Triton Images Put Scientists in Party Mode

It’s hard to say whether it was adrenaline or caffeine that got the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Voyager 2 imaging team through the wee hours of Friday morning.

Gulps of coffee seemed to come as often as gasps of wonder and triumph as Voyager sent back 23 pictures of the Neptunian moon Triton.

This was the night they had been waiting for.

Clustered around monitors that dotted every conference room, auditorium and cafeteria at the Pasadena space lab, those intimately involved with the Voyager mission, along with assorted visitors, made this night into a party.

The mood remained jovial as the 3:40 a.m. arrival time for the first Triton image approached. When the first picture of this intriguing moon rolled in, the group surged forward.

“Here we go!”

“Oh!”

“Look at that!”

“Holy cow!”

A few miles away, about 2,000 people gathered at the Pasadena Center, one of the few public sites in the Southland that stayed open all night for viewing the Voyager results as they were transmitted to Earth. Only about 200, however, stayed long enough to see the night’s most impressive display, the Triton photos.

2.7-Billion-Mile Trip

Those images ended their 2.7-billion-mile journey on the third floor of the JPL building, where the imaging team is headquartered. Team members spent the morning’s earliest hours milling about a conference room in a scientific version of a cocktail party.

Empty bottles of 1985-vintage Champagne and leftover cheese and crackers littered a large table, the remnants of the midnight celebration. The party started when it became apparent that Voyager had indeed survived a shower of microscopic dust particles as it crossed the region known as the ring plane. Small groups ebbed and flowed with conversation, scientific and otherwise.

“The SS is here. They’ve surrounded the building. We are to give ourselves up,” one staffer joked, referring to the tight security that was already in place in anticipation of Vice President Dan Quayle’s visit several hours later.

Outside, in JPL’s central courtyard, technicians were testing the sound system and others were setting up essentials such as a soft drink booth for Quayle’s visit. Dark plastic obscured the view through the wrought-iron fence around the courtyard--a “Quayle blind,” graduate student Steven Grigory called it.

As comments like that and newspaper cartoons posted on every available wall and door showed, scientists and engineers are far from the humorless stereotype society might have them.

“Imaging Team of the Lost Arc,” said one notice on an office door, joining the week’s speculations about partial rings, or arcs, around Neptune with an allusion to a popular movie.

On a nearby wall was posted the Neptune Pledge. “We, the undersigned, hereby apologize to our colleagues in advance for any sharp words, heated exchanges, testiness, or downright rudeness which might occur during the heat of encounter,” it reads.

Back in the conference room, three of the project’s top scientists, Ed Stone, Larry Soderblom and Bradford Smith, crowded around one small monitor to discuss the lineation that in some shots made Triton look like a cantaloupe.

A few minutes later, the cameras revealed a pattern that almost looked wind-swept. “Wispy terrain,” suggested one observer.

“No, we’ve used that word too much already,” protested a colleague.

“Swirly, then.”

Nearby, in small offices, other team members used their computers to zoom in on particularly interesting features, enhancing them quickly in black and white for immediate viewing. Another team member, Alfred McEwen, began refining their work and adding color to one shot, so the 1,049 media people at JPL for the encounter would have a color picture available by mid-morning.

Then in rushed a man waving a black-and-white version of another Triton photo; he urged McEwen to abandon work on the earlier shot. “This is real evidence of volcanic features with multiple flooding incidents,” he said excitedly. “We’ve got to go with this one.”

After a tense exchange, it was agreed that McEwen would work on the second image as soon as possible. “I can’t get this done as fast as they can pick out interesting features,” he muttered.

At the Pasadena Center, those viewing the Triton photos were not the NASA elite of space scientists and engineers, but high school teachers, amateur astronomers, students and machinists who wanted to witness history in the making.

“If you had a chance to be with Columbus, wouldn’t you have chosen that?” asked Ned Sutro of La Canada Flintridge. “It’s being part of something at its first moment.”

Michael Gilmore, a physicist from Torrance who had taken two days off from work to see the live transmissions in Pasadena, said: “There’s nothing like being right there. For all practical purposes, it’s happening now before us.”

The photos came in clumps, sometimes separated by hours of waiting. But as each new photos appeared, people would be drawn back to the screens to watch the changing images of Neptune and Triton.

Then, finally, just before 4 a.m. Friday, came the highlight: a stunning encounter with Triton.

These die-hards were waiting for an expected transmission of photos of Triton in the wee hours of the morning. Dozing viewers were scattered on chairs or the floor.

Few knew what to expect of the next series of photos. Perhaps they would be as blurry and indistinct as earlier shots of Neptune.

First Close-Ups

At 3:40 a.m., the series of Triton photos began appearing on television monitors.

As the first close-ups appeared on several televisions set up around the facility and in a large-screen viewing room, a gasp went up. Then came applause.

Standing out in sharp detail seemed to be a range of mountains in the corner of one photo. Craters appeared in another; a leathery landscape in yet another photo of the moon Triton.

The images were of a sharpness that many had hoped to see earlier in the evening. Now they appeared on the screen in a steady flow, one after the other, until an hour before dawn.

“That really woke me up,” said Michael Holgate, who had traveled from Norway with a group of amateur astronomers to view the Voyager fly-by. “It’s great.”