Uncovering the Mysterious Moons of Saturn What You Didn't Know

1 year ago
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Prometheus and Pandora, two new moons discovered by Voyager's higher-resolution camera, keep the icy material in the F-ring in a defined orbit. It also discovered Atlas and the G-ring, as well as images of several other of Saturn's moons. One puzzle for astronomers was Titan, the second-largest moon in the solar system after Jupiter's Ganymede. Titan's close-up images revealed nothing but an orange haze, fueling years of speculation about what lay beneath. It wasn't until the mid-2000s that humanity discovered this thanks to images captured from beneath the haze by the European Space Agency's Huygens Atmospheric Probe. The encounter with Saturn signaled the end of Voyager 1's primary mission, but the probe wasn't ready for retirement yet. The focus simply shifted to tracking the 1,590-pound craft as it raced toward interstellar space.

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