Abstract
It’s the morning of September 5, 1977, sunny and warm on Florida’s Atlantic coast. Forty-eight meters above the pad, the Voyager 1 Mission Module and its Injection Propulsion Unit sit fastened atop a Centaur third stage rocket whose tanks are full of cold liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, more than 16,000 kilograms in all. Small amounts of these cryogens are boiling off, venting visibly into the humid air from just below an oversized fairing. The powerful Centaur is about a meter wider than the Titan III-E core1, so its larger fairing protrudes just above the Titan’s second stage. There’s little obvious demarcation, but the first stage makes up about two-thirds of the central core.
Voyager’s design took advantage of this extra width by incorporating a high-gain communications antenna 3.7 meters in diameter, as wide as the fairing would allow.
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© 2009 Praxis Publishing Ltd, Chichester, UK
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Doody, D. (2009). Propulsion. In: Deep Space Craft. Springer Praxis Books. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-89510-7_4
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