As of November 12, 2020, it was 40 years ago that Voyager 1 swept past Saturn and took stunning photos of the ringed planet, which remain the last images of Saturn that we currently have. Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were launched in 1977 to take advantage of a rare planetary alignment that occurs only once every 175 years, and be the first spacecraft to utilize “gravity-assist” from one planet to the next, in order to make the most of the fuel onboard.
The discoveries by Voyager 1 were unprecedented: it first flew by Jupiter, taking more than 19,000 photographs, and finding a faint ring around the planet, and two new moons.
It then raced out towards Saturn, and took finely detailed photographs of Saturn’s rings, showing anomalies and “braiding” in their structures. It passed within about 4,034 miles of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, and discovered that it had a hazy orange atmosphere, composed primarily of nitrogen, methane and traces of hydrocarbons.
The NASA website remarks, “Four days after its closest approach, the spacecraft took a magnificent image of Saturn and its rings from a perspective never seen from Earth, the planet in a crescent phase with its night side dimly illuminated by ring-shine, sunlight reflected from the rings. Voyager 1 completed its observations of the Saturn system on Dec. 14, 1980.
