 Welcome to this edition of NASA Images. This is Lynn Bonderant. During this show we're focusing on historic NASA documentary footage showing some of the discoveries about the solar system and stars made by unmanned probes in 1979 and later. Our first film clip is from 1979 and shows some of the results of the Voyager spacecraft encounters with Jupiter and the Pioneer spacecraft flyby of Saturn. Jupiter, largest of the Sun's nine planets, was photographed close up by the Voyagers' one and two spacecraft. What their camera eyes recorded as they passed by the giant planet's churning clouds were ribbon-like streaks of red and brown and yellow. The wealth of data and photographs left behind by the Voyagers are providing scientists a valuable source of raw material to be studied. From Jupiter's newly discovered ring to the active volcanoes of Io, one of its 14 surrounding moons, the Voyager discoveries have surprised and delighted NASA scientists. Information that may one day help us better understand our own Earth. And the Voyagers' mission did not end at Jupiter. The two spacecraft are now speeding toward a rendezvous with Saturn in 1980 and 1981. Acting as pathfinder for the Voyagers, Pioneer 11, the 570-pound spacecraft climaxed six and a half years and a two billion-mile voyage in deep space as it swept by Saturn at 71,200 miles per hour. Scientists watched anxiously as Pioneer made its two-hour passage of Saturn's rings. Four times, the spacecraft was hit by small pieces of debris, but emerged safely despite the collisions. Pioneer had a closer look at Saturn than all the observations that have been made in the last 400 years. Photographs show what appear to be jet streams swirling around Saturn at 300 miles an hour, a new ring circling the planet's equator, and radiation belts that are more like Earths in their intensity and energy levels. The Pioneer 11 spacecraft, dwarfed by the objects it was sent to observe, is speeding out of the solar system in an endless journey. Just before Voyager 1 was to fly by Saturn, NASA released this pre-encounter film clip in October 1980. Looked beyond our atmosphere many times, but never have we seen what we are about to see. Two Voyager spacecraft are now approaching the planet Saturn, a ringed spectacle of gas and ice, and the second largest of our planets. There are special cameras aboard the Voyagers, though, which will revolutionize our knowledge about Saturn, its curious rings and its 10 moons. Launched through Cape Canaveral in 1977, the Voyagers completed their tour of Jupiter in 1979, when they returned 33,000 pictures to Earth. The close-up photography uncovered some remarkable findings. We learned that Jupiter has rings like Saturn, and one of its 16 satellites, or moons, has volcanic activity or impressions of the outer reaches of our solar system. It's cold out there, nearly a billion miles from the Sun, and yet one of Saturn's moons, the giant Titan, may have an atmosphere that could support organic life. An exploratory spacecraft, Pioneer 11, journeyed past Saturn a year ago with less sophisticated cameras. Pioneers successfully passed through the dangerous rings and discovered a fifth one, once the Voyagers should verify with photographs. We can expect very good quality photographs of Saturn. One of the things that made the Jupiter pictures so interesting were the surprises that were seen in these pictures. Now, we know even less about the Saturn system, and so we might expect more surprises than we had even in Jupiter. These computer-generated pictures show what Voyager 1 will see, traveling toward its closest encounter on November 12. It should reveal some exciting discoveries about Saturn which have been beyond our grasp. On that date, Voyager 1 will dip near the clouds of Titan to look for potential life there. Then it will pass behind Saturn's rings to study the planet's mixture of water and ice. Scientists think the rings might have been formed from a shattered satellite, or some other body that was pulled into Saturn's orbit by gravity. To us, they seem sleek and smooth, but the rings are composed of huge chunks of ice. At close range, they appear as an asteroid snowstorm. Saturn's composition has been a scientific puzzle because of the dense clouds that extend 37,000 miles from the planet's rocky core. We don't really even know exactly how large many of the Saturnian moons are because they're so hard to measure from the Earth. And in fact, one of the major experiments with all of the instruments onboard the Voyager spacecraft is a comparison of the Jupiter system with the Saturnian system to see how they differ and why they differ. The Voyagers were planned to affirm our beliefs about Saturn and Jupiter, but they've been so successful that NASA is sending Voyager 2 on to Uranus. After it tours Saturn next August, Voyager 2 will travel at an average speed of 60,000 miles per hour, reaching the seventh planet, Uranus, by 1986. After that, the spacecraft may venture even farther to Neptune. When the Voyagers finish their mission, they will lose contact with Earth and tumble endlessly into new galaxies. But then they will have served their purpose. For what was fantasia and speculation in our minds has become factual knowledge about space, one of the last frontiers. When Voyager 1 did speed through the Saturn system, there were some surprises, as we'll see next. And we'll also see a short report on how the Solar Max satellite looked at the Sun. These people, here in Mission Control, were responsible for guiding NASA's 1,800-pound unmanned Voyager 1 spacecraft some billion miles through space. On November 12, after a three-year journey, Voyager 1 made its closest encounter with the planet Saturn. Voyager has returned more than 18,000 photographs. Photographs that are giving scientists excellent close-up views and new information about the huge planet and its many moons. With the help of computer animation, you can take a ride on Voyager 2 Saturn and its major moons. Voyager's 11 scientific instruments probed deep into the atmosphere of Saturn and gave us an unprecedented view of those incredible rings. We now know there are six major ring systems made up of possibly as many as 1,000 rings. The rings are sun-reflecting icy objects ranging from boulder-sized to small particles that whirl around the planet at very high speeds. And those moons are satellites. Like outriders, they encircle Saturn generating as much scientific interest as the great-ringed planet itself. Mimus, Tethys, Dione, Rea, Titan, and a host of smaller ones. More than 1,000 journalists were on hand to witness the encounter and attend the science briefings that followed. And these were some of the storytellers, the engineers and scientists themselves. It's always gratifying to have the results be something more than what was expected and Saturn and what we have found was not expected. I suspect even for the next few years we will find new discoveries in the data which we've acquired in the last few days. And as we see more and more examples of the way the universe can put planets together, we find that our traditional perspective in explaining our own planet has been rather limited. What we learned about Saturn during that encounter and during the months that preceded it have really rewritten the textbooks on Saturn. Next August, Voyager 2 will approach Saturn, pass by the ringed spectacle of gas and ice from a different angle, and then fly on to Uranus, arriving there in 1986. It may also travel to Neptune before leaving our solar system. From Earth it appears as a warm, friendly ball, an integral part of everything living. But up close it's a churning solar furnace that spouts solar flares in an atmosphere that's constantly changing and explosive. Little wonder that our star, the Sun, has been the focal point of scientific investigation for centuries. To relay sophisticated pictures and data about the Sun and its energy cycles, NASA launched the Solar Max in 1980, short for Solar Maximum Mission. Being returned are the first true close-up views of the mysterious spots and solar flares that energize the Sun's surface. All this part of an effort to learn how we can channel the Sun into an even more effective energy source. Our next clip from September 1981 shows us some of the Voyager 2 results from Saturn. Those music-like sounds are actually radio waves picked up by the plasma wave detector on NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft as it approached and swept by the planet's Saturn. After a four-year, billion-mile journey, Voyager 2 passed within 63,000 miles of the many-colored planet and transmitted back thousands of extremely clear pictures. Astronomers were surprised at the complexity of Saturn's rings, including what appeared to be spokes running across them. During one experiment, scientists watched a star come out from behind Saturn and go behind the rings. They then measured the amount of starlight 100 times a second as it blinked on and off. What they found were many, many individual streams of particles orbiting Saturn, like waves in the ocean. Saturn also has very interesting weather, according to imaging team leader Dr. Bradford A. Smith. We, in fact, have found that there are similarities between the Saturnian weather and terrestrial weather, so that the analysis, which is still going on in trying to understand the dynamics of that Saturn system, those analyses sooner or later are going to be helpful in interpreting our own Earth's meteorology. Saturn is surrounded by signs of collisions, small, odd-shaped bodies of rock and ice. Dr. Lawrence A. Soderblum, Chief of Astrogeologic Studies for the U.S. Geological Survey, specializes in the study of Saturn's moons or satellites. What we've seen from the combined missions now is that the collection of objects that we find in the Saturnian satellite system is extremely varied and unanticipated in terms of the geologic activity and the degree to which these objects have remained active and alive. Enceladus, what you too discovered, has been active over most of geologic history. This is an extremely puzzling thing to have an object that has been continually replacing sections of a surface, but actually has a mass that's something like one part in 100,000, the mass of the Earth. The planet-sized moon Titan has many of the characteristics that may have existed on Earth in its early geologic history. Its atmosphere is dominated by 82% nitrogen gas compared with 79% on Earth. But instead of oxygen, it has methane and hydrogen, and it's very cold and smoggy. Voyager 2's cameras have been turned off and will remain off most of the time for the next four years. Even so, engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory will be watching and guiding it toward its next rendezvous with the planet Uranus in 1986 and Neptune in 1989. Voyager project scientist Dr. Ed Stone made these observations about the importance of this type research. Well, I think we all want to understand where we live, and it's interesting that we now have the capability to include in where we live the solar system in which we live. Now, that is interesting because we're very curious people and we live on one of the planets of the solar system which has obviously evolved to where it is today and which is continuing to evolve. It's very difficult when you're looking at something now to be able to accurately go back in time or to go forward in time. But by looking at a number of examples of things as they exist now in the solar system, I think we have a better idea of both how to look backward in time to the beginning and possibly how to look forward in time to how things will evolve. Now let's turn to the inner solar system to learn more about Venus from this 1982 report. Stop the Earth's rotation, remove its friendly neighborhood moon, push it just slightly closer to the Sun, and scientists believe the Earth would become like this planet, Venus. Recent findings indicate that the Earth and Venus are identical in many ways. At one point in Venus history, it might even have had oceans similar to ours. These are some of the new discoveries resulting from an international Venus science conference. Many of the new findings have come from the several pioneer Venus spacecraft sent there by NASA to study the cloud-shrouded planet at close range. We know that Venus has got dense sulfuric acid clouds that would seem to us to be something like a smog or a heavy fog which would burn your skin if you were exposed to these clouds. The bottom of the clouds is about 30 miles above the surface and below that the atmosphere is clear, you can see for great distances. As you go deeper and deeper into the atmosphere it gets hotter and hotter and eventually once you get to the surface it's about 800 degrees Fahrenheit like being inside of a self-cleaning oven. The temperatures are so hot that it would kill anyone who is exposed to them and the pressures are equivalent to being 3,000 feet deep in the ocean so the pressures would be crushing. The light levels are so dim at the surface during the day that it's sort of like the cloudiest day that we ever experience on the Earth. So it's a dim, hot, crushing place. During the early years of the solar system's history conditions may have been right for life to exist on Venus. One of the key elements was water according to geologist Dr. Harold Mazurski. Well we think that there was a lot of water in Venus like there is on the Earth but it's not there now. It's way too hot, there's water vapor in the atmosphere. So the big question is early in its history did it have condensed water on the surface? And we can look for that in high-resolution radar pictures and the way we do it is you look for shorelines because there are dried lakes now in the western United States that were full of water during the Ice Age and we can see that evidence clearly. There are offshore bars that were made when there was water so we can look for those kinds of things that may have been there in the past on Venus's surface. We were utterly surprised on Mars by understanding that the history was different early and the same thing is true of the Earth. So it would be strange if Venus had always been the same as it is now. Lightning, active volcanoes, upside down clouds that cause a drizzle of sulfuric acid and a super hot surface. Slowly but surely Venus is giving up some of its secrets. New information that will help us better understand our own planet both past and future. By May 1983 when the next clip was released the Pioneer 10 spacecraft was about to become the first man-made object to leave the solar system. Launched in 1972, NASA's Pioneer 10 spacecraft has accomplished many firsts over the course of its 11-year space odyssey. One was a successful passage through the rocky asteroid belt, a feat which greatly alleviated the fears of scientists concerned about damage to far-traveling spacecraft. Having safely journeyed the sum 2.5 billion miles to Jupiter Pioneer 10 transmitted valuable scientific information back to Earth, information shedding new light on the composition and evolution of Jupiter and its moons. On June 13th of this year, Pioneer 10 will travel beyond all the known planets and become the first man-made object to leave the solar system. As NASA's deep space network continues to track the spacecraft out to around 5 billion miles, researchers hope to learn more about the boundary between the sun's atmosphere and true interstellar space. Pioneer 10, a spacecraft that has journeyed further than any other to the outer planets and now beyond our solar system. A man-made object which will, from a new vantage point in Whitman's words, look up in perfect silence at the stars. As Pioneer 10 is speeding out towards the stars, astronomers are using radio telescopes to examine planets and stars as this 1983 report shows. Astronomers calculate that there are approximately 100 billion other stars in the Milky Way. An infinite number of these stars could conceivably have planets orbiting them, possibly supporting some sort of life. A scientific approach to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence has become possible in recent years thanks to the extraordinary development of new and more sophisticated instrumentation. Radio telescopes such as the Deep Space Network at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California are being used by scientists as part of a five-year research program. But the big ear on the universe is the Erisebo Observatory, the world's largest radio radar telescope. Lying deep within the mountains of northern Puerto Rico in a natural depression formed by the collapse of huge limestone caves, the instrument's collecting area is larger than all the combined collecting areas of all telescopes ever built. As a radio receiver, the 1,000-foot structure listens for signals coming from other stars in our galaxy. As a radar, the telescope sends out the strongest signal now leaving Earth, a signal which may be detected by similar instruments anywhere in our galaxy. Operated by Cornell University, the observatory was initially conceived to study the composition of the Earth's upper atmosphere. Later, NASA supported the installation of a large transmitter so it could be used to study other planets in our solar system. The surface roughness of Mars was examined prior to the Viking landings in 1976. High-resolution studies were also done on Venus. The director of the Arecibo telescope is Dr. Don Campbell. NASA realized the utility of the improved Arecibo telescope, which would be powerful enough to study the surface of Venus. It would also allow us to look more with more detail at the surface of Mercury, surfaces of Mars to measure altitudes, to complement the photography that was done from the Viking orbiters, and also to look at the outer planets, the satellites at Jupiter, the rings of Saturn, and numerous asteroids and comets that might come by. The very large collecting area captures radio waves coming from stars and galaxies, giving scientists a clue to the distribution of mass throughout the universe. Other interesting cosmic radio sources are pulsars, dying stars which emit pulsating radio signals as they spin in space. One of these fascinating stars was discovered at Arecibo in 1982. Director of Radio Astronomy at Arecibo is Dr. Mike Davis. This new pulsar that has been discovered recently at the observatory is rotating 642 times per second. That's more than 20 times as fast as the next fastest pulsar, the one in the Crab Nebula. And these neutron stars, as they're called, were predicted as long ago as 1934, but nobody knew that they would come with a rotating flashlight beacon like a lighthouse shining out to sea. Every time this beacon flashes past the observatory, we pick up a pulse. Astronomers have also detected quasars emitting enormous quantities of radio energy, which, traveling at the speed of light, have taken as long as 10 billion years to reach Earth. Arecibo, listening for signals from space in an attempt to solve some of the mysteries of our universe. Our final report shows how an international group of probes was to study Comet Halley and how Voyager 2 was approaching the planet Uranus. Comet Halley is making its regular 76-year pilgrimage around our sun, as it has been doing for countless centuries. The comet is the target of study for five exploratory spacecraft from Europe, Japan and the Soviet Union, each whizzing by the giant snowball of ice, gas and dust from different vantage points. The European space agency's JOTO spacecraft will be the most daring probe by taking a flight path just 300 miles in front of the comet's head. JOTO hopes to photograph the comet's nucleus. Two other highly instrumented Soviet spacecraft, Vega-1 and Vega-2, are scheduled to fly by the comet at a distance of 6,000 miles, hoping also to obtain images of the comet's nucleus. Lastly, two Japanese spacecrafts studying Halley are Planet A, which approaches the sunward side of Halley at a distance of 120,000 miles, and Sakigaki, which will pass about 4 million miles from the comet. In order to get the best use out of all the research being done on the comet, the International Halley Watch was organized. Thousands of scientists and amateur and professional astronomers from 47 different countries have joined forces. The Halley Encounter is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to study one of the most primitive objects in our solar system. A program dedicated to visiting some of the planets in our solar system with two unmanned probes has had a history of success ever since its beginning. In 1977, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were both launched on their way to Jupiter and Saturn. Now, having logged nearly 2 billion miles in space since 1977, Voyager 2 will point its sensors and TV cameras at a planet we have never seen up close, Uranus. Voyager project scientist Dr. Edward Stone, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Well, there are several unique things about Uranus. First of all, it's the most remote planet that we will have visited in the solar system. It formed in a much colder region of the solar nebula and therefore is made of different materials than either Jupiter or Saturn. So we will be studying the different properties of Uranus and its satellites. The other interesting thing about Uranus is that it's tipped over on its side with its spin axis at this time basically pointing at the Sun. So it has a much different orientation with respect to the Sun. Many questions will be answered during the encounter before the tiny one-ton spacecraft ventures even further into our solar system to visit the eighth planet from the Sun, Neptune. Voyager 2 successfully examined Uranus in early 1986. Comet Halley was also studied by an armada of spacecraft. During our next program, we'll see Comet Halley and Uranus results. That's all we have for this edition of NASA Images. But before we go, let me remind you that you're cordially invited to see the displays at the Visitor Center here at the NASA Lewis Research Center. We're located near the Hopkins International Airport in Cleveland. Admission is free. Until next time, this is Lynn Bonderant saying goodbye.