

Bell considers Voyager the “beginning to a golden age of discovery of our solar system.”

Space and sci-fi geeks recognize the craft as the carriers of the famous “Golden Records.” These gold-plated LPs, messages to intelligent alien life, contain a sampling of music and images from across our planet, including pulsar-based coordinates to Earth and a recording of Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode.”

In her address to the audience at JPL, Ann Druyan, creative director of the Voyager Interstellar Message and wife of the late Carl Sagan, explained that the records would allow Voyager to “speak for us, perhaps even some five billion years from now. A longer period than the whole history of life, the whole tenure of life on this planet.”

Popular science fans recognize Voyager’s final famous photograph as the muse for Sagan’s book “Pale Blue Dot” in which the image acts as an allegory for the fragility of Earth’s lifeforms.

“Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark,” Sagan wrote, “in our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.”

From Pasadena, to the White House, to Space

Voyager was dreamed up in Pasadena. In 1965, Gary Flandro, a Caltech doctoral student working for JPL, was exploring how “gravity assist” — when an object in space “steals” rotational energy from a larger rotating body — could be used to reach greater distances in less time.

Flandro discovered a brief window appearing every 175 years when the outer planets align such that a spacecraft could swing by each one, using gravity assist to accelerate. The mission could reach all four planets in only 12 years, rather than the 30 it would take flying directly to Neptune, the farthest outer planet. That window would arrive in 1976. Using Flandro’s calculations, JPL pitched the mission, a flyby of all four outer planets, to NASA and President Richard Nixon.

Whether due to the billion-dollar price tag or political considerations, Nixon and NASA declined, leading JPL to simplify the proposal, limiting Voyager to the two nearest outer planets: Jupiter and Saturn. Voyager 2 would provide backup if Voyager 1 missed important observations. Washington accepted the diminished proposal, disappointing the scientists and engineers in Pasadena who couldn’t wait another 175 years to see Uranus and Neptune up-close.

At this point, an unofficial plan was hatched by those scientists and engineers at JPL. In case Voyager 1 successfully completed all of its objectives, they would build into Voyager 2 the flexibility to change course, continue on to Uranus and Neptune, and survive the full 12-year journey.

In “Voyager Tales: Personal Views of the Grand Tour”, Dr. David Swift’s collection of Voyager’s oral history, Voyager Advanced Projects Group Supervisor Roger Bourke described the success of JPL’s secret mission: “We purposely made that option without a lot of noise about it because we were afraid that if Washington saw what we were doing they might squelch it,” Bourke recounted. “So I think of that as one small triumph of the engineers over the bureaucracy, for the everlasting benefit of all mankind.”

Whenever Voyager would flyby a new planet or moon, JPL’s atmosphere was vivid. Data arrived every minute of the day, for a week straight. Each new image of an oncoming planet or moon was the best one ever taken of that celestial body. Scientists crowded around screens, pointing out planetary features viewed clearly by human eyes for the first time.

For the 1989 Neptune flyby, JPL threw a party where Chuck Berry performed the only interstellar rock song.

During flybys, Pasadena became the polestar of science news, with journalists flocking to JPL.

Voyager Project Manager Susanne Dodd recalled the attention: “You could see reporters that you knew from the news just wandering around and you knew that they were going to go into the press conference right here.”

Bell, an undergraduate student and fly on the wall at JPL during the Uranus flyby, recalled the stress he witnessed: “You’re under this media spotlight, you have to try to give some quick and dirty answer, you haven’t had time to process what you’re seeing. You haven’t had time to run models of what you’re seeing or compare it to other data. You haven’t slept.”

Each day, the Voyager imaging team would print a new snapshot of a planet or moon. Any publication hoping to run the latest image had to pick it up in Pasadena.

NASA’s Director of the Heliophysics Science Division, Nicola Fox, remembers seeing those images as a student in London. “You’d walk down the hall and these new images would suddenly appear,” she recalled, “and it was the feeling of ‘I’m looking at something that no one else has seen before. No one else in history has ever had this opportunity to look at this planet up close and personal.”

By 2018, both Voyagers had left the solar system. Their only hope for ending the voyage is to be picked up by space travelers who might learn about the Earth, or at least our music.

As Sagan pointed out in “Pale Blue Dot”, humanity’s existence on Earth is not promised. Inside the auditorium, many attendees wear masks, reminders of the current global pandemic. Outside, Pasadena residents nervously eye their yards, awaiting a water restriction underscoring the ongoing drought. Meanwhile, two spacecraft from Pasadena, traveling 1,000,000 miles per day, carry the message that humans existed, they put things in space, and they loved Chuck Berry.