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By Root 1277 0

astonishing. Voyager 1 obtained excellent imagery of the other three Galilean satellites of Jupiter. But not Europa. It was left for Voyager 2 to acquire the first close-up pictures of Europa, where we see things that are only a few kilometers across. At first glance, the place looks like nothing so much as the canal network that Percival Lowell imagined to adorn Mars, and that, we now know from space vehicle exploration, does not exist at all. We see on Europa an amazing, intricate network of intersecting straight and curved lines. Are they ridges—that is, raised? Are they troughs—that is, depressed? How are they made? Are they part of a global tectonic system, produced perhaps by fracturing of an expanding or contracting planet? Are they connected with plate tectonics on the Earth? What light do they shed on the other satellites of the Jovian system? At the moment of discovery, the vaunted technology has produced something astonishing. But it remains for another device, the human brain, to figure it out. Europa turns out to be as smooth as a billiard ball despite the network of lineations. The absence of impact craters may be due to the heating and flow of surface ice upon impact. The lines are grooves or cracks, their origin still being debated long after the mission.

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 concern about provisions and instruments, which seemed to be malfunctioning, we successfully lifted off from Cape 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 pair.

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 asteroid 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 main asteroid belt, happy to have survived.

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 as 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 its 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