11/24/93: Voyager Spacecraft Honored For Engineering Achievements

Wed, 24 Nov 1993 00:24:27 GMT
Excerpted from Jet Propulsion Laboratory UNIVERSE
Pasadena, California - Vol. 23, No. 23 - November 19, 1993

By Mark Whalen

JPL's twin-spacecraft Voyager mission--"widely recognized as NASA's most
successful space program," according to Laboratory Director Dr. Edward
Stone--was honored Nov. 12 for its unprecedented achievements in engineering by
the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME).

Voyager 1 and 2, launched in 1977 on a five-year mission to study Jupiter,
Saturn and their moons, are still active, making their way out of the solar
system and continuing to far exceed the original mission's ambitious goals.

The award represented the 160th Historic Mechanical Engineering Landmark to be
designated by the ASME since its recognition program began in 1971.  It was the
40th such designation lauded for its international significance.

"It was the project's engineering achievements that made possible the science
results for which Voyager became world famous," added Stone, who is also
Voyager's project scientist.

Nick Friesen, a member of ASME's Board of Governors, noted that the
organization's historic and heritage recognition program "commemorates
achievements in mankind's dreams, and the Voyagers are fitting (for the award),
because they are mankind's dreams made real."

The mission "greatly increased public awareness" of science and astronomy, he
added, also lauding "new values enhanced in American industry in Voyager's
engineering, ingenuity and resourcefulness."

The 1977 launch was designed to meet a solar-system alignment that occurs only
once every 176 years.  As the mission progressed, additional flybys of Uranus
and Neptune proved possible.  Remote-control programming was used to give the
two Voyagers greater capabilities than they possessed when they left Earth,
their two-planet mission extending to four planets.

John Casani, assistant Laboratory director for the Office of Flight Projects
and a former Voyager project manager, noted that when the mission was being
contemplated, "the engineering, scientific and political communities felt that
the challenge to produce a spacecraft with an eight- or nine-year life span
(for further outer-planet exploration) was too daunting.

"But all of us (who worked on Voyager) knew in our hearts that we could go to
the outer planets."

Casani was joined at the award ceremony by former Voyager project managers
Harris "Bud" Schurmeier, Ray Heacock, Ek Davis, Richard Laeser and Norm Haynes,
along with current manager George Textor. Another former manager, Robert Parks,
was unable to attend.

The Voyagers are continuing to return data about interplanetary space and some
of Earth's stellar neighbors near the edges of the Milky Way. As the spacecraft
travel through the solar wind, they are examining the space around them with
instruments that study fields, particles and waves.

Last May, scientists concluded that the plasma-wave experiment was picking up
radio emissions that originate at the heliopause--the outer edge of our solar
system.

Voyager 1 is now rising above the ecliptic plane at an angle of about 35
degrees and at a speed of about 520 million kilometers (322 million miles) a
year.  Voyager 2 is moving below the ecliptic plane at an angle of about 48
degrees and at a speed of about 470 million kilometers (291 million miles) a
year.

Both spacecraft will continue to observe ultraviolet sources among the stars,
and the fields and particles experiments aboard will allow the study of the
boundary between the sun's influence and stellar space.

The Voyagers are expected to return valuable data for decades.  Communications
will be maintained until their nuclear-power sources can no longer supply
enough electrical energy to power-critical subsystems.
---
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