Captain’s Log

Captain’s Log

If the Voyager missions were manned, the captain would keep a ship’s log, and the log, a combination of the events of Voyagers 1 and 2, might read something like this:

Day 1: After much concerns about provisions and instruments, which seemed to be malfunctioning, we successfully lifted off from Cap Canaveral on our long journey to the planets and the stars.

Day 2: A problem in the deployment of the boom that supports the science scan platform. If the problem is not solved, we will lose most of our pictures and other scientific data.

Day 13: We have looked back and taken the first photograph ever obtained of the Earth and Moon as worlds together in space. A pretty fair.

Day 150: Engines fired nominally for a mid course trajectory correction.

Day 170: Routine housekeeping functions. An uneventful few months.

Day 185: Successful calibration images taken of Jupiter.

Day 207: Boom problem solved, but failure of main radio transmitter. We have moved to back-up transmitter. If it fails, no one on Earth will ever hear from us again.

Day 215: We cross the orbit of Mars. That planet itself is on the other side of the Sun.

Day 295: We enter the asteroids belt. There are many large, tumbling boulders here, the shoals and reefs of space. Most of them are uncharted. Lookouts posted. We hope to avoid a collision.

Day 475: We safely emerge from the moon asteroid belt, happy to have survived.

Fantasy World. The Real Voyager's Mission is Much Interesting Than the Journey of a Fictious Ship. Because we will never know the end of story. Image:Alternate Reality, Fantasy World, Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

Day 570: Jupiter is becoming prominent in the sky. We can now make out finer detail on it than the largest telescopes on Earth have ever obtained.

Day 615: The colossal weather systems and changing clouds of Jupiter, spinning in space before us, have us hypnotized. The planet is immense. It is more than twice more massive as all the other planets put together. There are no mountains, valleys, volcanoes, rivers; no boundaries between land and air; just a vast ocean of dense gas and floating clouds – a world without a surface. Everything we can see on Jupiter is floating in the sky.

Day 630: The weather on Jupiter continues to be spectacular. This ponderous world spins on its axis in less than ten hours. Its atmospheric motions are driven by the rapid rotation, by sunlight and by the heat bubbling and welling up from its interior.

Day 640: The cloud patterns are distinctive and gorgeous. They remind us a little of Van Gogh’s Starry Night, or works by William Blake or Edvard Munch. But only a little. No artist ever painted like this because none of them ever left our planet. No painter trapped on Earth ever imagined a world so strange and lovely.

We observe the multicolored belts and bands of Jupiter close up. The white bands are thought to be high clouds, probably ammonia crystals; the brownish-colored belts, deeper and hotter places where the atmosphere is sinking. The blue places are apparently deep holes in the overlying clouds through which we see clear sky.

We do not know the reason for the reddish-brown color of Jupiter. Perhaps it is due to the chemistry of phosphorus or sulfur. Perhaps it is due to complex brightly colored organic molecules produces when ultraviolet light from the Sun breaks down the methane, ammonia, and water in the Jovian atmosphere and the molecular fragments recombine. In that case, the colors of Jupiter speak to us of chemical events that four billion years ago back on Earth led to the origin of life.

Day 647: The Great Red Spot. A great column of gas reaching high above the adjacent clouds. So large that it could hold half a dozen Earths. Perhaps it is red because it is carrying up to view the complex molecules produced or concentrated at great depth. It may be a great storm system a million years old.

Day 650: Encounter. A day of wonders. We successfully negotiate the treacherous radiation belts of Jupiter with only one instrument, the photopolarimeter, damaged. We accomplish the ring plane crossing and suffer no collisions with the particles and boulders of the newly discovered rings of Jupiter. And wonderful images of Amalthea, a tiny, red, oblong world that lives in the heart of the radiation belt; of multicolored Io; of the linear markings on Europa; the cobwebby features of Ganymede; the great multi-ringed basin on Callisto. We round Callisto and pass the orbit of Jupiter 13, the outermost of the planet’s known moons. We are outward bound.

Day 662: Our particle and field detectors indicate that we have left the Jovian radiation belts. The planet’s gravity has boosted our speed. We are free of Jupiter at last and sail again the sea of space.

Day 874: A loss of the ship’s lock on the star Canopus – in the lore of constellations the rudder of a sailing vessel. It is our rudder too, essential for the ship’s orientation in the dark of space, to find our way through this unexplored part of the cosmic ocean. Canopus lock reacquired. The optical sensors seem to have mistaken Alpha and Beta Centauri for Canopus. Next port of call, two years hence: The Saturn system.