Bear with me, hivemind. I am calling on the power of QT3 to help my uncle out of a tight spot. He has been with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at CalTech for a long time and worked on the Voyager missions from the beginning. Read on to see how to help him preserve the honor of Voyager I & II.
Subject: Vote for Voyager – Seriously
All:
First of all, I want to thank any of you who helped
Voyager get past Cassini in NASA’s Mission Madness competition.
( http://mission-madness.nasa.gov/mm/bracket.html )
Whew, that was a close one. Voyager led throughout much of the
last day of voting about 60% - 40%. Then suddenly, Cassini came on and
bolted into the lead. I called Travis to help and sent a frantic
email to a subset of you to do what you could. Somehow, we overcame Cassini
by 24 votes out of about 7500 cast. Thank you.
Now let me just say that I’m not a big fan of this
contest. I mean, Hubble already lost, for crying out loud.
But, if they are going to have a stupid contest,
Voyager might as well win it, since I do think it is among the
elite NASA missions.
So, I plead with you once again. The voting starts in about an
hour at midnight East Coast time and lasts for 48 hours.
So, if you want to get in on this Team Voyager Project, then
you need to go to the above web address and vote. And you don’t
have to follow all the weird instructions. You don’t have to fill
out the entire bracket. Just click on Voyger 1 & 2.
Then click on the arrow that moves Voyager to the next level.
Then hit “Submit Vote”, the big basketball in
the top middle. That will bring up a results page.
Then hit “BRACKET” to vote again. You can vote as much as
you like. It takes about 5 seconds to vote, so let’s say
10 votes per minute. So, in an hour, you could vote
about 600 times. Last time we had about 3800 votes total
in 48 hours. So, if a whole bunch of you could put in
600-1000 votes in 2 days we ought to overcome anyone, even SB
(Super Pressure Balloon), which led all voting
with about 16,000 votes. SB is in our
bracket. How embarrassing that would be
to have Voyager lose to a balloon project for crying
out loud.
We need all the retired people to put in extra effort,
and the competitive Cummings clan needs to get serious
and push Voyager through the bracket. It takes
tenacity, it takes obsessive behaviour, it takes
a refuse to lose mentality, all of the qualities
the genealogists and bird watchers in my family have.
So let’s get with it. Be part of a national contest.
You vote for a couple of days
and then have a day off and the battle resumes again,
until about April 8th. Let’s pitch in and make
Voyager a winner!
Thank you,
Alan
#########################################################
Alan C. Cummings
Caltech
…
http://www.srl.caltech.edu/personnel/ace.html
#########################################################