Strange New Worlds

Chesley Bonestell’s lifelike paintings of Saturn as seen from the surface of Titan and other moons, published in 1944 in LIFE magazine, sparked the public imagination regarding the kind of geographies we would someday find in the outer Solar System. In characterizing the large gas planets and their moons, Voyager con­firmed what astronomers had long suspected: the Earth to some degree serves as an analog for meteorological and geological pro­cesses on other worlds. Serge Brunier explains, “Fogs, clouds, gla­ciation, the cycle of the seasons, aerial erosion, and volcanism are universal phenomena.”26 But the geological processes occurring on worlds billions of miles from the Sun both surprised and mes­merized scientists and space enthusiasts across the globe. Close-up views of Jupiter’s moons indicated internal heating as they flex in the tides of their host planet’s gravity. A probable ocean of water captured under the fractured and icy surface of Europa, and Ti­tan’s seas of liquid methane, both suggested strange and captivat­ing geographies.

Planet encounters garnered global attention and were keenly covered by the press. When Voyager 1 arrived at Saturn in Novem­ber 1980, Henry Dethloff and Ronald Schorn report that approxi­mately 100 million people tuned in to live television broadcasts from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory while roughly five hundred reporters from across the globe provided news coverage “unprec­edented in the history of unmanned space exploration.”27 It’s no wonder public interest in the mission was so intense. Voyager liter­ally beamed into our living rooms footage of worlds being charted for the first time. Of Voyager 1’s encounter with the second larg­est planet in our Solar System, former JPL Director Bruce Murray writes: “Both Time and Newsweek ran Saturn cover stories. Live

programming flowed daily from Pasadena to a network of view­ers in countries ranging from Canada to Finland and, especially, Japan. Colorful images of Saturn surrounded by its magnificent rings rapidly became pop art cultural symbols.” Saturn’s weather turned out to be wilder than Jupiter’s. A layer 1,200 miles thick has winds of over 1,000 mph. Murray recalls that President Jimmy Carter, curious about wind speeds and whether auroras had been detected on Saturn, phoned to say: “The Saturn pictures are fan­tastic. I watched two hours yesterday as well. Didn’t expect to have so much time available.” In the summer of 1989, when Voyager 2 arrived at Neptune and its moon Titan, black and white still im­ages were broadcast live as they streamed from the spacecraft, and NASA, PBS, and CNN arranged for live reports at regular intervals throughout the encounter. Voyager’s televised encounters allowed scientists and general audiences opportunity to ramble “through a cosmic Louvre,” writes Murray. “For the millions viewing PBS’s ‘Jupiter Watch’ telecasts, ABC’s ‘Nightline’ programs, or Carl Sa­gan’s ‘Cosmos’ series or watching the images appearing on screens in Japan, England, Mexico, and South America, Voyager revealed a treasure trove of abstract art.”28

Carl Sagan was a member of Voyager’s imaging science team and he incorporated into his PBS TV program Cosmos (1980) ani­mations of planetary flybys and computer-generated graphics pro­duced at JPL by the Voyager team.29 Through the PBS series, his book of the same title, and late night talks with Johnny Carson, Sagan worked to capture and generate widespread public interest in planetary science and the Voyager mission. A celebrated senior astronomer at Cornell University, Sagan dedicated his life to popu­larizing the latest findings in astronomy and planetary science, at a time when most astronomers were unwilling to risk their schol­arly reputations to do so. He fed a fascinated public exactly what they hoped for and wanted. Having researched the atmosphere of Venus as an example of runaway greenhouse effects, Sagan championed NASA’s projects and delighted in articulating in de­scriptive imagery astronomical and planetary phenomena. It was Sagan who suggested that Voyager, once beyond the orbit of Nep­tune and receding from the ecliptic plane, should capture a pho­tograph of Earth as it really appears in the scale of the Solar Sys­tem—a seemingly unimpressive “pale blue dot” as he evocatively named it.