Carl Sagan

Assembled from 47 blocks · 2 evidence · 61 related

1. Story
2. The planetary scientist and science communicator who chaired the committee that assembled the Golden Record and who argued, over several years and against resistance from within the project, that Voyager 1 should turn its cameras back towards the inner solar system before they were shut down. The scientific return from such an image was acknowledged to be near zero — that was the objection — and Sagan's case was explicitly not a scientific one. He also worked on the plaques carried by Pioneer 10 and 11, and later wrote the 1994 book that took its title from the resulting photograph. He died in 1996.
3. Knowledge
4. Voyager 1
5. Carl Sagan
6. Pale Blue Dot
7. Connections
8. The Voyager Golden Record
9. Pale Blue Dot
10. Voyager 1
11. Voyager 1 photographs the solar system from outside it
12. Carl Sagan
13. Voyager 1
14. Voyager 1 photographs the solar system from outside it
15. The Grand Tour alignment
16. Voyager 2
17. Multi-Hundred-Watt radioisotope thermoelectric generator
18. Titan
19. NASA Deep Space Network
20. Gravity assist
21. Jet Propulsion Laboratory
22. Launch Complex 41, Cape Canaveral
23. Jupiter
24. Saturn
25. Titan
26. Voyager high-gain antenna
27. Plasma Wave Subsystem (PWS)
28. Titan IIIE-Centaur
29. Edward C. Stone
30. The Voyager Golden Record
31. Carl Sagan
32. Pale Blue Dot
33. The full Grand Tour is cancelled and rebuilt as a two-spacecraft mission
34. Voyager 1 launches
35. Voyager 1 closest approach to Jupiter
36. Active volcanism found on Io
37. Voyager 1 passes Saturn and Titan, and leaves the plane of the planets
38. Voyager 1 photographs the solar system from outside it
39. Voyager 1 crosses the termination shock at about 94 AU
40. Voyager 1 crosses the heliopause at 121.6 AU
41. The 2012 crossing is confirmed from plasma oscillations
42. Voyager 1's cosmic ray subsystem is switched off
43. Voyager 1's low-energy charged particle instrument due for shutdown
44. Voyager 1 reaches one light-day from Earth
45. Evidence
46. Sagan's account of the 14 February 1990 family-portrait observation, of his advocacy for taking it and of what the resulting image of Earth as a sub-pixel point signifies. V55 verification basis: NOT CONSULTED IN THIS RUN. The book is cited as the origin of the name and of the argument; no passage is quoted and no page reference is given, because none was checked.
47. Each spacecraft carries a twelve-inch gold-plated copper phonograph record holding around 115 analogue-encoded images, greetings in dozens of languages, about ninety minutes of music and a sequence of natural and human sounds, with playing instructions, a hydrogen hyperfine-transition unit key, a fourteen-pulsar map of the Sun's position and an electroplated uranium-238 dating patch etched on the cover; the assembling committee was chaired by Carl Sagan. V55 verification basis: THE PAGE WAS NOT REACHED — voyager.jpl.nasa.gov returned EGRESS_BLOCKED and the search budget was exhausted. All figures are approximate and from general knowledge; the image count, language count, music duration and pulsar count all require confirmation.