Voyage to edge of solar system makes a star of Irish film-maker (2024)

The Dublin-based documentary team behind a film on the Voyager space probes has dedicated an Emmy award to a former Nasa engineer who appeared in the film.

The Farthest, directed by Emer Reynolds, won the award for outstanding science and technology documentary at the International News and Documentary Emmys in New York on Monday.

Brad Smith, a Nasa astronomer, was the leader of the team given the task of interpreting the detailed images captured by the probes as they passed Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Smith, who died in July, was also credited with the decision to investigate the satellites of the planets as well as the planets themselves.

Accepting the Emmy, John Murray, the documentary’s co-producer, said that winning the award was overwhelming. “Voyager was such an incredible achievement and such a privilege to make a film about,” he said. “We are a small company from Ireland and to be allowed to make this film was just unbelievable.”

He thanked the documentary’s American partners, PBS, and accepted the award in honour of Smith.

“I wanted to dedicate this to a man who appeared in the film, Brad Smith, who was the chief Voyager imaging scientist who passed away a few months ago,” he said.

The Farthest features footage from inside Nasa and first-hand accounts from those who worked at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the 1970s. It uses computer-generated imagery, designed by an Irish team to document the story of the twin spacecraft Voyager 1 and 2, which were launched in 1977 and explores the engineering that allowed man-made objects to travel farther than anyone or anything in history. Voyager 1 left the solar system in 2012 and, at 13 billion miles away, is the man-made object farthest from Earth. Voyager 2 has travelled 11 billion miles.

Reynolds, 51, who is from Mullin- ahone, Co Tipperary, said she was fascinated by the Voyager spacecraft as a child. Her background is in editing and her credits include the 1997 Brendan Gleeson crime comedy I Went Down.

“Since I was a child, I wanted to be an astronaut,” Reynolds said. “I used to get car sick and my father would joke that I could never achieve those dreams. I feel like I have achieved them with this project. It’s immersive and it has 360 degree shots on the cinema screen. I wanted to give viewers the feeling that they were hurtling towards space.”

Released in Irish cinemas in July last year, the film received critical acclaim at international festivals including Tribeca, Edinburgh, Sydney and the Audi Dublin International Film Festival, where it won best Irish documentary and the George Byrne Maverick award. It also won the Maureen O’Hara award at last year’s Kerry Film Festival.

The makers spent two years fundraising and securing support from the Irish Film Board before the team took a two-week research trip to the US in 2015 and gained access to Nasa.

“Nasa were really on board from the start,” Reynolds said. “They liked that it was a cinema-scale adventure through space. They gave us access to archives and that was incredible, like walking through history. It was so humbling to be around the people who made Voyager happen; it was mind-blowing to be honest.”