Word: saturns
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...Saturn's rings also yielded puzzling new findings. Barely had Voyager 1's cameras zeroed in on these thin, elegant discs than scientists spotted two new moons no more than 600 km (370 miles) across at the edge of the ring system. They were designated 513 and S-14, because they are the 13th and 14th to be discovered. 513 circles Saturn just outside the so-called Fring, which is about 80,000 km (50,000 miles) from the planet's cloud tops -the gaseous sphere has no real surface. 514 revolves just inside that ring. Like...
...side of its globe, which is dappled with craters and highlands. Dione resembles the earth's moon, marked by all sorts of craters, big and little, features that look like our moon's "seas," and ice flows, rills and highlands. Iapetus, one of the most curious of Saturn's moons-one hemisphere is five or six times as bright as the other -was seen only from a vast distance...
Perhaps the most stunning new spacescape was presented by Rhea, named after Saturn's mythological wife-sister. Voyager 1 approached so close, less than 72,000 km (45,000 miles) away, that Rhea's features showed with crystalline sharpness. It too looked like the earth's moon, but its craters are so densely packed that U.S. Geological Survey Planetary Geologist Larry Soderblom called them "shoulder-to-shoulder craters, falling on top of each other...
...yield discoveries for months to come. The advanced computer-enhancement techniques developed at J.P.L. for processing color photographs permit researchers to mute or intensify colors to help bring out the faintest details. It was during a photographic fine-tuning session, while he was rerunning fairly distant views of Saturn on the TV screen, that J.P.L. Scientist Stewart Collins, working with David Carlson, a visiting student from Drexel University, discovered the planet's 13th and 14th moons...
...Voyager 1 sped off last week, casting over-the-shoulder cinematic looks back at Saturn, the incredible machine was headed for one last major assignment before going into deep space, where, after its power runs out, it will drift forever in silence. By measuring the flow of solar particles, Voyager will seek to determine where the sun's influence ends and that of the stars begins -in short, to establish the exact outer boundary of our solar system. Still, as exciting as such quests may seem, they come at a time of dwindling Government interest in space exploration...