Word: spacecrafts
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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...
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...
...festival, perhaps coinciding with the winter planting, was staged to propitiate Saturn, the sickle-wielding deity of agriculture. Now scientists gathered at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena may be tempted to hold their own Saturnalia. Next week, after traveling for more than three years, their robot Voyager 1 spacecraft will achieve its closest encounter with Saturn, providing the most spectacular view yet of the beautifully ringed planet and its system of moons...
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...