The Loyal Engineers Steering NASA's Voyager Probes Across the Universe

[dalton99a]

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/03/magazine/the-loyal-engineers-steering-nasas-voyager-probes-across-the-universe.html

The Loyal Engineers Steering NASA’s Voyager Probes Across the Universe
As the Voyager mission is winding down, so, too, are the careers of the aging explorers who expanded our sense of home in the galaxy.
By KIM TINGLEY | AUG. 3, 2017

In the early spring of 1977, Larry Zottarelli, a 40-year-old computer engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, set out for Cape Canaveral, Fla., in his Toyota Corolla. A Los Angeles native, he had never ventured as far as Tijuana, but he had a per diem, and he liked to drive. Just east of Orlando, a causeway carried him over the Indian and Banana Rivers to a triangular spit of sand jutting into the Atlantic, where the Air Force keeps a base. His journey terminated at a cavernous military hangar.

A fleet of JPL trucks made the trip under armored guard to the same destination. Their cargo was unwrapped inside the hangar high bay, a gleaming silo stocked with tool racks and ladder trucks. Engineers began to assemble the various pieces. Gradually, two identical spacecraft took shape. They were dubbed Voyager I and II, and their mission was to make the first color photographs and close-up measurements of Jupiter, Saturn and their moons. Then, if all went well, they might press onward — into uncharted territory.

It took six months, working in shifts around the clock, for the NASA crew to reassemble and test the spacecraft. As the first launch date, Aug. 20, drew near, they folded the camera and instrument boom down against the spacecraft’s spindly body like a bird’s wing; gingerly they pushed it, satellite dish first, up inside a metal capsule hanging from the high bay ceiling. Once ‘‘mated,’’ the capsule and its cargo — a probe no bigger than a Volkswagen Beetle that, along with its twin, had nevertheless taken 1,500 engineers five years and more than $200 million to build — were towed to the launchpad.

By T-minus two hours, a select few engineers, too nervous to sit down, stood at computers outside the high bay, overseeing the spacecraft telemetry. Elsewhere in the hangar, scientists, NASA brass from Washington and several dozen ‘‘nonessential’’ engineers — Zottarelli among them — huddled around TV monitors. At T-minus 30 seconds, the spacecraft’s engines roared to life, and many of the nonessentials took off running out of the room and toward the exit — ‘‘seven, six, five.’’ They burst out into the morning. Shielding their eyes, they peered across a flat expanse at smoke billowing on the horizon. Slowly and silently, the capsule rose out of the cloud, its rockets trailing flames. In an instant, there came a terrific boom as the sound waves from blastoff hit the hangar like a gong, ringing it as the spacecraft disappeared.

[TeapotInATempest]

1. What a fascinating article.

Thanks for posting.

"These beings - with soaring imagination - eventually flung themselves, and their machines, into interplanetary space." -Carolyn Porco, Lead scientist, Cassini mission

[Nitram]

2. "steering NASA's probes across the universe?" I don't think so.

There was no "steering" once it achieved escape velocity.

[MosheFeingold]

3. I believe

The probes were equipped with hydrazine thrusters and various gyroscopic controls that did allow each probe to be steered, to some degree.

I have no idea if these are still functional. I thought they steered one of the craft to catch a fly-by that they didn't think they were going to make.