Word: spacecrafts
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Last week, while earthlings nearly a billion miles away marveled as they monitored its progress, an all-seeing but unmanned spacecraft no larger than a compact car completed the final and most spectacular phase of an epochal journey. Beating Buck Rogers and the faithful Wilma, sci-fi heroes of the pre-Star Trek generation, by five centuries, Voyager 1 brushed past the ringed planet Saturn, second largest member of the sun's family, and provided the best images yet of that strange and wondrous world, a far-off realm in the solar system never before glimpsed with such glittering...
...while its instruments and television cameras blinked away furiously, almost as if they had a life of their own. So large did Saturn loom in the robot's probing electronic eyes that they could capture only small swatches of the planet's stormy atmosphere. The spacecraft executed its maneuvers with astonishing precision - near the climax of its long journey it was only 19 km (12 miles) off course. Finally, Voyager climbed upward, once again crossing just outside Saturn's rings. Casting backward glances with its cameras and instruments, it soared above the ecliptic - the plane formed...
Transmissions from the spacecraft to earth have prompted scientists to conclude that Titan is the only known moon in the solar system with an atmosphere...
Voyager 1, weighing a scant 825 kg (1,820 Ibs.) and drawing its electricity from a compact nuclear power pack, is ideally equipped to answer such questions. One of two identical ships en route to Saturn (its twin will reach it next August), the spacecraft carries eleven instruments, including two television cameras. During Voyager's swing by Jupiter in March 1979, these keen eyes sent back stunning closeups of the planet's turbulent atmosphere, detailed views of its moons and even a spectacular shot of a volcanic eruption on the Jovian satellite...
Voyager 1 will not be around for that spectacle. After sweeping within 4,000 km (2,500 miles) of Titan, the spacecraft will plunge through the plane of Saturn's rings, soar past the moon Tethys, and on Nov. 12 come to within 124,000 km (77,174 miles) of the planet's cloud tops. Whipped by Saturn's gravity, the spacecraft will then swing quickly up and around the planet, photograph other moons, make a film of Saturn's swiftly moving clouds and rings and, finally, head out of the solar system...