Voyager sterilisation?
- From: Andrew Gray <andrew.gray@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 27 Apr 2005 20:12:43 GMT
The work I'm doing at the moment gives me copious free time for my
lunches, but sadly no net connection; it's an opportunity to work down
through the paperback reading pile. (I've gone through about half the
Heinlein juveniles in the past month, it seems...)
So, I turned up a copy of /Journey Beyond Selene/, by Jeffrey Kluger;
quite interesting, although it does seem a bit on the overzealously
enthusiastic side. (OTOH, he's writing about JPL's highest-profile
successes. It'd be hard not to be enthusiastic.)
He mentions that the Voyager 1 flyby of Titan was planned to be at about
4,000km distance; at 10AU, the margins of error involved are trivial,
and there was a real worry they would foul up and have the probe collide
with the planet, rather than skim past.
I assume this was considered before; as I understand things, a close
Titan flyby was seen as the prize of the Saturn stage of the mission.
(Thankfully, it turned out to be scientifically uninteresting, and
Voyager 2 could be retargeted to go on to Uranus and Neptune.) Given
that the great interest in Titan was the prospect of Interesting Organic
Chemistry And All That, does anyone know if the Voyagers were sterilised
lest they enter the atmosphere, or was it assumed that interplanetary
trajectories would mean they'd be going so fast on entry that no spores
would plausibly survive?
--
-Andrew Gray
andrew.gray@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
.
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