Voyager - Exploration, Space, And The Third Great Age Of Discovery
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But few places at the time of discovery were truly unnamed because they were rarely uninhabited. Every settled place already came as thickly covered with names as with woods or flying insects. Since most explorers had native guides and interpreters, they first learned of those places through their indigenous nomenclature. Some survived, more or less intact, leaving Massachusetts, Tidbinbilla, and Rotorua. More got bent through linguistic prisms as adults struggled to mouth exotic sounds or convert them into something that sounded familiar. Nahuatl Gualé twisted into “Gualape.” Algonquian che, meaning “big,” and sepi, meaning “river,” combined with a generic ending -at to become “Chesapeake,” which sounded vaguely familiar, like something that might apply to a mountain. French Canadians exploring in the Plains named a river the Purgatoire, which Anglophone Americans reengineered into “Picketwire.”129
But there were some places that seemed strikingly new, required many names for unusual features, lacked indigenous labels, and came late enough in the game that explorers invoked some system. The prime example may be the Grand Canyon. The first explorer through the gorge, John Wesley Powell, elevated the canyon from Big to Grand, and named some of the salient features of the river, particularly its rapids and their associated gorges, bestowing such memorable labels as Sockdolager and Bright Angel. But the perspective from the Canyon rim was more daunting: there were so many features, all unnamed. Clarence Dutton decided that the mesas resembled pagodas and that the Canyon deserved a spiritual aura, and so bestowed the names of Asian gods and sages. Immediately there were temples for Confucius, Shiva, Vishnu, and Zoroaster, while the rim proper got Cape Royal, Cape Final, and Point Sublime. The next major cartographer, François Matthes, favored Nordic gods, bequeathing Wotan’s Throne, Freya’s Castle, and Thor’s Hammer. When Arthur Evans succeeded him, the Welshman insisted that figures from the Arthurian legend be immortalized, which led to Lancelot Point, Guinevere Castle, and a spire called simply Excalibur. Meanwhile the Birdseye Expedition through the gorge, an exercise in cartographic engineering, merely labeled the river’s features by their mileage from Lee’s Ferry (eg., Mile 128 rapid). A few vernacular terms slid into the gazetteer, such as Horseshoe Mesa and the Battleship; miners and promoters put their names on trails and select features; and the National Park Service arranged to name the main tourist overlook after its first director, Stephen Mather. Explorers ensured they got onto the map, although they found themselves clustered on Powell’s Plateau, with Dutton claiming the prominent point to the southeast and army rivals such as Lieutenants Wheeler and Ives banished to less interesting western peninsulas.
To a remarkable extent this same pattern would govern the naming of planetary bodies and their landscapes.
One reason is that by the time the Canyon was fully mapped, the U.S. Board on Geographic Names had been established to oversee uniform place-names by federal agencies, particularly the U.S. Geological Survey, which was mapping the country. The board functioned to regulate usage much as a dictionary does ordinary language. The board was rechartered in 1947, and continues today to promulgate “official geographic feature names with locative attributes as well as principles, policies, and procedures governing the use of domestic names, foreign names, Antarctic names, and undersea feature names.” It thus oversaw two of the three regions of the Third Age. It spread into space because the U.S. Geological Survey’s Astrogeology Research Program, established in 1963, has responsibility for mapping and naming the features that planetary exploration discovers.130
Two traits especially distinguish space from the naming practices typical of the First and Second Ages. There are no indigenous peoples, and hence no existing names, and similarly there are no territorial claims associated with the naming process. The solution to the first issue is to create a past by appealing to ancient or traditional lore from around the Earth, much as Dutton and his successors did at Grand Canyon. The solution to the second is to rely on a neutral institution to govern naming, a task that falls to the International Astronomical Union, first established in 1919, which arbitrates and regularizes nomenclature for planetary bodies. At first this meant the Moon and Mars, as viewed by Earth-based telescopes. But as robotic spacecraft began their reconnaissance, the task expanded. In 1970 a Mars nomenclature working group was charged with designating names for the features revealed by Mariner 4 and its successors, particularly those anticipated from Mariner 9. In 1973 the IAU established a Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature, which in turn created task subgroups for the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, and the outer solar system. In 1982 Harold Masursky of the USGS Astrogeology Program and a member of the Voyager Imaging Team became president of the Working Group.
By then the Voyagers had recorded two flybys through the Jovian and Saturnian systems. In their wake were tens of thousands of photographs of new worlds overrunning with features. They needed names, or at least some did. In the end more than five hundred landmarks got them.
The naming process begins with a theme, approved by the proper IAU task group, followed by some names to prominent features. Improved images lead inevitably to more names. From the task group the names go to the Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature, where they must again find approval. The protocol allows for a three-month period for objections before the names are recorded into gazetteers, maps, and the transactions of the IAU.131
In their search for themes, the working groups assembled a library of more than two hundred published or submitted sources, from the Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology, Kiowa Tales, Gilgamesh, The Indian Background of Colonial Yucatan, Giants, Tales of Yoruba: Gods and Heroes, Soviet Encyclopedia, Webster’s Biographical Dictionary, a list of radar scientists (provided by G. H. Pettengill), Fairies, Zhenshchina v mifakh i legendakh (Women in Myths and Legends), Dictionary of Slavic Mythology, and Myths of North American Indians, to say nothing of classic literature from Homer and Virgil to Dante and Milton.132
On November 16, 1980, some members of the working group for naming the outer planets met at JPL to identify the themes for naming features on Saturn’s satellites. Hal Masursky thought that since they all had themed lists of potential names, they might match many-featured moons such as Rhea with the longest lists; but Tobias Owen, the chair, thought they might begin with the moons with the fewest features. That pointed to Enceladus and Hyperion. But a theme? Since Saturn was a Titan, most of the satellites were named for sibling Titans. Enceladus, however, was a giant that Athena buried under Sicily, so Masursky suggested that the craters on the moons be named for giants. Owen then noted that the IAU had criticized the nomenclature committees for taking too many names from Western civilization. The group considered using names of giants from cultures everywhere, which segued into a query about giants in the Aeneid, and then the Odyssey, which free-associated into The Tale of Genji and then Arthurian legend. (With its sharply etched black-and-white terrains, Iapetus seemed suitable for a story of good and evil—a white crater for Lancelot, a black one for Mordred.) Then they considered naming after discoverers, but since living persons were disallowed, they could not, for example, use Rich Terrile. Instead, they decided to let him pick from a list. Returning to Enceladus, they fussed over the idea of naming features after Sicilian towns, which led back to the Aeneid, which then led to adjournment. In the end the full working group proposed that Tethys get its names from the Odyssey, Dione from the Aeneid, Mimas from Arthurian legend (based on Baines’s translation of Le Morte d’Arthur), and Rhea from creation myths from around the world. Enceladus got names from people and places in Burton’s Arabian Nights. In the end the giants lost out altogether because they tended to cluster too heavily in Nordic legends and thus found themselves buried beneath the Sicily of cultural diversity.133
By the time Voyager completed its flybys, the Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature recognized some fifty-one “descriptor terms” for features, almost all of which had Latin roots. These ranged from “arcus” (arc-shaped feature) to “cavus” (hollows) t
o “dorsum” (ridge) to “labes” (landslide). “Palus” described a swamp or small plain. “Planitia,” a low plain. “Planum,” a plateau. “Macula,” a dark spot. “Rima,” a fissure. “Rupes,” a scarp. “Tessera,” tile-like polygonal terrain. Matched with themes, Io’s volcanoes got names from fire, sun, thunder, and volcano gods and heroes. Its catenae (chains of craters) came from sun gods; its “mensae,” “montes,” “paterae,” and “tholi” from the Io myth or Dante’s Inferno. Europa received names from the Europa myth or Celtic mythology. Ganymede boasted gods and heroes from the Fertile Crescent. Some small satellites, like Colorado River features, got numbers. After the space shuttle Challenger blew up, the committee resisted the impulse to name moons after the deceased astronauts.
The names rolled on, a fugue of words counterpointing the rosters of raw data. While neither names nor numbers could compete with the graphic shock of images, both were necessary means of assimilating what would never be colonized. They populated the new worlds with gods, heroes, giants, and so connected the mission with a cultural heritage that a machine could not otherwise have. They made Voyager a saga, not simply an instrument.
EYES OF DISCOVERY
To planetary scientists, Voyager was a flying lab, outfitted with instruments for recording phenomena largely invisible to the naked eye that it then transmitted back in streams of data, which researchers would pore over for years. To the public, however, Voyager was a camera, and its startling revelations were its photos. No one could see infrared or ultraviolet radiation, much less something as recondite as a bow shock. But everyone could stand amazed at crisp images of exotic worlds viewed instantly as they were displayed on monitors. For humanity at large, and for the media, those images largely defined and sustained Voyager.
The split in perception was real, however, and it dated from the very origins of the space program. Many space partisans saw scientific research in only a supporting role; and space scientists themselves disagreed about what research warranted a place on the instrument boom. Certainly in its origins planetary science had meant geophysics; of the fifteen scientists allied with Voyager, only one, Larry Soderblom, was a geologist because, as Bruce Murray put it, “there was no geology of the outer planets.” IGY had been, after all, a geophysical year, with special focus on the upper atmosphere; and the new astronomy was shifting away from imagery based on hard bodies and visual light and toward radio, X-ray, or infrared spectra and the objects that emitted them. The first triumph of the American space program was Explorer 1’s discovery of Earth’s invisible radiation belts. Simple pictures of new landscapes, moons, and galaxies held little research promise; they seemed scarcely better than postcards, or tourist souvenirs, with trivial value for scientific inquiry. As early as 1962 an august group of space scientists (including Nobel laureates) had argued strenuously against putting a TV camera on satellites as a waste of precious payload. Even as Voyager 1 hurtled toward its rendezvous with Jupiter, “nowhere,” observed two chroniclers of the mission, was “there any indication of the dominant role that images would play in the exploration of these new worlds.”134
That was the vision of professional science speaking to its own. Against its bias was the steady penetration of TV into American culture. This was an age in which the word increasingly counted less than the image, and the still image less than the moving one. From its origins, the space program had been televised; Vanguard 2 had attempted to televise Earth; and beginning with Tiros 1, weather satellites beamed back photos, both startling and self-evident, to an eager public. The eyes of discovery disseminated to anyone with a TV set: nothing created so great a bond with the citizenry whose consent made the space program possible. Still photos were effectively published on TV.
Gradually, however, geophysicists came to appreciate the value of images for interpreting the hard geography of the new worlds being discovered. Even seemingly backwater sciences such as geomorphology enjoyed a revival by being able to decode from surface images past and current planetary dynamics, from once-flowing waters on Mars to subterranean renewals on Europa. The lasting image of the Apollo program was not a posturing astronaut on the Moon but Earth rising above the Moon’s horizon. The camera surrogate used by Pioneers 10 and 11—painstakingly reconstructed from scans by a photopolarimeter—had enthralled viewers; but those spare, grainy images paled before the glossy, multihued thousands that Voyager broadcast back.
Their wide- and narrow-angle cameras, not their recording of whistlers on Jupiter or the unstable magnetospheric fringes of Titan, were what most bonded the Voyagers to the wider public.
That had long been true. Before printing became cheap, explorers had indulged in word paintings, and they still did, even as the Second Age made it standard practice to carry artists with expeditions. Those paired images were the ones that electrified the public.
It was one of the great convergences of the Second Age that nature became a reputable subject for art. Vast natural history paintings replaced operatic human history canvases as a source of wonder and moral instruction; portraits of parrots, beavers, turkeys, and platypuses replaced, at least in popular lore, portraiture of aristocrats, plutocrats, and ecclesiastics; mountains and blasted trees sublimated religious allegory, and then became iconic objects in their own right. Artists such as William Hodges established indelible images of Tahiti, Easter Island, and floating Antarctic ice mountains. Karl Bodmer bequeathed a brilliant, irreplaceable record of upper Missouri tribes, as aesthetics merged with ethnography. Frederic Church reproduced Humboldt’s South American adventures with tropical mists, towering peaks, and erupting volcanoes in immense chromatic canvases. Artists recorded and introduced to Europe the kangaroo, the Aborigine, the baobab tree, the Ituri Forest, the Great Plains. In America, where a sublime Nature and its monuments would substitute for the absence of Antiquity and its relics, discovery and artistic representation knotted tightly together. Thomas Moran’s splendiferous canvas of Yellowstone Falls and his mellifluous watercolors of Mammoth Hot Springs, painted for the Hayden Expedition of 1871, were galvanic in pushing Congress to declare Yellowstone a national park. Immediately, John Wesley Powell persuaded Moran to visit the newly unveiled Grand Canyon, and repeat the trick—which he did.
Eventually technology changed the terms of public engagement, as the camera overtoppled the brush as the most popular medium. Photographs were what primarily engaged the public; even artists used photos to help re-create paintings later in their studios. Where expeditions had to pay for themselves by lectures and publications, as Shackleton’s did, photos were critical. That makes all the more gripping the moment when, on the Endurance expedition, knowing they had to leave the ice floes for boats, Shackleton and Frank Hurley sat down and determined which glass-plate negatives they could afford to take with them and which they could not. Shackleton smashed the rejects to forestall any attempt by expedition members to secrete the remainder among the stores.
During the interregnum between the Second and Third ages that followed, discovery became increasingly banal, or even staged by magazines such as National Geographic. Everyone used cameras. Expeditions sought out niche landscapes, or simply places that lent themselves to being photographed. The photogenic mattered more than the unknown. There were a few exceptions, most spectacularly the Leahy brothers, who carried a motion-picture camera on their 1930 foray into the highlands of New Guinea, filming a first-contact record never to be repeated.
By the Third Age the camera had continued as an instrument of record, but art had abandoned nature for art, and artists had plunged into a greater unknowable, themselves. No artists accompanied the major expeditions of the era, although an Earth-based art of space did evolve, and some cosmonauts dabbled in paint and pencil while enduring the ennui of Earth orbit, like sailors on long voyages carving scrimshaw. The medium of the age, however, was the moving picture. The classic episodes of exploration were recorded on TV or recapitulated in documentaries. The dominant technological romance emerged from H
ollywood.
For Voyager, in particular, its long trek paralleled a revival of space movies. Star Wars was released in May 1977, three months before Voyager 2 launched, and Star Trek: The Movie, in late 1979, when the Voyagers were halfway between their encounters with Jupiter and Saturn. The real Voyagers did not have to wait for Hollywood. Among their most memorable images were time-lapse movies made of Jovian storms, Saturn ring spokes, and fast-approaching moons. Technicians completed the trend by creating animated, computer-generated movies that tracked Voyager as it flew past new worlds.
Such productions required more than normal manipulation. “Enhancement” was already a mandatory practice, however, since Voyager did not transmit canvas oils and watercolors but only electronic daubs and brushstrokes for its pixels. The published image was assembled at JPL labs.
This, too, had a long tradition. Exploring artists rarely painted their canvases on the scene and then hauled them for months on mule and keelboat. They carried sketchbooks and journals in which they did studies and executed tricky details and indicated in words what color should go where, and then collected artifacts that they could subsequently include in a reconstructed scene. Later, they relied on photographs as well. They completed their final compositions in a studio. And not surprisingly, they indulged in a degree of enhancement.
The nature of digital images made manipulation both necessary and tempting, as what began as a means to sharpen data could segue seamlessly into artistic license. It was possible to compensate for weak and distorted signals; to lighten dark blotches; to parse bland haze into false color tints based on differing electromagnetic spectra; to highlight murky rings with sharp coloration, as though the image had been washed with psychedelic drugs. Computers became palettes, and imaging labs, artists’ studios. The first survey from Mars by Mariner 4 consisted of two hundred scan lines of two hundred picture elements each, a giant printout of forty thousand numbers, which were then hand-colored with crayons to produce an image the public could understand. The volcanoes on Io were effectively discovered by manipulating data into a form that highlighted the crescent domes of sulfuric gas. As with all data, the numbers had to be processed to make meaningful patterns. The imaging teams used photo software instead of statistics.135