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The Planetary Report South Pole of 10 • Officers CARL SAGAN. BRUCE MURRAY. President Vice President Director, Laboratory Director, for Planetary Studies. Jet Propulsion LETTERS TO THE EDITOR Cornell University Laboratory. California Institute LOUIS FRIEDMAN . of Technology Executive Director To read about NASA considering abandoning the Voyager spacecraft was nothing less than Board of Advisors a shock. This is perhaps understandable because eight years ago I was intimately involved DIANE ACK ERMAN. JOHN GARDNER. in the scientific planning of the mission, and it is with a great sense of pride that I have poet and author founder, Voyager Common Cause been following the extraordinary achievements of at Jupiter and Saturn, JAMES VAN ALLEN. recounting them in my classes and in public lectures around Europe. Professor of Physics. SHIRLEY M. HUFSTEDLER. Univer sity of Iowa educator and jurist What I now find amazing is the same angry reaction of my students and colleagues here. HARRY ASHMORE. JAMES MICHENER. For them, after launch, Voyager had become a messenger of human enterprise rather than Pulitzer Prize-winning author just another American gadget. How then can NASA offer it for cancellation when it has journalist PHILIP MORRISON. become the property of the world? ISAAC ASIMOV. Institute Professor. author Massachusetts In these days of global turmoil, the only thing that keeps us going is the hope for the future. RICHARD BERENOZEN. Institute of Technology The success of missions like Apollo, Viking and Voyager strengthens our confidence in the President, PAUL NEWMAN. human enterprise. America is the country that makes it possible. Shouldn't we keep it that way? American University actor S.l. RASOOL JACQUES BLAMONT. BERNARD M . OLI VER. Chief Scientist. Vice President. Chair, Atmospheric Sciences, Fondation de France, Paris Centre National Research and Develop­ Visiting Professor, IBM Scientific Center, Paris d'Etudes Spatiales. ment. Hewlett-Pa ckard France Corporation RAY BRADBURY. HARRISON H. SCHMITT. poet and author U.S. Senator, Having returned from my trip around the world, I like very much to remember'my stay at New Mexico JOHNNY CARSON. Pasadena during the unforgettable days of the Saturn encounter of Voyager 2. I was entertainer ADLAI E. STEVENSON. III. especially impressed by the numerous activities of many groups and individuals displaying former U.S. Senator. NORMAN COUSINS. their results at Planetfest '81 at the Pasadena Center! Let us hope that the future of JPL will Illinois editor and author not be as serious as I read it these days. Let us hope that Galileo will continue to exist and LEWIS THOMAS. FRANK DRAKE. President, to perform its task at Jupiter and let us hope that Voyager 2 will be successful at Uranus Director, National Memorial Sloan Astronomy and and Neptune. Any foreign observer of those decisions of "budget-cutting euphoria" is Kettering Cancer Ionosphere Center Center shaking his head. LEE A. OUBRIOGE . I have been in America. I have seen. The real pioneers with new ideas and undefeatable former presidential science advisor enthusiasm have not died out. If they had, I should not have made my foot-walk from the Huntington Sheraton to JPL and back on August 26, when the cameras of Voyagerwere The Planetary ReJ:JOrt is published six t imes yearly still blocked. I hope to be present once more during the Uranus flyby in January 1986 and at the editorial offices of The Planetary Society. 110 S. Euclid Avenue, Pasadena. CA 91101 . the Neptune flyby in August, 1989! Editor, Charlene M . Anderson; Technical Editor. James D. Burke; FRIEDHELM DORST Art Director. Barbara Smith. West Germany Viewpoints expressed in columns or editorials are those of the authors and do not necessarily [On the day Mr. Dorst walked the several miles from his hotel to JPL and back again, the represent positions of The Planetary Society, temperature hovered around 105° Fahrenheit. - Ed.] its officers or advisors. Copyright © 1 9B2 by The Planetary Society. I have enclosed my check for $25.07 which is the proceeds from collecting aluminum cans last month. This brings my can drive collection for the year to $123.77. My friends and I Cover: A flat plain, probably formed by the repetitive er!lption of thin, low­ have set our goal for $300.00 for the year. We are sure that The Planetary Society will be viscosity SUlfur, covers the south pole successful in the projects undertaken. We shall continue to support you as much as possible. of10. The dark circular feaiures are WILLIAM E. BROOKS calderas formed by such eruptions. The calderas seen in this Voyager Fairfax, Va. image are filled with either liquid [The contributions of Mr. Brooks, and others who have found imaginative ways to support sulfur at moderate temperatures or the Society, are being used to fund special Society projects like the "suitcase SETf" of Dr. solid, chilled deposits of originally Paul Horowitz.-Ed.] high-temperature sulfur_ P,HOTO: UNITED STATES GEOLOGICAL SURVEY, LARRY SODERBLOM oyager 2 journeyed four years from the warm sands V of Florida to the icy environs of Saturn. Scientific spe­ cialists have been awed by the intricate and unexpected natural phenomena which characterize the Saturnian sys­ tem, just as they were earlier bedazzled by Jupiter. Millions of others around the world have been carried along, via instant global communications, on this fantastic journey of the mind. But a funny thing happened on the way to the outer planets. While the Voyagers functioned relatively smoothly in space, circumstances in their terrestrial birthplace were not so harmonious. Double-digit inflation combined with unprecedented levels of interest rates painfully exacer­ bated the growing disparity between expectations and reality for middle-class Americans. NASA plans for a smooth tran­ sition to the reusable space shuttle were dashed by sched­ ule delays and burgeoning costs. All planetary launches following the PioneerlVenus Mission in 1978 became dependent on timely development of the shuttle and upper stages. Voyager 2 began its ambitious four-planet journey in August, 1977. At that time, Ga/ileo, a long-duration Jupiter orbiter also carrying a sophisticated entry probe for direct atmospheric sampling, was firmly scheduled for launch in December, 1982 aboard shuttle flight number 16. Two International Solar Polar (is PM) spacecraft, one American and one European, were planned to depart by shuttle in February, 1983, on exploratory passages over opposite poles of the Sun. By 1984, the Venus Orbiting Imaging Radar BRIce Murray holds a model (VOIR) spacecraft was expected to map by radar the per­ of the Mariner 10 spacecraft that mapped Mercury. manently cloud-shrouded surface of Earth's closest plane­ tary relative. And even a daring rendezvous with the nucleus of Halley's Comet in 1986 was contemplated. What is the situation now? Galileo is the only remaining US. planetary project under development, its Jupiter launch delayed until 1985. The US. ISPM spacecraft has been can­ celled outright and the launch of its European counterpart delayed until 1986. VOIR, deferred again last year until at least 1988, has come to resemble more the fading grin of a Cheshire cat than a serious national objective. Halley's On a longer time scale, ambitious new missions to the Comet will be investigated by spacecraft of the Soviet Union, Moon and Mars can and should come about in response Western Europe, and Japan - but not the United States. By to the expanding capabilities and aspirations of many more these actions the US. unilaterally abandoned world leader­ peoples than just those of the US. and Soviet Union. ship in planetary exploration, one of the 20th century's most During the next century, humankind's growing compre­ uplifting and challenging technological and scientific hension and utilization of our solar neighborhood are likely enterprises. That brilliant burst of American imagination and to make the events of the last two decades seem tiny in energy, catalyzed by the Apollo decision, carried our senses magnitude but large in historical import. While foregoing and intellect inward to Mercury as well as outward beyond dominance, the United States can still make crucial contri­ Saturn, but now has nearly run its course. butions in a more internationalized era of space explora­ Our new challenge is to maximize the scientific and tion. The readership of Science [and certainly The Planetary exploratory significance of the much more modest US. deep Report] can help this uncertain nation to once again look space activities projected for the 1980's. The Deep Space outward in space and forward in time. Perhaps our national Net, which so skillfully captured Voyager's faint video sig­ expectations of ourselves will once again be rising four years nals from a distance of over 1 billion miles, steadily hence, when Voyager 2 reaches Uranus. improves. New deep space missions can materialize so long Reprinted from Science, Vol. 215, No. 4532, 29 January 1981. as they don't require increased launch capability nor strain (0 1982 by The American Association for the Advancement the NASA budget. Opportunities for truly collaborative of Science. international deep space efforts may arise to replace the symbolic and sometimes paternalistic arrangements of the Bruce Murray, Vice President of The Planetary Society, is past. director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. 3 ~-----,-----=:-----:=----==--=:---=-------------------------.-.- HM: I see a couple of scientific mis­ sions coming up in the next few years that are of the highest interest, the Space Telescope being the first. We'll see a major breakthrough in astro­ physics and we will be able to do things with the telescope that are inconceiv­ able now. I can imagine things coming from use of the Space Telescope that could .be fundamental in terms of interactions between high energy physics and astrophysics. LF: So you don't think there is a crisis space.
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