Play Audiobook Sample
The Interstellar Age: The Story of the NASA Men and Women Who Flew the Forty-Year Voyager Mission Audiobook
Play Audiobook Sample
(0.00) - 0 listener ratings
Quick Stats About this Audiobook
Total Audiobook Chapters:
Longest Chapter Length:
Shortest Chapter Length:
Average Chapter Length:
Audiobooks by this Author:
Publisher Description
The story of the men and women who drove the Voyager spacecraft mission— told by a scientist who was there from the beginning. 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. Voyager 1 left the solar system in 2012; its sister craft, Voyager 2, will do so in 2015. The fantastic journey began in 1977, before the first episode of Cosmos 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. In The Interstellar Age, award-winning planetary scientist Jim Bell reveals what drove and continues to drive the members of this extraordinary team, including Ed Stone, Voyager’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 Voyagers 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 Voyagers’ astoundingly clear images of moons and planets. Speeding through space at a mind-bending eleven miles a second, Voyager 1 is now beyond our solar system's planets. It carries with it artifacts of human civilization. By the time Voyager passes its first star in about 40,000 years, the gold record on the spacecraft, containing various music and images including Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode,” will still be playable.
Download and start listening now!
“Bell, president of the Planetary Society, delivers a lucid account of the magnificent scientific accomplishments of the Voyager missions with a cheerfulness that it deserves… Bell describes the flybys, which produced an avalanche of new discoveries, but he gives equal space to the craft themselves, whose instruments are museum curiosities today. Nevertheless, they worked to a marvelous degree, and readers will have no trouble sharing Bell’s exuberance at a remarkable human accomplishment. "
— Publishers Weekly
Quotes
-
“In The Interstellar Age Professor Jim Bell celebrates Voyager—NASA’s most famous space probe. In this task, Bell not only shines as a leading planetary scientist, you get the sneaky feeling he knew the probe personally, serving in this case as Voyager’s personal biographer to the benefit of us all.”
— Neil deGrasse Tyson, New York Times bestselling author -
“Come along with Dr. Bell on an extraordinary adventure. He loves to travel. He relishes a long voyage. He doesn’t mind leaving home forever and never coming back. If it involves a once in lifetime journey through the cold emptiness of space, so much the better, as long as the ports of call are planets—up close and personal. These voyages changed what we know of the cosmos and our place within it. Jim Bell’s story will change you, too.”
— Bill Nye, CEO, the Planetary Society, and New York Times bestselling author of Undeniable -
“Part memoir, part anecdotal history, and part sermon on the delights of science, The Interstellar Age is a captivating read.”
— Nature -
“Comprehensive and engrossing…charming.”
— Wall Street Journal -
“The Interstellar Age recaptures the daring and genius of this ambitious ongoing project and describes what it has told us and will tell us about the worlds beyond our own night sky.”
— Barnes&Noble.com, editorial review -
“A highly enjoyable read for anyone with an interest in popular science.”
— Library Journal -
“Astronomer and space scientist Jim Bell is obviously comfortable behind a microphone…His matter-of-fact approach is both friendly and professorial. Here he gives a carefully detailed play-by-play on the development, launch, and planetary encounters of the two Voyager spacecraft. Because he’s ‘been there—done that,’ his narration has the voice of authority. Listen and take a tour of what follows: Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and now, interstellar space. Fascinating.”
— AudioFile
Awards
-
A Barnes & Noble Editor’s Recommendation
-
A 2015 Amazon Best Books of the Year Selection for Science
The Interstellar Age Listener Reviews
Be the first to write a review about this audiobook!
About Jim Bell
Jim Bell is a scientist, author, and prolific public communicator of science and space exploration. He is a professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University, an adjunct professor of Astronomy at Cornell University, and president of the Planetary Society. He has written a number of books that showcase some of the most spectacular stories and images from the space program: Postcards from Mars, Mars 3-D, Moon 3-D, The Space Book, and The Interstellar Age. As a professional scientist, he has published more than thirty first-authored and 140 co-authored research papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals. He has been an active user of the Hubble Space Telescope and of ground-based telescopes at Mauna Kea Observatory in Hawaii.