At JPL, a press room had been opened in Von Karman Auditorium to accommodate the hundred or so reporters expected to arrive. To keep all the interested people informed of Voyager progress, frequent television reports were beamed over closed-circuit TV throughout JPL. From an in-lab television studio called the Blue Room, JPL scientist Al Hibbs, who had played a similar role during the Viking Mission to Mars, provided hourly reports and interviewed members of the Voyager teams. As the pressure for constant commentary and instant analysis increased, Garry Hunt of the Imaging Team was also called on to host activities in the Blue Room, where his British accent added an additional touch of class to the operation.
As the encounter progressed, the JPL television reports reached a wider audience. In the Los Angeles area, KCET Public Television began a nightly “Jupiter Watch” program, with Dr. Hibbs as host. During the encounter days, service was extended to interested public television stations throughout the nation. In this way, tens of thousands of persons were able to experience the thrill of discovery, seeing the closeup pictures of Jupiter and its satellites at the same moment as the scientists at JPL saw them, and listening to the excited and frequently awestruck commentary as the first tentative interpretations were attempted. Unfortunately, the commercial television networks did not make use of this opportunity, and the greatest coverage available to most of the country was a 90-second commentary on the nightly network news.
(_Range to Jupiter, 5.9 million kilometers_). At 6:33 a.m., at a range of 86 R_J, Voyager 1 finally reached Jupiter’s bow shock. But by 12:28 p.m. the solar wind had pushed the magnetosphere back toward Jupiter, and Voyager was once more outside, back in the solar wind. Not until March 2, at a distance of less than 45 R_J, would the spacecraft enter the magnetosphere for the final time.
At 11 a.m. the first daily briefing to the press was given. “After nearly two months of atmospheric imaging and perhaps a week or two of satellite viewing, [we’re] happily bewildered,” said Brad Smith. The Jovian atmosphere is “where our greatest state of confusion seems to exist right at the moment, although over the next several days we may find that some of our smirking geology friends will find themselves in a similar state. I think, for the most part, we have to say that the existing atmospheric circulation models have all been shot to hell by Voyager. Although these models can still explain some of the coarse zonal flow patterns, they fail entirely in explaining the detailed behavior that Voyager is now revealing.” It was thought, from Pioneer results, that Jupiter’s atmosphere showed primarily horizontal or zonal flow near the equatorial region, but that the zonal flow pattern broke down at high latitudes. But Voyager found that “zonal flow exists poleward as far as we can see.”