Engineering Education "Today in History" Blog: Voyager 1 takes first photo of our solar system
by Alice Agogino
closeAuthor: Alice Agogino
Name: Alice Agogino
Email: agogino@berkeley.edu
Site: http://www.me.berkeley.edu/faculty/agogino/
About: Alice M. Agogino is the Roscoe and Elizabeth Hughes Professor of Mechanical Engineering and is affiliated faculty at the Haas School of Business in their Operations and Information Technology Management Group. Her research interests include: community-based design; sustainable engineering; intelligent learning systems; information retrieval and data mining; multiobjective and strategic product design; nonlinear optimization; probabilistic modeling; intelligent control and manufacturing; sensor validation, fusion and diagnostics; wireless sensor networks; multimedia and computer-aided design; design databases; design theory and methods; MEMS/NEMS synthesis and computer-aided design; artificial intelligence and decision and expert systems; and gender/ethnic equity.
She has served in a number of administrative positions at UC Berkeley, including Chair of the Faculty Senate, Associate Dean of Engineering and Faculty Assistant to the Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost in Educational Development and Technology. Prof. Agogino also served as Director for Synthesis, an NSF-sponsored coalition of eight universities with the goal of reforming undergraduate engineering education, and continues as PI for the NEEDS (www.needs.org) and SMETE.ORG digital libraries of courseware in science, mathematics, engineering and technology.
Prof. Agogino received a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of New Mexico (1975), M.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering (1978) from the University of California at Berkeley and Ph.D. from the Department of Engineering-Economic Systems at Stanford University (1984). Prior to joining the faculty at UC Berkeley, she worked in industry for Dow Chemical, General Electric and SRI International. She has authored over 150 scholarly publications; has won numerous teaching, best paper and research awards; and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). At NAE she served on the Committee on Engineering Education, working on the Technologically Speaking and the Engineer 2020 projects. She is currently a member of the National Research Council's Board on Education and the Women in Academic Science Engineering Committee. She has supervised 66 MS projects/theses, 26 doctoral dissertations and numerous undergraduate researchers.See Authors Posts (864) · February 14th, 2010 · Add a Comment
Today in History – February 14, 1990 - First photo of the solar system is taken and dubbed the “family portrait” of our solar system as seen from outside.
Voyager 1 was launched on September 5, 1977 and it passed Saturn in November 1980. It continued a trajectory that took it out of the solar system, making it the most distant spacecraft from Earth and our Sun (as far as we know). It passed the termination shock, the place where the solar wind abruptly slows down, and traveled through a zone called the heliosheath where the Sun’s magnetic field and solar wind dominate the environment. Its boundary, called the heliopause, is where the interstellar wind takes over. A second spacecraft, the Voyager 2, was launched earlier on August 20, 1977 but Voyager 1 reached the outer solar system and interstellar space earlier due to its trajectory design for outer space and gravity-assist from Jupiter. The Voyager crafts are estimated to have sufficient electrical power to operate their radio transmitters until at least after 2025 – over 48 years after launch.
Sharing Carl Sagan‘s belief that Earth is not the only planet with advanced technology, I find the “Golden Record “ one of the most interesting parts of the Voyager mission. This gold-plated copper “phonograph record” is a kind of time capsule, intended to communicate a story of our world to extraterrestrials. Assembled by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan of Cornell University, these sounds and images were “selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth“.
For more information, see the Engineering Pathway‘s resources on the Voyager 1 and space exploration. For related educational resources, visit the Aerospace Engineering Education Community site. The Engineering Pathway also hosts Engineering Education communities in all ABET-accredited disciplines.
Also on this date in 1946, ENIAC, the world’s first digital electronic computer, is unveiled. See Lucy Sander’s related blog on ENIAC and Women in Computing.
For more information, see the Engineering Pathway’s educational resources on the ENIAC, history of computing, Ada Lovelace and women in information technology. For curricular resources, visit the Computer Science Education, Information Science Education, Information Technology Education, Computer Engineering Education of Software Engineering Education community sites.
Tags: Aerospace Engineering · General Engineering, Engineering Science · Information Systems · Information Technology · Surveying and Geomatics Engineerings
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