first Jupiter in 1979 then Saturn two
years later
Uranus in 1986 and finally Neptune the
blue giant all part of Voyager twos
12-year grand tour of the outer planets
having traveled over four billion miles
through the solar system the spacecraft
trained its aging cameras and electronic
sensors on the mysterious blue planet
revealing an unexpectedly turbulent
world of violent storms and backpedaling
winds up to 700 miles per hour a
particular interest with the swirling
energetic dark spots recording the
project scientist dr. in stone we
believe that these large spots are in
fact huge hurricane like storm systems
when you have opposing jet streams they
tend to generate vortices or small
storms and those small storms collide
with each other and accumulate to make
one large storm Voyager 2 also found six
new moons around Neptune and produced
imagery of the planets three rings
believed to be debris left from
collisions between larger objects after
passing just 3,000 miles over its cloud
tops Voyager turned its attention to
Neptune's largest moon Triton a five
mile tall geyser shooting dark particles
into its atmosphere was just one of the
surprises Triton had to offer here is a
moon which is in a retrograde orbit that
is it's orbiting backwards around
Neptune compared to the way Neptune is
rotating on tablet there was methane ice
frozen natural gas on a surface and
probably frozen nitrogen on a surface we
had never seen a moon with those ices on
their surface it is the coldest object
we have seen in the solar system almost
400 degrees Fahrenheit below zero
Voyager's accomplishments are even more
impressive considering that it was
originally supposed to visit only
Jupiter and Saturn Uranus and Neptune
were added bonuses achievable because of
the spacecraft's remarkable performance
huge antennas on the ground which by the
time it rendezvous with Neptune took
over four hours to reach Earth and the
transmitter on the spacecraft used to
send back those signals is only about as
powerful as the light bulb in a
refrigerator like its sister ship
Voyager 1 Voyager 2 is now bound for the
edges of the solar system other
spacecraft such as Galileo scheduled for
a return to Jupiter and Cassini which
will revisit Saturn are slated to make
even more detailed studies of the
planets
the voyagers legacy of discovery can
never be duplicated Voyager will be
regarded as the quintessential mission
of exploration there has been no other
mission which has explored so many new
worlds and there can be no other mission
which will do that in the future only
Voyager has had the opportunity of
visiting in sequence for giant planets
with literally dozens of new worlds in
orbit around them
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