[mek6800d2]

Thanks for the excerpt. I read a couple of Sagan's other books many years ago and I really should read APBD sometime.

Interesting to me, Sagan's "little puff of gas" was borne out in the paper I referenced (not that Sagan needed being borne out!) and that the resulting "imaging system worked ... better at Uranus" was something I hadn't thought of. Per the paper, the Voyagers originally had minimum thruster pulse lengths of 10 ms. In the lab and then on Voyager 1, the Voyager engineers figured out that they could reduce the pulses to 5 ms, thus allowing finer control of Voyager 2's attitude at Uranus (and later Neptune) and probably better image quality than at Jupiter and Saturn. Very interesting - I really should read Sagan's book!

[gdubs]

I really enjoyed it! Actually read it to my kids as a bedtime book, and although it was pretty advanced for them, they really stayed with it. Really too bad he's not around anymore.