The captivating tales of the people and events behind one of humanity's greatest achievements in exploration: NASA's Voyager mission.
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There are better movies of two hours length. I loved the actress'performance.
To all those who have watched it: I hope you enjoyed it as much as I do.
A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.
It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.
In 1977, NASA launched Voyager1 and Voyager2. They traveled to the lesser-known outer planets and some of the moons orbiting them. The planets' rare alignment made it an opportune time. Carl Sagan is the driving force behind the golden record of earthly sounds which became the media focus.This is slightly better than most PBS hour long specials. It's actually 96 minutes and packs an emotional punch. The wide-eyed poetry of exploration is well presented. This is a lot things. It's an underdog story. It's a scientific documentary. It's an exploration thriller. It brings back all the great discoveries. This could be great for inspiring a high school science class.
This documentary tells the decades of discoveries led by a group of scientists and the two Voyager probes.The images are beautiful and literally out of this world. It is great to see so many interviews of scientists who were involved in the process. There is a lot of inside information, such as the opposition to taking a final photo of the solar system at the end of the mission. I got moved to tears many tints, because this mission is beyond humanity, beyond space and beyond time.
The technology in 1977 was amazingly primitive to what we have today and yet the brilliant scientists at NASA got a spaceship outside of our solar system? And who's to say Voyager 2 won't do the same?If the two crafts hadn't launched when they did then we wouldn't have seen two of these planets until around 2150. Sobering thought.I really do think that, if we hadn't done this, then there would have been no New Horizons visiting Pluto or most of the Mars missions.We're lucky that Nixon had a limited vision for giving the go-ahead for this mission back in 1972 and Jimmy Carter for starting the process with the moon landing back in 1969. This documentary is a fascinating insight into the 12 year mission plan to get from launch to leaving Neptune's orbit. If you're a space junkie like me then you have to watch this.
With all the horrors and depressing events going on currently in the world, it is refreshing to be reminded of a human endeavour that was wholly positive in outlook and execution. The Farthest is the story of the two Voyager space crafts which were launched way back in 1977. These probes were tasked with two objectives – to explore the outer planets and to carry messages to other potential life forms deep into interstellar space. At one point in the late 70's it became possible for this mission to be possible, a time which occurs approximately once every 175 years where Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune are aligned in such a way as to allow a space craft to travel between them using the gravity of one to propel it onto the next. This window of opportunity was grabbed and NASA formulated the Voyager programme, with Voyager 1 navigating the first two giant planets and Voyager 2 following behind but adding the final two to its trajectory.Its genuinely quite an incredible story. Especially when you remind yourself that this extremely complex, technical and frankly unprecedented undertaking was achieved using mid 70's technology. In 2012 Voyager 1 became the first man-made object to leave our solar system and reach interstellar space, having orbited all four of the giant planets taking a series of incredible pictures of them and their moons. It achieved this with computer memory a tiny fraction of what can be found in a modern smart phone. Its bordering on a miracle that this mission was achieved, especially when you learn that certain moments were executed with split-second accuracy, a fracture of a second more would have led to destruction, such as the moment where the probe was propelled between the atmosphere of Uranus and one of its moons. It's all the more impressive when you discover that the probes were re-programmable via communication with a craft which over a billion miles away. It was in summary one of the greatest undertakings humans have ever executed.The documentary takes a fairly traditional talking heads format where we hear recollections of various scientists involved in the programme. Its these moments themselves which add a considerable amount of emotional weight to proceedings, making it clear that these space probes were ultimately far more than scientific equipment, they represented something far more and quite wonderful. It's not just the scientific angle of the mission but also the philosophical, such as the moment late in the mission that the cameras were reversed to look back at Earth which was now a pixel, making it clear how small we are in the universe while simultaneously making us realise that we need to look after our small planet as this little dot on a picture is all we have. There is some considerable detail given to the golden record, which contains the music, sounds and imagery of Earth. The music ranged from Mozart to Chuck Berry (with The Beatles foolishly refusing one of their songs), the imagery constitutes about one hundred pictures which attempted to convey the world as much as possible. This alien contact element of the mission was unsurprisingly given a lot of publicity at the time but it is only now that the probe has finally left our galaxy that this has become the whole mission. But really, the imagery of the four mysterious giant planets is the real pinnacle of the Voyager missions and the incredible imagery that it captured remains quite extraordinary. These probes will more than likely hurtle onwards through deep space at 10 miles per second for billions of years long after our planet and sun are gone, and that says it all really.