SaturnIn 1981, the U.S. spacecraft Voyager II came within 63,000 miles (100,000 km) of Saturn’s cloud cover, sending back data and pictures of the ringed planet in its closest approach to Saturn, showing not a few, but thousands of rings. Photographs were also sent back of a number of Saturn's moons. The space probe was launched on 20 Aug 1977, and visited Jupiter on 9 Jul 1979, and continued on to Uranus (24 Jan 1986) and Neptune (25 Aug 1989) before leaving the Solar System. Having a nuclear power source, the space probe continues to study ultraviolet sources among the stars, and its fields and particles instruments continue to search for the boundary between the Sun's influence and interstellar space.«[Image: detail of Saturn's B-rings photographed by Voyager II from a distance of 743,000 km on 25 Aug 1981. About 4000-km width is shown.] |
