| ENCOUNTER DISTANCES FOR VOYAGER 1 | ||
|---|---|---|
| Object | Range to Center at Closest Approach (kilometers) | Best Image Resolution (km per line pair) |
| Jupiter | 349 000 | 8 |
| Amalthea | 417 000 | 8 |
| Io | 21 000 | 1 |
| Europa | 734 000 | 33 |
| Ganymede | 115 000 | 2 |
| Callisto | 126 000 | 2 |
For the first time since its discovery, Lyle Broadfoot and his UVS colleagues suggested a probable identification for the unexpected ultraviolet emission near the orbit of Io. The most likely candidate was sulfur atoms with two electrons removed (S III), at an inferred temperature perhaps as high as 200 000 K. An additional indication of sulfur came from Mike Krimigis, who reported that the low-energy charged particles instrument had detected bursts of sulfur ions streaming away from Jupiter that had apparently escaped from the inner magnetosphere. No explanations were offered, however, for the presence of large amounts of this element.
At JPL, a press room had been opened in Von Karman Auditorium to accommodate the hundred or so reporters expected to arrive. To keep all the interested people informed of Voyager progress, frequent television reports were beamed over closed-circuit TV throughout JPL. From an in-lab television studio called the Blue Room, JPL scientist Al Hibbs, who had played a similar role during the Viking Mission to Mars, provided hourly reports and interviewed members of the Voyager teams. As the pressure for constant commentary and instant analysis increased, Garry Hunt of the Imaging Team was also called on to host activities in the Blue Room, where his British accent added an additional touch of class to the operation.
As the encounter progressed, the JPL television reports reached a wider audience. In the Los Angeles area, KCET Public Television began a nightly “Jupiter Watch” program, with Dr. Hibbs as host. During the encounter days, service was extended to interested public television stations throughout the nation. In this way, tens of thousands of persons were able to experience the thrill of discovery, seeing the closeup pictures of Jupiter and its satellites at the same moment as the scientists at JPL saw them, and listening to the excited and frequently awestruck commentary as the first tentative interpretations were attempted. Unfortunately, the commercial television networks did not make use of this opportunity, and the greatest coverage available to most of the country was a 90-second commentary on the nightly network news.
Wednesday, February 28.
(Range to Jupiter, 5.9 million kilometers). At 6:33 a.m., at a range of 86 RJ, Voyager 1 finally reached Jupiter’s bow shock. But by 12:28 p.m. the solar wind had pushed the magnetosphere back toward Jupiter, and Voyager was once more outside, back in the solar wind. Not until March 2, at a distance of less than 45 RJ, would the spacecraft enter the magnetosphere for the final time.
At 11 a.m. the first daily briefing to the press was given. “After nearly two months of atmospheric imaging and perhaps a week or two of satellite viewing, [we’re] happily bewildered,” said Brad Smith. The Jovian atmosphere is “where our greatest state of confusion seems to exist right at the moment, although over the next several days we may find that some of our smirking geology friends will find themselves in a similar state. I think, for the most part, we have to say that the existing atmospheric circulation models have all been shot to hell by Voyager. Although these models can still explain some of the coarse zonal flow patterns, they fail entirely in explaining the detailed behavior that Voyager is now revealing.” It was thought, from Pioneer results, that Jupiter’s atmosphere showed primarily horizontal or zonal flow near the equatorial region, but that the zonal flow pattern broke down at high latitudes. But Voyager found that “zonal flow exists poleward as far as we can see.”
Smith also showed a time-lapse movie of Jupiter assembled from images obtained during the month of January. Once each rotation, approximately every ten hours, a color picture had been taken. Viewed consecutively, these frames displayed the complex cloud motions on a single hemisphere of Jupiter, as they would be seen from a fixed point above the equator of the planet. The film revealed that clouds move around the Great Red Spot in a period of about six days, at speeds of perhaps 100 meters per second. The Great Red Spot, as well as many of the smaller spots that dot the planet, appeared to be rotating anticyclonically. Anticyclonic motion is characteristic of high-pressure regions, unlike terrestrial storms. Smith noted that “Jupiter is far more complex in its atmospheric motions than we had ever imagined. We are seeing a much more complicated flow of cyclonic and anticyclonic vorticity, circulation. We see currents which flow along and seem to interact with an obstacle and turn around and flow back.” There is a Jovian jet stream that is “moving along at well over 100 meters per second. Several of these curious little dark features that appear to be small brown spots near Jupiter’s north temperate region have been seen to overtake one another and gobble each other up. And then they occasionally spit out a piece here and there as they move along.”
Thursday, March 1.
(Range to Jupiter, 4.8 million kilometers). At 5 a.m., at a distance of 71 RJ, Voyager crossed the bow shock for the third time, catching up with the contracting magnetosphere of the planet. About noon, at 66 RJ, the spacecraft finally reached the boundary of the magnetosphere, called the magnetopause. Herbert Bridge, the plasma instrument Principal Investigator, noted that the solar wind pressure as monitored by Voyager 2, still between the Sun and Jupiter, had been for several days from two to five times greater than its level during the Pioneer 10 and 11 encounters. Presumably, this high pressure was the cause of the compressed state of the magnetosphere. However, in the previous few hours the solar pressure had dropped, so Bridge anticipated that the Jovian magnetosphere might soon inflate and expand outward.