Friday, February 5, 2010
Contact: Madge Gibson
news@utsi.edu
Dr.
Gary Flandro, Professor Emeritus at the University of Tennessee
Space Institute, has been honored by NASA for his contributions on
the Voyager project.
He is one of several NASA pioneers included in a special feature of
NASA’s celebration of 50 years of space exploration.
NASA commissioned Jay O’Callahan, a prominent American storyteller,
to write “a love letter to NASA” in celebration of fifty years of
space exploration.
O’Callahan spent the better part of a year and a half, interviewing
astronauts, engineers and various NASA employees, studying
astronomy, reading and traveling to recapture the essence of what
the last fifty years meant to the NASA community and to the world.
The National Public Radio presented a holiday special entitled
Living on Earth where O’Callahan performed his “Forged in the
Stars’, to a live radio audience.
In O’Callahan’s presentation, he created two fictional characters
that were romantically involved at the beginning of the
presentation. They were tasked to write a love story about some of
the people who were contributors over the last fifty years to NASA
and the space program. By the story’s end they were just friends,
but both had a love for NASA and the people who had been an integral
part of the NASA history.
O’Callahan told about a young Gary Flandro who was a student at
Caltech in 1965, while also working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory
in Pasadena, California. Flandro discovered that the outer planets
would align on one side of the sun in a way that had not happened
since Jefferson’s time and will not align again in this way for
another 176 years.
Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, the gas giants, would play a
pivotal role in what would be a Grand Tour of the Outer Planets.
Flandro applied the ‘gravity assist’ idea that a space craft
approaching a planet from behind can gain energy because the gravity
of the planet flings it forward at a tremendous speed. A spacecraft
can travel on until it approaches another planet and again gathers
energy from the next planet and will be flung forward again, and
then on to the next planet and to the next. This is something like a
cosmic billiard game.
At the time of Flandro’s discovery, Mars, at 35 million miles away,
was the closest planet to earth. Neptune is about two and a half
billion miles away. Nobody knew for sure if it would work, but
engineers and scientists began planning and building the small
spacecraft weighing about eighteen hundred pounds each. They were
named Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. The original plan was to fly by each
of the four outer planets but NASA curtailed the flight to include
only Jupiter and Saturn due to budget constraints. However, despite
the funding cuts, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory secretly built the
Voyagers with the capability to carry out the complete Grand four
planet mission as envisaged by Flandro. After the successful Jupiter
and Saturn encounters, and considering the robust good-health of the
spacecraft, NASA provided funding to allow Voyager 2 to complete the
full Jupiter-Saturn-Uranus-Neptune Grand Tour mission. Voyager 2
encountered Neptune on August 25, 1989. The spacecraft is still
operating after 33 years and is now the most distant human-made
object in space; it is 12.9 billion kilometers from the Sun. Voyager
1 recently made a new discovery of an interstellar gas cloud that
physicists say should not exist.
When Voyager 1 and 2 were launched in 1977, NASA used their
imagination and included on both spacecraft a gold record with
various sounds and images portraying the diversity of life on earth.
Among the things on the phonograph record was “hello” in fifty-five
languages, music consisting Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, the Beetles,
Australian horn and totem music, Melanesian panpipes, Chinese chin
music, Japanese flute music and music from all over the world. They
also included the sounds of whales, the cries of babies, multiple
everyday sounds of earth today, as well as a message from the
President of the United States, Jimmy Carter.
Flandro said “It is highly unlikely anyone will ever retrieve the
gold record since it isn’t heading for any particular star. The
record is a time capsule of sorts and not a serious attempt to
communicate with any extraterrestrial life form”.
In 2008, Voyagers 1 and 2 became the third and fourth human artifact
to escape from the solar system. They will go into interstellar
space in six or seven years and reach the Oort cloud in the year
26,000 and make the closest approach to the star Sirius in the year
296,036.
Flandro received his M.S. degree from California Institute of
Technology in 1960 and his PhD from California Institute of
Technology in 1967. Dr. Flandro came to the University of Tennessee
Space Institute in 1991 when he was appointed to the Boling Chair of
Excellence. He kept that position until he retired in December 2009.
He is a Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and
Astronautics (AIAA). He was awarded the NASA Exceptional Achievement
Medal in 1998 “for seminal contributions to the design and
engineering of multi-outer-planet missions, including the Grand Tour
opportunity for the epic Voyager explorations.”
Dr. Robert “Buddy” Moore, Executive Director of UTSI remarked that
“While many people have contributed to the space program over the
past 50 years, a very small number have made enormous contributions
and one of those individuals is Dr. Flandro. It remains a privilege
to have him associated with UTSI.”
Also, among those who were honored in the “love story” was the first
school teacher in space, Christa McAuliffe who died, along with
seven astronauts, when Challenger blew up in mid-air, while the
world looked on.
NASA was formed on October 1, 1958 due to two primary things. Russia
had launched Sputnik in October 1957, showing the world they had the
technology to launch nuclear weapons on rockets and beating out the
United States to be first to launch a rocket into space.
Secondly, the Army and Navy laboratories were competing with each
other, often duplicating things, so out of necessity, Congress,
under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, formed the National
Aeronautics and Space Administration, previously known as National
Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, to oversee and coordinate
non-military space research.
