The last Voyager 1 press briefing was held. Each speaker was allotted only a few minutes, prompting Larry Soderblom to preface his remarks by trying to explain how difficult it was to describe four new planets—the Galilean satellites—in the time allowed. “Torrence [Johnson] was sitting with me last night, puzzling. He said, ‘You know, Larry, it’s sort of like imagining we’d flown into the solar system the day before yesterday, and said, “There’s a thing we’ll call Mercury, and there’s the Moon, and there’s Earth, and there’s Mars. Now let’s explain them in ten minutes”.’” There was Callisto, with the highest density of craters of any Galilean satellite—the oldest of the Galilean surfaces—featuring a huge “bullseye” that is “the largest single contiguous feature seen so far in the solar system.” There was Ganymede, cratered, but also overrun with fault lines that looked, according to one person, like “tire tracks in the desert,” showing a surface that “had laterally slid—faulted and sheared and sheared again—twisted and torn apart.” There was Io, the most bizarre—the one that scientists had thought would be most lunarlike—showing a surface that had apparently been “cooked and steamed and fumed out leaving deposits all over the surface much like you might see around a fumarole at Yellowstone National Park. The fact that these things exhibit such youth makes it likely that the planet is still volcanically active.” There was Europa, with huge linear features unlike those of the other three Galileans—Europa the mystery satellite, waiting for the probing eyes of Voyager 2 to survey it in early July. Ed Stone summed it all up: “I think we have had almost a decade’s worth of discovery in this two-week period, and I think that all of the people who have been talking to you feel the same saturation of new information which has occurred. And in fact, we will probably be studying it in great detail for at least five years.” Over the next day or so the press packed up and went home. The TV monitors showed the spacecraft’s parting glance at a crescent Jupiter, only hinting at the vastness of space Voyager 1 would travel until its encounter with Saturn in the autumn of 1980. Maybe now there would be a relative calm that would allow the scientists to begin analyzing that “decade’s worth of data.” But things were not to be calm just yet. Fire and Brimstone