Voyager: to the final frontier

British independent filmmaker, Christopher Riley, has returned to the BBC for his latest documentary film, ‘Voyager: to the final frontier’ premiering on BBC FOUR at 9pm on 24 October 2012. The film celebrates NASA’s remarkable Voyager interstellar missions, at the very time we prepare to see them leave the entire Solar System and literally cross their final frontier.

Launched in the summer of 1977, Voyager 1 and 2 made mankind’s first close encounters with the Giant planets possible. Thirty five years on they continue to beam back information today from 11 billion miles away, as they pass out of the Solar System - the first objects built by humans ever to do so.

These ‘longest journeys in human history’ were only made possible thanks to a mathematical discovery in the early 1960s. It was made by a young student called Michael Minovitch who now, in his mid-70s, lives in Los Angeles. Riley and the film’s presenter Dallas Campbell tracked him down there to record a rare interview about his breakthrough for the film.

Chris Riley says; “I originally learned of Michael’s story in the late 1990s, when first researching the Voyagers and have waited almost fifteen years to have the chance to film an interview with him. He’s one of the most significant mathematicians of the 20th century and I’m thrilled to have now captured his story first hand, for future generations. His contribution to human exploration cannot be over-stated. Michael’s genius opened a gateway to the outer planets. And the Voyager missions went on to return more information on the Giant Planets than in the rest of human history.”

The Voyagers carry two phonograph 12 inch records, both gold-plated copper disks known as ‘The Golden Records’; compilations of music and pictures that reflect something of human culture and life on Earth. To tell the story of this unique time capsule Riley and Campbell trawled through the BBC’s archives to find recordings of the famous American astronomer Carl Sagan, (who died in 1996). “In a 1982 BBC Radio interview Sagan points out that these golden records will last for over 1000 million years” says Campbell. “And that means that they are likely to outlive the pyramids, they’ll outlive humans, and they might even outlive the Earth itself; the only record of our existence”. Riley adds; “That makes them perhaps the most significant thing that we’ve ever accomplished as a species.”

Clips and trailers from the new film can be viewed at: www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01nj48v

More details of the Golden Record can be explored at: www.goldenrecord.org

Notes To Editors

The Voyager Missions

NASA’s Voyager missions launched two unmanned spacecraft – Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 in 1977, on a unique trajectory, which propelled them to an encounter with the planet Jupiter in 1979, and Saturn in 1982. The ringed planet was used to bend Voyager 1’s flight path out of the plane of the solar system and off towards the stars, whilst Voyager 2 carried on towards a rendezvous with Uranus in 1986 and Neptune in 1989.

Voyager 2 is now 9 billion miles from Earth, and Voyager 1 is 11 billion, making them the most distant objects built by humans. Both spacecraft have enough power on board to last another ten years or so to 2020 or 2025. Five scientific instruments are still working on each spacecraft transmitting back information about the new frontier they are now crossing, as they pass beyond the influence of the Sun’s so called ‘solar wind’ and out into the Galaxy beyond.

Christopher Riley

Christopher Riley Producer and Director – “Voyager: to the final frontier”, worked on data from NASA’s early Spacelab 1 Shuttle mission for his Ph.D. at Imperial College, London, before embarking on a career making science documentaries for the BBC. He has worked with the NASA film archive for the past fifteen years on projects ranging from the BBC’s landmark series ‘The Planets’ to the highly acclaimed feature documentary film ‘In the Shadow of the Moon’.

In 2009 with NASA’s blessing, and in close collaboration with the film’s original director Theo Kamecke, he restored and re-mastered the classic Apollo documentary ‘Moonwalk One’.

He is the producer and director of the hit 2011 internet film ‘First Orbit’, which celebrated the pioneering spaceflight of Yuri Gagarin.

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