Word: planet
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...space, there was no faulting Voyager 2's marksmanship. Indeed, one golf-minded scientist likened it to sinking a 500-mile putt. Superlatives were certainly in order last week as the semiautonomous robot completed the second lap of its epic flight: a rendezvous with the giant ringed planet Saturn, the spectacular finale to two ambitious decades of planetary exploration by unmanned U.S. spacecraft...
Racing toward Saturn at 54,000 m.p.h.-20 times as fast as a speeding bullet-the 1,800-lb. spacecraft came within a cosmic hair of the planet's stormy cloud tops, clearing them by 63,000 miles. Then it plunged downward behind the huge gaseous sphere and passed through a large gap near the edge of the thin disc of icy debris that forms Saturn's multi-hued rings. Finally, like a pebble in a great celestial slingshot, it was sent hurtling off toward Uranus on a new course created by the powerful pull of Saturn...
...sudden failure, Voyager 2's performance was almost flawless. Picking up where its twin, Voyager 1, left off last November, it provided new insights into Saturn's turbulent weather. Banded with powerful jet streams, like those of neighboring Jupiter (which Voyager 2 surveyed in 1979), the planet has even greater winds-up to 1,100 m.p.h. just north of the equator. In Saturn's higher latitudes, Voyager 2's cameras spotted a storm system larger than all of Europe and Asia, as well as numerous smaller storms, some whirling clockwise, others counterclockwise...
Voyager came closest to Saturn just before the 1½-hour period when the spacecraft was behind the planet, totally cut off from the earth. But the semi-intelligent machine continued operations under the command of its preprogrammed computers, taking pictures, performing experiments and storing the information on tape. Not until Voyager 2 emerged from behind Saturn and again began radioing back data did scientists learn that something had gone wrong. As Voyager 2 crossed the rings, the playback showed, the cameras began missing their targets. Somehow the spacecraft's movable "scan platform," which acts as an aiming mechanism...
...week's end, it appeared that they may well have succeeded. With a swivel that jubilant controllers described as "right on the money," the platform brought fading Saturn back onto their TV monitors again. This week they hope to aim the cameras at Phoebe, the planet's outermost moon. Even if the problem recurs, though, it should not spoil the photographic reconnaissance of Uranus or Neptune. The controllers can simply "pan" the cameras by rolling the entire spacecraft with blasts from its small thrusters...