Good News In History, November 12
Good News In History, November 12 45 years ago today, NASA’s Voyager 1 probe arrived at Saturn and beamed back the first images ever taken of its rings. It arrived at our solar system’s second-largest planet via a gravitational assist trajectory at Jupiter which was replicated with Voyager 2. On November 12th, when the space probe came within 77,000 miles of Saturn’s cloud-tops, the space probe’s cameras detected complex structures in the rings of Saturn, and its remote sensing instruments studied the atmospheres of Saturn and its giant moon Titan. READ what it discovered… (1980) Saturn as pictured by Voyager 1 – credit, NASA Voyager 1 found that about 7% of the volume of Saturn’s upper atmosphere is helium (compared with 11% of Jupiter’s atmosphere), while almost all the rest is hydrogen. Since Saturn’s internal helium abundance was expected to be the same as Jupiter’s and the Sun’s, the lower abundance of helium in the upper atmosphere may imply that the heavier helium may be slowly si…
