Word: saturn
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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...
There was, however, a mysterious glitch. While Voyager 2 was hidden behind Saturn it developed the space-age equivalent of a crick in the neck, reducing the mobility of its cameras. But the robot had already accomplished most of its goals, and the trouble will almost certainly not prevent use of the cameras on the rest of Voyager 2's flight-past Uranus in 1986 and Neptune...
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...
Until the 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...
Such phenomena seemed to defy the revered laws of classical physics. But scientists are about to get a chance to unravel these mysteries-and perhaps more. At precisely 11:25 p.m. E.D.T. next Tuesday, Aug. 25, a second spacecraft, Voyager 2, will finally reach Saturn after a four-year, 1.4 billion-mile flight. Ducking behind the planet (as seen from earth), it will skim to within 63,000 miles of the planet's cloud tops. Then Voyager 2 will plunge through the plane of Saturn's rings, brushing precariously close to that rocky debris. All the while...