Around the Cosmos in 192 Pages

摘要

For true believers in space exploration-and I count myself among them-1972 was the year when everything changed. It is best known as a time of sad retrenchment. At 10:54 p.m. GMT on December 14, the Apollo 17 crew blasted off from the Moon's Taurus-Littrow valley and headed home. Nobody has ventured beyond Earth's orbit since. The "giant leap for mankind" proclaimed by Neil Armstrong just three years earlier looked more like a brief, abortive excursion. But a few months before Apollo's anticlimactic end, a different voyage began, quietly setting space exploration on a dynamic new course. On March 3, 1972, Pioneer 10 shot into the sky over Florida aboard an Atlas-Centaur rocket. In just 11 hours, the probe had raced past the Moon's orbit. By December of the following year it was skimming over the cloud-tops of Jupiter, providing humanity's first up-close look at the outer Solar System. From there, the giant planet's gravity flung Pioneer 10 free of the Sun. On January 1, 1974, NASA gave the program a new name, the Pioneer Interstellar Mission, and its spacecraft became the first directed out to the stars.