JPL to screen film about Voyager’s historic fly-by past distant moons and planets

For anyone who couldn’t make it to JPL’s recent Open House, another opportunity to learn about the facility takes place Wednesday evening, when the screening of “The Footsteps of Voyager” takes place in Caltech’s Beckman Auditorium.

Created as one installment in a documentary series about the important work done on JPL’s many missions since the 1930s — when the fledgling facility was a testing ground for military rockets — the film takes a look at Voyager’s work around Neptune and Uranus in the 1980s.

That arc of the Voyager interstellar mission was an important time in the history of space exploration, according to JPL director of communications Blaine Baggett, who’s produced and directed the film series in his spare time for the past six years.

“It was the completion of the first reconnaissance of the solar system, the first ever,” Baggett said in an interview Monday. “On Uranus, (Voyager) saw winds blowing at incredible speeds. What was so startling and fantastic about Neptune was its moon, Triton. It’s terrain is so incredibly diverse — they had no idea there would be a place like this that far out.”

With a 60-minute running time, “The Footsteps of Voyager” uses rare film footage and interviews with engineers and scientists who were there. At the 7:30 p.m. screening Oct. 28, audience members will also hear from Ed Stone, a former JPL director and project scientist of NASA’s Voyager mission since 1972, and ask questions after the event.

Baggett said he’s worked with staff members to produce one documentary each year. JPL historian Erik Conway locates and interviews employees past and present, while Baggett puts together a rough cut of the stories and footage.

“We outline the highlights, and then we go and interview all of the people we can find in the mission who had important roles,” Baggett said of the process.

The end result is one way of capturing the work and discoveries that occur at JPL while digitizing old footage in the process, says Conway, who works in Baggett’s department writing and researching contributions to the facility’s internal archives system.

“They’re narrow, in the sense that they’re primarily about JPL’s history and not NASA, but I think they’re enjoyable,” Conway said of the series’ films, which are often gifted to employees and new hires. “We try to communicate a kind of a message that space (science) is hard but can be done.”

The Oct. 28 screening is free and open to the public. Caltech’s Beckman Auditorium is located at 332 S Michigan Ave., Pasadena.

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Sara Cardine, sara.cardine@latimes.com

Twitter: @SaraCardine