A special color reconstruction of the eruption of the volcano Loki on the Joviansatellite Io. The picture was taken by Voyager 1 from a range of about half a millionkilometers. [P-21334C]
NASA SP-439
Voyage To Jupiter
David Morrison
and Jane Samz
Scientific and Technical Information Branch 1980
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
Washington, DC
For sale by the Superintendent of Documents
U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C. 20402
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 80-600126
FOREWORD
Few missions of planetary exploration have provided such rewards of insightand surprise as the Voyager flybys of Jupiter. Those who were fortunate enough tobe with the science teams during those weeks will long remember the experience; itwas like being in the crow’s nest of a ship during landfall and passage through an archipelagoof strange islands. We had known that Jupiter would be remarkable, forman had been studying it for centuries, but we were far from prepared for the torrentof new information that the Voyagers poured back to Earth.
Some of the spirit of excitement and connection is captured in this volume. Itssenior author was a member of the Imaging Team. It is not common that a personcan both “do science” at the leading edge and also present so vivid an inside pictureof a remarkable moment in the history of space exploration.
April 30, 1980
Thomas A. Mutch
Associate Administrator
Office of Space Science
INTRODUCTION
The two Voyager encounters with Jupiter were periods unparalleled in degreeand diversity of discovery. We had, of course, expected a number of discoveriesbecause we had never before been able to study in detail the atmospheric motions ona planet that is a giant spinning sphere of hydrogen and helium, nor had we everobserved planet-sized objects such as the Jovian satellites Ganymede and Callisto,which are half water-ice. We had never been so close to a Moon-sized satellite suchas Io, which was known to be dispersing sodium throughout its Jovianneighborhood and was thought to be generating a one-million-ampere electrical currentthat in some way results in billions of watts of radio emission from Jupiter.
The closer Voyager came to Jupiter the more apparent it became that the scientificrichness of the Jovian system was going to greatly exceed even our most optimisticexpectations. The growing realization among Voyager scientists of thewealth of discovery is apparent in their comments, discus