we're here to commemorate with them the 48th anniversary of the voyager spacecrafts. it was an epic mission to exprope explore the outer plants and is one of the most ambitious that nasa has ever sent out to the solar system. the mission for me has personal relevance not because i was ever involved with it. but because as a child, encounters with the planet uranus and neptune -- i was too young to enjoy the fly buys of jupiter and saturn, but uranus and neptune, i remember quite clearly the images on the news and just really being impressed by what we were doing out there in the solar systems that i began to feel that i was once of the first to see these planets in such great resolution and i'm sure that many others of you that were born in the '70s might feel the same way. and i want to note before going any further, that we do have a wonderful model of the voyager spacecraft upstairs in our exploring the planets ba s gall that's true to the actual voyager, and it's some of the parts used for the engineering and testing of the voyager, and if you want to see that spacecraft in its real full size and glory, i suggest that you take some time if you're here in our audience, to go upstairs and take a look at the model and if you're watching us on nasa tv, please come to the museum when you can and take a look at that model, i don't think you'll be disappointed. so to get started, i would like to introduce thomas zubrikan. he's the -- is headquartered here at -- the doctor has authored or go authored more than 200 articles on hilo sphere kl phenomenon. he's been involved in several special missions. so dr. zubrikan. >> well, thanks, everybody. it's really a pleasure to be here with you today, to celebrate this pioneering moment for both nasa and for exploration history of himg hum, happy anniversary to voyager. yes. of course you know that on september 5, four decades ago in 1977, nasa launched the voyager 1 space craft, only a little over eight years to the blast off to apollo 11, voyager was and still is, to me the apollo 11 of space science, it's a mission that changed everything. it not only change whads we kt but how we think. it's about redefining what we can and cannot do as humans. imagine this fall, children all around the region, around the country going to school, getting their schoolbooks and looking at these pictures in these books and looking at, especially the pictures of the planets. many of these pictures, of course, are pretty young. mercury has pretty cool pictures, i know because i was on the messenger mission, as you just heard, you take images there, you go look at mars images, some of the most amazing investigations going on right now, both on the surface and in orbit. and then you go farther out and you get to neptune and uranus. every picture comes from spacecraft that are out there from the spacecraft that flewably that are out there and we have not gone back. to me, it's also the beginning of my interest in space science, the first book i ever got under the christmas tree for me when i was just under 10 years old, was to celebrate the upcoming launch of the first voyager, and voyager 2 and i have this book with me and it's still in my office. for me it was an inspiration. we all is my point have a perm story that relates to voyager, even if we were not fortunate to be there with hands on like so many people who are working on it now. voyager affects the lives of children of all ages all over the world. know that children were not born that are going to school right now when voyager was still on the ground, well, not even their parents were born for many of them, half humanity that lives today was not born when voyager was launched. and so really what we're celebrating today is 40 years of discovery and exploration history eclipsing everybody's expectations. nearly 40 years later, the successful voyager and it's sister spacecraft voyager 2 continue to provide us with unpress definiu unprecedented information about the space we live in. it's now traveling through the emptiness and loneliness of intrastellar space, having left a atmosphere sphere of influenc sun sun, it's expected to transmit data until 2025, if none of the tech nothinologies fail. voyager 2 is just mind-boggling, it's still going. a robotic explorer to space and beyond the imageable. it is a mission driven by scientific research and a mission of pioneering and inspiration. it's a mission that has opened entirely new questions that keep us awake at night today, the questions that are a subject of ongoing science investigations. casini, in it's last orbits, it's hard to imagine without voyager ahead of it. the images of saturn ring are all over monitoring today and on my phone as well. and we think of the injection of water from below, this icy surface, again starting with voyager. every 450 days or so, we see ne images from juneau. and remember galileo, one of the most recent passages of jupiter's dynamic storm which has lasted for a getting weaker. a whole ocean of wonders that remain to be explored. in fact, we just put an announcement out to the science can community to make the next step towards understanding the boundary of that sphere of influence of the sun, the helio sphere. also deduct interstellar gas in ways we have never seen before. again, a research topic started with voyager. because, guess what? we're dreaming even bigger, these technologies that we have today, allow us to go the distance, but we want to go farther, we want to go faster, and we're inventing these technologies together with the children of the world about possibility traveling to other stars, that's the direction voyager has pushed us in. so i want to congratulate all the generations of the voyager team. remember of course the ones that are no longer with us. and we celebrate the ones who are making voyager work today from nasa jpl all the way to australia, where a big satellite dish listens to voyager in the deep sky. congratulations and encouragement to those who are squeezing every ounce of science out of these pits, these rare and precious pits that are coming from deep space to us. so i want to thank suzanne dodd, the current voyager project manager who first began working on this mission in 1984, and suzanne told me that many of her friends are here and i'm just so excited to welcome you all from jpl who are, you know, many of you have started in the '80s, some of you have started more recently and we won't say who. but i'm just really excited that you're here and celebrating with us. dr. ed stone is my friend for decades, the retired director of nasa jet propulsion laboratory and on the voyager project since 1972, a major spokesperson aboard the voyager science team and one of the key contributors to the science. still inspiring to me, i keep going back to these, so thanks for all the work you have done. the creative director of nasa's voyager intrastellar messages. the innovator here who -- using the gravity -- from 40 years to less than 10 years. nasa used this with voyager 1 and voyager 2 missions. and dr. allen cummings, a friend for many years and one of the funniest guys at any party you'll ever go to. look at him when he's out there. you'll know what i mean. senior scientist, cal tech physicist who works with ed stone, studying the nature of particles entering the solar system from the local int intrastellar medium. i want to tell you right now, i'm coming here with my children or with myself, you all are performing a remarkable service educating and inspiring people of all ages and drives us to keep pushing dpe ining against of ignorance, to be researchers, explorers and in fact voyagers. with that, what i would like to do is kick off a movie that was prepared for this event. thank you so much. >> in six months to make the voyage record and we wanted everything we could possibly compress into the space allotted on the record. as the idea of making a record that represents the type of planet and our movies. >> hello from the children of planet earth. >> we wanted to convey something about the joy of being alive. we knew that the spacecraft itself would speak volumes about us, as much perhaps as the message, which i might add has exceeded it's design specifications in every conceivable way. this was a spacecraft that was supposed to function for something like a dozen years, here we are 40 years later, and we're still in touch. and look at the discoveries that both voyagers have given us, including most recently the borderline of the heliopause, that place where the wind from the sun and the intrastellar medium begins. nasa has every reason to feel the utmost pride. >> 20 seconds. 20 seconds. stand by. stand by. [ applause ] >> it's now my pleasure to introduce our first panel of the day, the doctor already gave them all pretty good introductions, we have dr. ed stone, who has been a project scientist on voyager from 1972 to the present. we have dr. gary flandro who is the expert in space propulsion, and who was the first to sort of propose is grand tour multiplanet exploration of the outer planets. we have allen cummings, allen cummings has been employed at the space radiation laboratory at cal tech since 1973, and he is presently a current senior scientist and member of the professional staff there. we have suzanne dodd, suzanne dodd is jpl's director for the interplanetary network director and she has more than 30 years experience serving as project manager role and also other missions. and we have anne drea. who is work is largely concerned with the effects of science and technology on our civilization, she was co-writer on the emmy winning television series " "cosmos." so without further adieu, i will ask our panelists questions to start with the voyager mission. we'll start with dr. stone. so dr. stone, to you what is so special about voyager? >> well, from many points of view, voyager really represents humanity's most ambitious journey of discovery and that i think is it's legacy. >> and tell us about the beginnings of the mission, the early years? >> voyager began when gary flandro which you'll hear about in a few minutes discovered that there was a year 1997, plus or minus a year, where a single spacecraft would be launched that could fly by all four giant planets was called the grand tour, that was in 1965, by 1972, they had been sort of downsized to mjs-77, which is mariner, jupiter, saturn, four missions just to those giant planets and their moons and rings. that fortunately was to be launched in 1977, however, so if they continued to work they could go on to uranus and finally neptune, which is what voyager 2 did. as gary promised a way to do that in 12 years rather than 30 years so we really have him to thank that we could do it in a 12-year journey. >> voyager obviously has made many discoveries, what are some of your favorites? >> if i could have the first slide please, which shows jupiter and it's great red spot, along with two of jupiter's moons, ioa and yoeuropa. the only known active volcanos in the solar system were here on oert a earth and then voyager flew by one of the moons and has ten times the volcanic activity of the earth. before earth, the only known liquid water erosions wither here on earth, and then voyager flew by another one of jupiter's moons and it was covered with ice, and voyager saw it was cracked ice, though it was on the liquid water ocean, you see the two moons in this image, io being the orangish color one because of the volcanic activity and europa being the one that's ice packed. going on to saturn, before voyager, the only known nitrogen solar -- then we flew by titan, has 70 times the nitrogen, but has methane in the atmosphere not oxygen. so the effect of sunlight is to create organic molecules that creates this haze. another mission appeared several decades later moved through the clouds and the haze, and saw that indeed there are lakes of liquid methane, liquid natural gas on this moon. on to uranus, before voyager, the only known magnetic fields all had their north poles and south poles oriented to be near the rotational axis of the planet, because presumably it was that rotation which creates the magnetic field. and we found that the magnetic pole was nearer the equator, so our view from earth of what magnetic fields were like had to be great ly expanded and then w visited another moon around neping tune, 290 degrees below fahrenheit. so cold that the nitrogen is in the why polar cap, the dark streaks are geysers, erupting, and depositing and we found two active geysers at a time we flew by, in a world that is so cold that even the nitrogen as frozen. see this caused us time and time again to -- what we thought we knew about magnetic fields and moons, has created a legacy now for many future missions to the outer planets. >> so dr. flandro, i'll ask you the question next, in the early 1970s, if you would ask someone how long it would take to get a mission to neptune, the answer would be maybe a few decades, so how did this mission end up being possible in the span of only a dozen years? >> the key here is to use free energy, it's not using rockets now, it's using free energy which i will explain. let's put the first slide up. first slide. okay. this is actually the result of thousands of calculations. i had to run thousands and thousands of numerical calculations of trajectories looking for the possible outer planet mission, this was my favorite here, and the first one that was published, showing a 1978 launch from the earth. i put this up so that you can get some idea about the angles that you have to reflect the trajectory through to gain energy, so i start from the earth here in september 1978, on that little tiny dot along that dash line. make 135-degree turn over to jupiter. and here's now where we start gaining energy. if i didn't do anything, if i didn't go back past jupiter it come back to the earth. jupiter is pulling us with that gravity field, often called the gravity assist, offers a tremendous amount of energy. if a volkswagen is equivalent to four or five rockets waiting out there, you can hook those up and you can really get a tremendous boost of speed. now we have permanently lost the spacecraft, it's on hyperbolic now. you're going to ask me, where did i figure this out and i'll show you. and we get to saturn, in 1978, i loved this because i could get so fast, i could get clear out to neptune in about seven and a half years. if you do it at neptune, i had to go between the planet and the rings, and that scares people. although casini's been doing it now. and you can get to uranus really quickly. and then on the way out to the solar system, we get intrastellar at that point. i'm doing these things, and i said how can we ever sell it? but the key to selling it is to notice that every event happens in a four-year time span, if it doesn't, you're never going to get anything from the government. that's how it works and let me show you how we found it. the next slide shows the actual thing i used to figure out you could do it. along the bottom are the dates, i was looking to the next 10 or 20 years from when i was working in 1965. on the other axis, the vertical axis, these were the angles i was showing you in that slide. i can see something really remarkable here. that in the latest 1980s or so. all of the planets were all on the same side of the sun, i was like oh, my gosh, i better look there, because that means you could probably get one spacecraft that could get all of those planets and that's how it happened. that's how that was discovered and you have to run all these trajectories until you find the best launch windows. 1977, 1978 and the real problem here is that only recurs only 175 years. so if you miss this one, you've lost it because it takes time to build a spacecraft. we had about 10 years to do it. and last time this opportunity ever came was when thomas jefferson was president and he must have -- muffed it. >> so you have already anticipated one of the questions. but let me ask you, the first successful gravity assist was 1974 with mariner 10. so how did you know this was work or what other problems did you think might happen? >> i knew it would work because as astronomers have known about it since the early 1700s. and a lot of scientists know if you fly past a planet with gravity, it will give it a slingshot effect. we also fixtured that out with the venus and mercury trajectories. we knew we could do it, no problem, just getting the money to do it was the problem. >> we'll move on to allen cummings, dr. cummings, tell us how you first got involved in voyager? >> well, actually i got involved in voyager because i lost the experiment i had been working on, it went missing in action, seriously. what happened was i was up in ft. churchill canada, the summer of '73, and i was doing what we had been doing for years, which was attach our experiment to the bottom of a huge balloon and septemb sent it to the top of the atmosphere and we take our measurements and the idea was it drifts west about 500 miles during the course of a day, you bring it down, you rekocover it and bring it back down and then you start all over again. the command to cut it downtown work and the backup cut down timer didn't work, so it just kept going, it went right around the world, it went around the world twice, and the second time it went over russia and they got it. and that ended that experiment. and i got back to cal tech all dejected and they said how would you like to start working on a new pro project called mjs 77, which is the early name for voyager. and the rest is history, i have been working on it ever since, and now looking back on it in 1973 and losing that balloon, it wasn't all that bad, i got to start working on the greatest mission ever to put it bluntly. >> you started working with idle hands. tell me about your experiences with voyager, what are some of your memories of it? >> right off the bat, one of the early ones was, i think i was the last person to physically touch the spacecraft. right after ensap -- encapsulation of the spacecraft. i gave each of the telescopes a little twist. it is otheerie to think, that i was the last person to touch them, the next person to touch them is going to be a space alien. bring out this slide here. this is a picture of our cosmic grade team looking at our first data in 1977 from voyager 2. and i'm the one, by the way in the front there bent over. >> i could tell. i w >> i was the only one apparently that could read the data upside down. but at the time this picture was taken, we were not completely convinced that this was working. so getting voyager 1 in the intrastellar place was kind of the holy grail. due to solar activity, those particles are not detectable inside the helio atmosphesphere. now we're there and we have measured it. galactic toxic rays are haza hazardohazar hazardous to astronauts. what is the maximum intensity of cosmic rays that astronauts would have to deal with. >> maybe you can explain to us, how do you know that voyager is out in intrastellar space? >> that took quite a while to sort out, actually, from our cosmic ray data, we said, yes, we just entered intrasolar space in august of 2012. but thro the one's magnetic field and the galaxy's magnetic field were lined up and that didn't seem likely. so then the plasma wave team came to the rescue. and that's, we'll show it to you here in a minute. but anyway, the sun sent out some big blast waves, had sent out some big blast waves and they reached the vicinity of i voyager one. and it caused the plasma to oscillate and the plasma wave gives us the fwreerequency of t oscillation s then you know the density of the plasma. sand this is the detection of the oscillations and it turns out the density that's inferred, is the density expected in intrasolar space and not the intensity inside the heliopause, that's when we knew that voyager had gone stellar. and theorists are coming to grips with the data and figuring out why that happened and it's just interaction between the hel heliosphere and the intrastellar medium is more than we first thought. >> dr. dodd, where exactly where voyager and voyager 2? >> sure, if you bring up the first graphic. i like to say that the joy of having two spacecraft is that you, as allan was saying, you have to have a model that fits both data points. so we have two spacecraft, they're identical, voyager 1 is the one that if you look on this graphic is sort of going up and out, toward the nose, it's in st intrastellar sparks it has been since august 2012. voyager 2 lhas yet to cross the boundary of intrastellar space. that's probably the number one question that anybody on the project gets, but i always defer that question to dr. stone. so voyager 1 was actually launched second, but it is traveling the fastest. it's the farthest spacecraft from us at 13 billion miles, it travels at 38,000-mile-per-hour approximately. nothing's going to catch up to it. and voyager 2 is traveling a little bit slower, 34,000-mile-per-hour, approximately. but that's still 40 times the speed of sound here on earth. >> so moving that so far away, how do we communicate with these spacecraft? >> well, because the voyagers are so far away, they need to use the deep space network antennas, which are very, very large array dishes, they're 70 meter antenna s as well as 40 meter antennas and they're located in australia and in spain and here in california, i'm not in california now, my apolo apologies, back in my home in california. and so the way voyager operates, it's slightly different from other missions in the sense that most of the data comes down continuously, in real time, sent down to the earth and we capture the data with the deep space network and antennas. so when we're listening to that data, we capture the data and we capture data from both spacecraft about four to six hours a day, from each spacecraft. we send commands to the spacecraft, approximately once a week, a lot of times those commands are just how are you? how are you doing? because of the distance, the roundtrip light time for voyager 1 is 38 hours, so what that means is us as engineers, we're in our office on a monday afternoon, we type a command that says hello to voyager, we come back into the office, not tuesday, but wednesday morning and voyager says i'm fine, how are you doing? so it's more than a day and a half roundtrip flight time for voyager 1 and that has its own challenges in communicating with the spacecraft. >> and how are the voyagers doing? >> well, pull-up the next slide. and the voyagers are healthy and as healthy as senior citizens can be, that's the way i like to think of them. they're twin spacecraft, identical and think of them as twin sisters, senior citizen sisters, so each of them has had problems over the years. one of them is tone deaf, each time we send it to the spacecraft, we have to put it in a few different frequencies in order for the spacecraft to hear it. voyager 1 does not have an operating plaza science instrument. what means is that voyager 1 cannot really directly feel the solar wind and the high energy charged particles coming from the sun. as allan explained, he sort of had to infer that from a different judgment. so each of the spacecrafts were -- had redundant subsystems when they were launch and over time, certain things have broken. we have had to go to the backup systems, we have also turninged thinturninged -- turned things off, power is our limiting resource, we use a isotope thermoelectrical engineer, those are the cans that you're seeing on the left side of the image as you're seeing, we lose 4% of power per year. the real key is how long to make this spacecraft operate. and when will we have to start turning off instruments and how long can we last, and it's a balance between the engineering and the science desires and we hope to keep this mission operating have science instruments operating, at least one into 2025, it might be a little bit longer, 2026, 2027, we're not sure. but personally i hope that i can so it here 10 years from now, with all these folks and talk about the 50th anniversary of the voyager launch and still have them flying. >> anne, the golden record is probably one of the most well known objects in the history of spaceex proper rati exploration tell us about it that we don't already know. >> a lot of people think it was just the kwhwhim of carl say bg others. many people have said in the decades since that the voyager record is kind of a beginning of world music. and that was very much due to carl's planetary perspective and our desire, not just to represent the imperial culture that had created this spacecraft, but also all of the different ways that we found to express the joy of being alive. and so i found something out about the voyager record two days ago that i never knew in all these 40 years and that was there's a peruvian wedding song that is sung by a child in the a andes that was repo and andes. we never thought to ask what the words mean, we just knew it was a wedding song and we just found out that it is a scathing indictment of male chauvinism of that culture and the nightmare of being a powerless woman in that society, which came as a complete revelation to me. so i think there's so many revelations hidden deep within the 27 pieces of music, the sound essay, the greetings from the humans and the humpback whales. there's a lot to learn. >> well, it sounds like it's been very meaningful for you, you have found a lot of meaning in the record. have you imagined what it would actually sort of say about high humans to a totally alien species if they discover it? >> virtually every single night of my life. i stare at -- i'm lucky enou enough -- i stare at it and i have imagined on countless nights because it's real, they really are moving between 35,000 and 40,000 miles an hour. they are as real as we are. so to try to imagine traveling alongside these spacecraft and then to think that the design specifications, you know, that voyagers has exceeded nasa's craziest dreams for it. when they say the record is going to last from 1 billion to 5 billion years. it could be more than that, space is very empty, the chances are very small of them being intercepted, of either of them being intercepted. some grad student on some interstellar steamer who has a whole, you know, collection of these artifacts from these adolescent technological civilizations that can't wait to tell the cosmos what they can do and popping tonight stylist which we included and listening to ten maybe rocking out to johnny b. goode and thinking these guys knew how to party. >> that sounds like the basis for a great book. we have time for a couple of audience questions. yes? >> hi. i'm emily from nasa social media. we have a lot of questions on social. this first one comes from twitter. can you elaborate on your brain wave eeg that's inscribed on the golden disc and the love story inside? >> i would be happy to talk about that. so while we were -- the voyager record at cbs studios in manhattan, when did i ask carl if it was possible if i were to meditate and all of the impulses that my body was giving off, the -- my ekg, my eeg, every rem, every single thing, was it conceivable that the extra ter restrals of a different time can could reconstitute this meditation and interpret it and i remember carl's beaming at me and saying, you know, a billion years is a long time, annie, go do it. so i went to nyu medical center, was hooked up to computer, which was the size of a vast room, probably much more feeble computing power than in our iphones and -- and i was blind folded and sense deprived and i meditated for an hour about -- about the history of the planet, it's geology, it's biology, it's emerging technology to the best of my very limited abilities. told the story of our species, history of our civilization since the invention of agriculture but this was also just a few days after carl sagan and i realized how deeply in love we were and had told each other on june 1st, 1977 in the throes of this mythic undertaking to speak for earth, for billions of years and so part of my meditation is the joy of a 27-year-old woman madly in love, truly in love as every single heartbeat since that moment can affirm. so that's on voyager and if that can be interpreted, then -- then in some sense it keeps us all alive and the deepest feelings and the greatest joys we've ever known. >> we have one more question. >> one more question from social. do you think voyager 2 will reach the helio pause before its nuclear powered batteries are exhausted? >> voyager 2, yes, we certainly expect so. we don't know, of course. this is exploration. it's several more years of that order. not ten more years. if we don't reach it in ten years that will be a very big surprise. >> okay. well, we have a second panel coming up that's going to be a couple of younger scientists whose lives and careers have been impacted by voyager but first we have something that we think you'll find very cool. we're going to throw things over to j.p.l. to mission control for the voyager interstellar mission and there we have tracy drain to explain what's going to happen. so tracy? >> tracy drain, [ inaudible ] managed by nasa's jet propulsion laboratory in california. this is mission control for the deep space network. this is where spacecraft from all over the solar system and beyond communicate through the earth in what we call the deep space network. the voyager's have been communicating with us this way for four decades and we're in a communication pass with voyager 1 today. you can see on this live screen behind me that we're talking to voyager 1 with station 63. in celebration of 40 years of continuing exploration with the voyager's we launched a campaign message to voyager which was inspired by the uplifting messages on voyager's golden records so we asked you to submit messages of good will that we took and selected the top ones and put out to a vote. these had to be short messages, no more than 60 characters. so we're going to reveal today what you chose as the winning message and send that all the way out to voyager 1 in interstellar space. this is ejeff burner and he's te top engineer. can you tell us what's going to be done with the message today? >> well the selected message is 56 characters long which translace into 448 bits and put it into a voyager command message format and sending it up the voyager rate at 60 bits per seconds which means it'll take 28 seconds for the message to be totally transmitted. once it's transmitted, it'll take about 19 and a quarter hours to pass by voyager on its way to interstellar space. it will have traveled 12.9 billion miles. >> and how is it going to be sent? >> we're transmitting from the 70 meter antenna outside madrid, spain and to give you an idea how big this antenna is. it's about three quarters the length of a football field. >> that's pretty fantastic. thank you, jeff. i was only to years old when the voyager's launched but by the time i got to elementary school we had already started getting back images of jupiter and saturn that were really fantastic and hend to inspire me to be interested in space exploration and growing up to be an engineer. my mom was also very interested in science fiction especially star trek. i loved how at the end of voyager the motion picture, the alien spacecraft turned out to be a long lost voyager series probe. so who better to help us send today's message to voyager than captain kirk. that's right. [ applause ] >> i'm so pleased to be here. it's a magical place and this is a magical moment to send a message to voyager and once it reaches voyager, it keeps going so it's like an advanced plan. voyager coming, voyager coming to all the little green people out there. >> that's right. it's pretty exciting. can't wait to see or hear maybe someone will send it back to us. >> wouldn't that be something? >> also here with us today is command engineer and she's going to be ready to send the message on your command. >> she's going to press the button. >> that's right. >> so this message was composed by some individual that was chosen by committee once all the attempts to show us -- to give us a message. there was 30,000, something like that. >> that's right. 30,000 people. >> this was witled down to ten and one of the ten has been chosen and you're going to give me the envelope. >> that's right. >> and i've done this on awards show and we read the message. >> that's exactly right. >> and anna belle will press the button and the message will go out to voyager to get their message 19 hours later. i am so excited. i wonder what they wanted us to say. >> i wonder too. less than 60 characters. >> um-hum. >> that's a half a tweet. >> that's right. it's not a lot of space. >> a lot of space for a large space. >> can we have the envelope, please? here we go. all right. so now i'm going to open it up. and oliver jenkins is the message that's been selected. and this is anabelle this is the message, am i going to read it. >> let's have you read it. we offer friendship across the stars. you are not alone. >> that's fantastic. >> what a great message by oliver jenkins. >> i love that. >> are you going to send it out now? >> i'm ready to send it. >> frequencies up. for the trekkies. command engineer anabelle kennedy, send the message. >> on your command. >> and we are active on three, two, one, active and we are radiating message to voyager at 17:20:01. [ applause ] when you think of the mysterious void that's out there and what little we know and we're sending a message out and it goes into the stars. it goes -- we don't know how long that'll take. how long will that take? i don't mean how long -- i mean the electrical impulse moves at the speed of light -- does it ever decay? >> it will spread out eventually over many, many, many light years. >> yes. >> but eventually if there's something out there with a big enough antenna that can listen, who knows? >> you don't need big antennas -- they have little -- it spreads out and goes forever. >> it just goes forever. >> because it's a light, it's a foeton. >> it's radio signals that are going out. >> right. >> okay. >> i am so happy. >> thank you very much for being with us and we're going to pass it back out to matthew in washington, d.c. >> thank you. [ applause ] we're back at the national air and space museum here on the smithsonian grounds and we have our second panel. we have two new folks joining the panel. i won't introduce -- reintroduce the folks you already know. we have dr. morgan cable. dr. cable is research scientist in pasadena. she earned her ph.d. from cal tech studying life in extreme environments. currently dr. cable is a system project engineer for the cassini mission which has been exploring the saturn system for 13 years and she's also a collaborator on the mapping image spec trom ter. and dr. eric zernstein in the department of astro physical science at princeton university where he specializes in the simulation and analysis of physical processes related to the solar wind and its interaction with the interstellar medium. he received his bs, ms and ph.d. in alabama and he's published peer review articles interpreting observations made by nasa, the nasa missions voyager, interstellar boundary explorer and new horizons. a couple of very accomplished young scientists. let me start by asking dr. cable a few questions. how has voyager influenced your career as a scientist? >> well, voyager's had an immense impact i think on all the careers of scientists and engineers in my generation. it's been more an impact the people have made, being able to work at jpl and cal tech alongside people like ed stone, hi, has been amazing. dr. lynn fill ker has taken me under her wing and through her mentorship i've been able to excel with this knowledge passed down from this voyager veterans. it's been an incredible way to start to find my own path as a scientist in planet tri science and space exploration. >> and which planets have you studied? >> planets, i'm going to say moons are more exciting for me. so i'm really interested in astro biology and thanks to the amazing discoveries of voyager and building on those with cassini, i'm really excited about these ocean worlds, these places like uropa and tighten around saturn, places that have liquid water oceans underneath icy crust. they seem to have all the ingredients at least that we know of for life to survive, water, chemistry and energy. and here if we can show, this is an imagine that voyager took of insell tuesday, one of those ocean worlds in orbit around saturn. back when voyager was -- voyager 2, we captured this amazing image, this is one of the whitest and brightest moons in the solar system. unfortunately, voyager 2 scan platform jammed so it was not able to at that time get an image of as it was leaving, passing by saturn. if it had, it might have captured an image of the plume that now we know is emanating out of the south pole. if we go to the next slide. you'll see this was an image that was captured by cassini, this is the follow on mission at least for ten days in the saturn system. i encourage you all early in the morning to watch the final grand finale of that mission, the next slide this is what voyager would have seen had that scan platform been working. this is some material that's coming out of these four giant tiger stripes in the south polar terrain. this is free ocean water spewing into space and thanks to voyager we know about these amazing worlds, missions like cassini and hopefully some future spacecraft are building on that knowledge and it's such a fun time to be a planetary scientist. >> is there anything on earth that you could compare these two? >> let's see. the best comparison i think for these types of plume emnations would be maybe a geyser like in iceland or something like that but the scale is very, very different. those geysers maybe spray a few tens of meters at host into the air. these plumes that are mem naturing from -- single plumes many jets forming a single plume spew out at least 50 miles and maybe more. they form that e ring around saturn. one of the rings is being formed because of this material coming out of insell la dus. what do you want to exnext? >> i want to explore everything. inselidus is at the top of the list. i'm lucky enough to be a part of. we have a few more in the works. we're hoping will move forward and then looking further out these fascinating places like triton around neptune. it's orbiting backwards. it's spewing volcanos of nitrogen and methane and amazing stuff. there's so much to explore. >> great. dr. zernstein. how did you first get involved in helio research. >> it started when i was an undergraduate at my university. i was taking a computer physics programming in class and our professor came in and showed us these new observations that the interstellar boundary explorer was just taking. the interstellar boundary explorer is short for ibex is an earth orbiting spacecraft that are created in the outer atmosphere. they're created at distances where voyager's spacecraft is and travel through space. so professor showed us these observations, these are real exciting but totally unexpected. and we have a brief animation we can show. so ibex takes a sky map so took a picture of the sky within six months and what it does is, you can see on the sky map there's the pixels for voyager 1, voyager 2 on the bot op. these are where they're going away from the sun, away from the earth. in the background is what ibex sees. it sees all these neutral atoms from every direction in space. what was totally unexpected was this band going across the middle of the sky that we call the ibex ribbon. this excited everyone that was working on it and i decided to do my undergraduate project with him on it and it's been like that ever since. >> we see voyager 1 and 2 in your graphic. how is your work intersected with the voyager exploration? >> voyager gives the ground truth to what we naub. ibex gives a global picture but voyager tells us what's happening in location in space. so using them simultaneously is really important for our research. so ever since it was officially confirmed that voyager 1 had crossed the healey pause, those unexpected strange magnetic field observations were maybe not actually that strange afterall. so the graphic we're showing, if you first imagine the solar wind coming out from the sun. it goes and just comes out from the sun and fills a bubble in space called the helio pause like a comet shape. this blue, light blue you are is surface is the surface of that bubble and then outside of it is interstellar space and you can see the top arrow is where voyager 1 is outside the healey pause. still pretty close on these scales and the bottom black arrow is voyager 2 but it's still inside so there's no picture and what we can see in the simulation is that the magnetic field lines which are those black curves snaking from the top left to bottom right are showing us how the magnetic field is wrapping around this healey pause surface and we believe what voyager is telling us is how these magnetic field lines are draining around the helio field and as it prop gates farther away from the sun it's going to tell us how far this interaction goes. >> and what about your plans for the future? what do you hope to see for the future of interstellar exploration? >> we'll continue to see more observations from voyager 1 as it goes 38,000 miles per hour and it's going to provide us with more and more important observations for at least the next ten years and -- but our community, we're definitely expecting voyager 2 is going to cross the healey pause down at the bottom there and we believe it's going to be in the next few years but we'll just have to wait and see. but voyager has shown us is not only is it exciting and astounding to see all these observations but it's definitely capable. we're definitely cable of doing this and hopefully it's going to be one of many in the future. >> fantastic. so now i think we have some time for some audience questions and i think we also have a social media question. if anyone from the audience has a question you can make your way over to the microphone in this aisle over here. >> hello. this is really an inspiring day. thank you for this and thank you, guys, for all you've done. i've always been curious as a space buff since childhood when my dad took me to see saturn, when we send out the inspirational messages in the record as so on, as slim as the chance is that they'll be found was there ever any concern that they might not be nice green people who find it? >> great fear about the nature of the extra ter res treeals, someone as brilliant at steven hawking, don't let them know we're here, but it's too late for that. because of our radio signals as described earlier. we've been broadcasting for something on the order of a century and the word is out that we're here. what i find so pudsling is that maybe because i've been so lucky to have a wonderful life, is that we always assume that the extra terrestrials will have to be more advanced than we are because afterall they're space faring, they're sufficiently good at it that they can flag down a derelict spacecraft in the middle of nowhere, so they're technologically advanced but we always assume that they'll be as emotionally and spiritually stunted as we are, that they will treat us the way we treat each other. and i say, beautiful until proven ugly. let's -- it makes no sense to me that you could be that good at traveling in space, mastering the planetary quarantine that we're born in to, figuring out all of the difficulties and challenges of actually being a space faring civilization and still be out there hunting for lunch or for, you know, something to wear. it just doesn't strike me as practical and so i say, you know, the voyagers are literally as they've often been called, they're messages cast in the bottle in the great ocean of space. they move so slowly that, you know, our radiosignals out run them at the speed of light while they plod along at maximum 40,000 miles an hour. so not to worry. >> dr. stone, i was involved in the fly by of neptune and when we went by triton, you could see those dark clouds or -- did that ever prove out or was it something else? >> you know -- >> i know a little bit about that. so triton surface is mostly nitrogen and methane ice and so what happens is as triton moves through the seasons, you have -- it's methane snow that moves and condenses so it moves from pole to pole and when some hydro carbons get trapped underneath some of the snow and it starts to warm up it turns to a gas and it starts to vent out and that's what you're seeing and i believe the dark marks are very similar to the tholene, another material we see on tighten when methane and other small molecules act with energetic sources in our solar system it forms larger molecules. they're muddy because they're muddy colored. right? >> right. >> get a gold star. >> social media question. >> emily from nasa social media. this question comes from twitter and they're asking when the next opportunity for a mission that could fly by neptune or uranus. >> since it takes a long time with chemical propulsion we would have to use gravity assists. i think there are hundreds of possibles within the next ten years to do that. >> at least a -- been included in the most recent -- huge proponents as i'm sure we all are of exploring these fantastic systems. >> another audience question. >> hi, alice mcgraw. i've got a question about the spacecraft itself and debris. i know that you're measuring plasma but what about dust and do you expect it to be swiss cheese at this point, structurally? >> the space is really empty and the gold cover you see there in the image is, in fact, a dust cover. the record is behind it. that cover is thick enough -- it's there because micrometeor yooits would disrupt and hit the groove. they believe that that thin plate that is there to give a billion year warranty against dust. >> at the beginning of this whole thing when we were first proposing this, everybody told me that you're wasting your time. you cannot get through the astroid belt with that spacecraft. just forget it. you're not going to make it through but i don't think there was ever any sign of any problem going through. >> with advances in information storage and the ability to crowd source like we did for the message to the voyager today, how do you think the process of making another project like the golden record would be and how different do you think the end result would be? >> well, first of all, yes, the opportunity to compress so much -- i mean really our nano technologies and our abilities to compress we could send the entire internet on the next epic mission. we could send warts and all everything we are without any difficulty. it was a challenge in 1977 to select the -- the pieces of music, the process was heartbreaking at times. precisely because of the finite space available on a phone owe graph record. still it made the most sense at the time to maximize the amount of information we could send, but if we were going to send it now, you know, there's a project that i have pro liveral association with it's called breakthrough star shot, contemplating sending nano craft, each craft the size of a lentol with greater capabilities than each of the voyager and a tiny little light sale moving not 40,000 miles an hour but ultimately if it's successfully a significant fraction of the speed of light so the -- the possibility are virtually infinite if we just get our act together here on earth. >> i believe we have time for two more questions. >> i certainly have enjoyed listening to all of you, young and old, and to see that voyager has a future. there's something going around on the internet that i hope maybe you can all -- somebody can describe. and that is the effect that pioneering voyager had on getting rid of planet x? >> i think the pioneer ten they tracked the spacecraft very accurately and look and they thought that they had found a small residual acceleration that was not accounted for by known physics. and that would be very excited if there was no physics that was effecting gravity on the larger scale. they've reanalyzed the data and they've analyzed it for pioneer ten and 11 and have concluded, unfortunately, it was really material properties having to do with a spacecraft radiating the heat away from the sun and there is no evidence that there's new physics involved. >> sorry. first i want to thank nasa for ruining my seventh birthday pause you threw the first one. what i would like to know is the most white knuckle or scariest moment during a mission process? >> clearly the scariest time was on voyager 2 when we lost one receiver and found that the backup receiver no longer could tune to the frequency we were sending, so we had to learn how to send the right frequency so the spacecraft could -- fortunately we learned how to do that. that was a very scary period, several months, while we sorted out what happened. we've flown this entire mission now with this tone deaf receiver so it's fine. there are many such things that happen on real missions and normally you don't hear about them because once they get fixed it's old news. we're very lucky that there's been no catastrophic failure but that's just the risk of space. things do happen that you can't fix. >> i want to thank our second panel for doing a wonderful job and really giving us some great history and future of the voyager project. [ applause ] and i want to turn things over to ann who is going to present the final part of our days activities. >> well, before you up on the screen is voyager's final look homeward. a picture that was taken because carl sagan lobbied endlessly to have it taken. it was reluctance to take it because to look homeward was to look back to the sun, which meant the possibility that the lenses would burn out, but as carl kept pointing out, we're not going to take any more pictures and he knew that it would be important for us to see our home planet, not as the framed filling apollo image which was such a sea change in the history of our civilization. i remember seeing the earth from space for the first time and seeing it fill the frame and believing for the first time in a visceral way, yes, we live on a world that moves through space, but this is what we really need to take to our hearts right this moment, because that's not the framed filling center of the universe image of the earth but our true circumstances. we live on a one pixel world in the scale of the solar system, forget about the scale of the galaxy, forget about the scale of the hundred billion galaxy. forget about part of the universe that we have yet to apprehend. we only understand and really know such a small part of it and that's really us as carl wrote so beautifully, that's everyone you ever loved and -- >> i know. [ inaudible ]. >> in a kind of global hostage crisis of terror, that somebody who has managed to climb to the top of this tiny ant hill on one part of the dot is threatening to destroy all the life and the beauty of this world for the beings of another part of that dot as carl wrote so mem raably. it's like fruit flies fighting over a grape and, you know, that picture is the place where our scientific cleverness, our genius, our engineering brilliance and our fledgeling knowledge of the universe intersects with how we should conduct ourselves and how we should live. and i'm so glad that nasa exceeded to carl's wishes and took that picture, you know, in the bible it says, you should have frontlet between thine eyes and walkest by the way morning and night, see that. and teach that to everyone you know, so that we can begin to treat each other the way we should, the way -- in a way that would be worthy of our children and grandchildren. thank you. [ applause ] >> okay. thank you, ann and thank you to all of our panelists and speakers today. on behalf of the smithsonian national air and space museum, thank you all for joining us as our audience today and please come and visit us when you can. [ applause ] you're watching american history tv. all weekend every weekend on c-span3. to join the conversation, like us on facebook at cspan history. it's a radiostation in the nation's capital. it covers 6 million people. this is a very heavily automobile commute city and it'll just extend our brand and give people who are involved in the process here a chance to listen to it. that's how it happened and it was that simple. cspan radiomarking 20 years of -- listen to the washington journal live each morning beginning as 7:00 a.m. eastern. hear recaps of the day's political events and get the latest from congress, the administration and important events from across the nation. cspan radio is available in washington on 90.1 fm. on our website cspan.org or by downloading the free cspan radio app. cspan radio at 20 years where you hear history unfold daily. monday on american history tv, descendants of participants and one copetitioner talk about the decision's legacy. here's a preview. >> i want everybody to understand, you know, you don't have to like everybody. not every black person likes every black person, not every white person likes every white person. you don't have a right to act on it and you don't have to like me. you don't have to live down the street from me but you have no right to decide, you know, and to violate my right as an individual citizen. so don't get us wrong. this is not a cumuba aye everybody has to love everybody. you do not have a right to act on it. absolutely not. >> and i would just like to add that, we need to learn to respect our differences. and to appreciate them. because once you understand, you know, about each other then you're going to have a better sense of yourself. go home and ask about your own stories, of the struggles of your families and where they came from. we're all -- most of us were immigrants and are have that history unless you're indigenous and native american. so once you understand other -- your own story then you can appreciate other peoples' stories but respect and what my father said along this line is to stand up for what is right, protest, but not with violence. otherwise they won't listen to you, but don't be afraid to speak up. watch the entire discussion on the legacies of supreme court landmark cases hosted by the national constitution center in philadelphia monday at 8:00 p.m. eastern here on american history tv only on c-span3. next, former president bill clinton delivers the keynote address at a ceremony marking the 60th anniversary of the integration of little rock central high school in arkansas. also participating in the event in the school auditorium are eight of the little rock nine. the first african-american students to attend the school. president eisenhower sent the 101st airborne to little rock to escort the students on september 25th, 1957. ladies and gentlemen, please welcome our distinguished guests for today's

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