It’s Quieter in the Twilight

We are reaching the end of the mission.

Hopefully it doesn't...

get lost because of an anomaly.

Uh, but it's, uh it is

uh, yeah, it is...

a lot of pressure.

You don't wanna let down Voyager.

Hello?

Jeff, are you there?

Oh, yeah, yeah, I'm here.

So, what happened?

It's been really wild.

Yeah, um, basically the, um

certain things happened,

unusual things happened during the mag-roll

that should have not happened.

Still, I mean, we do not know we don't know everything.

If we can talk a little bit later,

people here are coming into my office

- and want to know... - Okay.

...what's going on, what's happening?

Have we been able to recover?

Okay, welcome to Voyager.

Put those lights on.

Okay.

Wanna get the blinds open.

We have our library,

I'm not sure what this is on the floor over here.

This is our kitchen area,

offices for the engineers,

and, of course, this is Suzy's office here.

Suzy, take one.

My name is Suzanne Dodd

and I'm the Voyager project manager

here at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

I think, um, being here, um...

you're forgotten here.

Where we are now is a complex called Woodbury,

which is the name of the street it's on.

It's about a mile from JPL, I think.

Next to McDonald's.

NASA management doesn't really think of Voyager,

doesn't really worry about Voyager.

It's out of sight, out of mind kind of thing.

That wasn't always the case.

The mission of Voyager

is the search for knowledge

that will widen the horizons of generations to come.

The whole community, the science community,

the political community,

were really hot to do this mission.

To help you feel

the staggering dimensions of this mission,

it's worth recalling how it got here.

In the late '60s, we learned it was possible

to use the gravity of one planet

to accelerate the spacecraft

and go to another planet.

And then somebody found out

that there's a very unusual alignment in '77.

All four of the giant outer planets,

Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus and Neptune,

would be aligned on the same side of the sun.

That only occurs once every 176 years,

where you can go from Jupiter to Saturn to Uranus to Neptune.

The last time that happened

was during Thomas Jefferson's administration.

In '77, it happens again.

When the Space Age itself is only 20 years old.

As soon as people realize that,

they think we've got to send a mission to do that.

The Voyager Spacecraft

will carry the eyes of men farther than they've ever been

and closer to the very limits of our solar system.

They said, "Okay, what we're gonna do

is we're gonna have two spacecrafts

for redundancies."

Cape Canaveral Florida

sent another unmanned Voyager spacecraft

on its way to Jupiter and Saturn.

That gave us better assurance

that at least one could finish

what's called the Grand Tour of the giant outer planets.

What we know about Jupiter

and Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune

were all achieved by a single mission,

flying breakneck speed through the solar system.

Not since 1969

and man's first footsteps on the moon

has space captured the nation's imagination to this degree.

We are in the process of having completed

the reconnaissance of the solar system.

It's a fantastic historical achievement.

The scientists and friends are here

to celebrate the completion of Voyager's Grand Tour.

There's a strong feeling of elation here

as many continue to ride the crest of a wave

that carried the mission to a monumental success.

And after that,

pretty much everybody thought Voyager was over.

I think we probably had about 1,200 engineers working on it.

I I I you know, I I don't even know I

how many people are working on Voyager right now.

Probably not more than ten or 15.

Today we have 12 people that fly two spacecraft.

They've dedicated their whole career to Voyager.

It's not that we fly by Neptune

and then everything's done.

Voyager has long legs.

As far as continuation of the mission,

we do plan to continue tracking Voyager

for as long as it's possible.

We move into the interstellar mission,

which will be staffed by a much lower staffing level.

This is the next step of exploration for mankind.

The first to interstellar space. We made it.

Hello?

Hello?

Hello?

Hmm.

Hello?

Hey, this is Suzy, I'm on the line.

Hey, Suzy, we're about to walk in,

so stand by.

Okay.

My first job out of college was on Voyager.

Entry level position.

It was doing what we call sequencing.

The small team that I was on

was small, "relative small," it was 30 people.

And I did that for the Uranus encounter

and then also the Neptune encounter.

Since then, I've done several positions.

I was working on Spitzer and Cassini,

raising kids, lots of stuff going on,

so I wasn't paying much attention to Voyager

until they called me and said,

"Would you like to be the Voyager project manager?"

I said, "Sure, is it still going?"

I was surprised when I came back

as a project manager in 2010,

how many people were still on the Voyager.

It's like I had never 20 years had never gone by.

When you joined Voyager,

what year was that?

'73.

I was a spacecraft team chief through mid '81.

Much later in my career, they called me back.

The experience is different from day to day,

but it's still the same goal.

There's a mission to be flown.

We need to put the instruments through their paces,

we need to make observations,

we need to look for things

where we're not sure what we're gonna find.

Just to get the science back.

And that's really the role of of these teams.

Our focus is to make sure

that we get the scientists the data that they want.

No space driver's ever been out this far.

Astrophysicists, they're tickled to death

that both Voyagers have survived

and are taking data in interstellar space.

There's a chance to see something new

or learn something that hasn't been learned or observed before.

My best day is when we have a staff meeting

and Ed Stone is there

and he's talking about what they're seeing.

We're talking with Dr. Edward Stone,

Voyager project scientist.

Dr. Stone is a professor of physics at, uh, CalTech.

Doctor, um, what are the responsibility

your responsibilities here at JPL?

I'm Ed Stone, I'm the chief scientist

for the mission called the Project Scientist

for Voyager.

Dr. Ed Stone.

Ed Stone, the Voyager project scientist,

has joined us again.

The, uh, Voyager project scientist, Dr. Ed Stone.

The one and the only project scientist

that Voyager has ever known.

The one and only.

Voyager was really a pathfinder.

The fact that it lasted 42 years and is still working

is something we could not have imagined

back in those days.

What we're learning is how this the wind of the sun

interacts with the wind from the other stars nearby.

The Voyager 1 entered interstellar space in 2012

and it was in the northern hemisphere

of the heliosphere.

The heliosphere's a huge bubble the sun creates around itself.

Voyager 1 was in the North.

Voyager 2 was in the South.

We were surprised to find that,

in terms of where the heliopause is,

it's almost as far from the sun in the South

as it is in the North.

By measuring the distance to the sun