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Published January 29, 1982 | public
Journal Article

A New Look at the Saturn System: The Voyager 2 Images

Abstract

Voyager 2 photography has complemented that of Voyager I in revealing many additional characteristics of Saturn and its satellites and rings. Saturn's atmosphere contains persistent oval cloud features reminiscent of features on Jupiter. Smaller irregular features track out a pattern of zonal winds that is symmetric about Saturn's equator and appears to extend to great depth. Winds are predominantly eastward and reach 500 meters per second at the equator. Titan has several haze layers with significantly varying optical properties and a northern polar "collar" that is dark at short wavelengths. Several satellites have been photographed at substantially improved resolution. Enceladus' surface ranges from old, densely cratered terrain to relatively young, uncratered plains crossed by grooves and faults. Tethys has a crater 400 kilometers in diameter whose floor has domed to match Tethys' surface curvature and a deep trench that extends at least 270° around Tethys' circumference. Hyperion is cratered and irregular in shape. Iapetus' bright, trailing hemisphere includes several dark-floored craters, and Phoebe has a very low albedo and rotates in the direction opposite to that of its orbital revolution with a period of 9 hours. Within Saturn's rings, the "birth" of a spoke has been observed, and surprising azimuthal and time variability is found in the ringlet structure of the outer B ring. These observations lead to speculations about Saturn's internal structure and about the collisional and thermal history of the rings and satellites.

Additional Information

© 1982 American Association for the Advancement of Science. Received for publication 30 November 1981. With the completion of the second Voyager Saturn encounter, the Voyager spacecraft have not returned more than 62,000 images of Jupiter, Saturn and their encourages. More than a random accumulation of photographs, these images constitute carefully planned and executed time-lapse sequences of atmospheric, volcanic, or ring activity, multispectral mosaics of geologic surfaces, or extensive scans of small-scale ring structure. This treasure of stunning and informative pictures greatly exceeds the original imaging plans of Voyager and represents the successful efforts of several thousand talented individuals who have devoted their skills to this mission. A few of these people, those who are directly associated with this report, are listed below. J. B. Plescia (crater counts); L. A. Sromovsky (Saturn and Titan measurements); P. Thomas (satellite radiometry); T. C. Duxbury (Hyperion); P. Goldreich, J. J. Lissauer, E. Grün, G. Morfill (ring structure and formation); S. W. Squyres (geology); J. L. Anderson, P. L. Jepsen, and G. M. Yagi (image processing); G. W. Garneau (atmospheric feature tracking for sequence predictions); G. P. Dimit, L. Garcia, D. Godfrey, A. Piumpunyalerd, E. T. Simien, and E. S. Thompson (data handling and manuscript preparation); JPL's photolab and graphics departments, Image Processing Laboratory, and Mission and Test Imaging System; and two reviewers, including M. J. S. Belton, G. E. H. is supported by the Science and Engineering Research Council, Great Britain. This report presents the results of one phase of research carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory under NASA contract 7-100.

Additional details

Created:
August 22, 2023
Modified:
October 23, 2023