Bill Kurth

Voyager Plasma Wave Science Co-Investigator

Voyager Plasma Wave Science Co-Investigator

Coralville, Iowa

I have had the unspeakably good fortune to have worked on Voyager throughout my entire career and to continue to do so. As a graduate student, I worked on the Plasma Wave Science (PWS) instruments prior to launch. (I placed a “Uranus or Bust” sticker on the Voyager 2 PWS shipping container – how little I knew about how far it would go!). I defended my doctoral dissertation just one month before Voyager 1 flew past Jupiter. I continue to monitor PWS data as Voyager 1 passes 139 astronomical units and Voyager 2 approaches 115 astronomical units. I processed the data showing plasma waves near 2 kilohertz in 2012 that showed definitively that Voyager 1 had entered interstellar space.

One of my most memorable moments occurred in early March 1979 at the Jet Propulsion Lab. Fred Scarf and I were watching PWS data come in as they were beamed from Voyager 1 onto simple printouts and plots that were state of the art, at the time. In our workspace, there was a very small black and white monitor that occasionally showed unprocessed PWS high-rate observations. However, most of the time, these monitors displayed the most recent image from the Voyager Imaging Science Subsystem – the camera. The display was riveting. Each day and each hour, the images became clearer and more detailed, and new worlds were literally being unveiled before our eyes. At the same time, the PWS data were showing evidence of radio and plasma waves never before observed in a magnetosphere beyond Earth.

Fred surprised me, one day, by saying how very sad he was for me. He said that it was so sad that I was experiencing Voyager so early in my career, because it would never be so good again. Of course, what Fred did not know was that the Voyagers would visit not only Jupiter and Saturn as was the mission plan, but also Uranus and Neptune. Nor did he realize that the Voyagers would still be telling us about the outer heliosphere and interstellar space 40 years after their launches. I’m only saddened that Fred did not live to see that Voyager’s mission of discovery extended for more than 40 years and spanned the entire distance to the heliopause (where our sun’s plasma ends) and beyond.

Certainly, I have been a part of other exciting and fruitful planetary missions including Galileo, Cassini, and Juno. But, in my heart there is one above the rest – Voyager, the mission that paved the way for so many more.