Word: planet
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Aboard the spacecraft, two television cameras and an array of instruments focused on the ever enlarging sphere and its rings and moons, snapping pictures and taking readings that were beamed to earth, almost 2 billion miles away. At week's end, as Voyager whipped past the mysterious blue-green planet, soaring as close as 50,679 miles to its cloudtops at 42,143 m.p.h., streams of new data from the craft poured into the control room at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "We're quite excited," said J.P.L. Project Scientist Edward Stone. "It's the crescendo of discovery...
...Astronomer William Herschel. The spacecraft detected a tenth ring and ten tiny, previously undiscovered moons and discerned craters and other surface features on the five large moons that until now had been seen only as featureless spots of light through telescopes. It observed a reddish-brown haze at the planet's north pole and tracked cloud formations as they passed over the middle latitudes. The movement of the clouds seemed to confirm earlier estimates that a Uranian day is about 16 hours long. The spacecraft also determined that Uranus has a magnetic field, and measured...
...pulverized the gray surface, exposed an underlying layer of ice and spewed it out in all directions. The haze covering the Uranian north polar area,* he suggested, may be smog--not unlike the Los Angeles variety--resulting from a photochemical reaction caused by sunlight acting upon gases in the planet's atmosphere...
Physicist Norman Ness reported that Voyager's magnetometers had "detected firm evidence" of a Uranian magnetic field about a third the strength of earth's. The existence of the field suggests that the giant planet, which is 64 times as large as the earth in volume but has a mass only 14 1/2 times as great, has a liquid core. Some scientists speculate, however, that the magnetic field may be generated by an electrically charged ocean covering the planet. Some of the larger moons apparently have, or at one time had, crustal movements that created the fault zones and valleys...
...passed Uranus last week, Voyager looked back at the planet, now silhouetted against the distant sun, seeking to learn more about the rings by observing sunlight passing through them. One early finding: the rings contained far less dust than those circling Saturn. Then, its direction changed by the tug of Uranian gravity, the hardy little spacecraft began a 3 1/2-year trip to Neptune, which it is scheduled to encounter in August...