The Interstellar Age: The Story of the NASA Men and Women Who Flew the Forty-Year Voyager Mission

<b>*Chosen as one of Amazon's Best Books of 2015!*<br><br>The story of the men and women who drove the Voyager spacecraft mission - told by a scientist who was there from the beginning.</b><br><br> The Voyager spacecraft are our farthest-flung emissaries - 11.3 billion miles away from the crew who built and still operate them, decades since their launch.<br><br> <i>Voyager 1 </i>left the solar system in 2012; its sister craft, <i>Voyager 2</i>, will do so in 2015. The fantastic journey began in 1977, before the first episode of <i>Cosmos</i> aired. The mission was planned as a grand tour beyond the moon; beyond Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn; and maybe even into interstellar space. The fact that it actually happened makes this humanity's greatest space mission.<br><br> In <i>The Interstellar Age</i>, award-winning planetary scientist Jim Bell reveals what drove and continues to drive the members of this extraordinary team, including Ed Stone, <i>Voyager</i>'s chief scientist and the one-time head of NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab; Charley Kohlhase, an orbital dynamics engineer who helped to design many of the critical slingshot maneuvers around planets that enabled the <i>Voyagers</i> to travel so far; and the geologist whose Earth-bound experience would prove of little help in interpreting the strange new landscapes revealed in the <i>Voyagers</i>' astoundingly clear images of moons and planets.<br><br> Speeding through space at a mind-bending eleven miles a second, <i>Voyager 1</i> is now beyond our solar system's planets. It carries with it artifacts of human civilization. By the time<i> Voyager</i> passes its first star in about 40,000 years, the gold record on the spacecraft, containing various music and images including Chuck Berry's &quot;Johnny B. Goode,&quot; will still be playable.<br><br><br><i>From the Hardcover edition.</i>