Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 80-600126
FOREWORD
Few missions of planetary exploration have provided such rewards of insight and surprise as the Voyager flybys of Jupiter. Those who were fortunate enough to be with the science teams during those weeks will long remember the experience; it was like being in the crow’s nest of a ship during landfall and passage through an archipelago of strange islands. We had known that Jupiter would be remarkable, for man had been studying it for centuries, but we were far from prepared for the torrent of new information that the Voyagers poured back to Earth.
Some of the spirit of excitement and connection is captured in this volume. Its senior author was a member of the Imaging Team. It is not common that a person can both “do science” at the leading edge and also present so vivid an inside picture of 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 degree and diversity of discovery. We had, of course, expected a number of discoveries because we had never before been able to study in detail the atmospheric motions on a planet that is a giant spinning sphere of hydrogen and helium, nor had we ever observed 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 such as Io, which was known to be dispersing sodium throughout its Jovian neighborhood and was thought to be generating a one-million-ampere electrical current that in some way results in billions of watts of radio emission from Jupiter.