August 22, 2011 - Playing Host

Published in cooperation with The Planetary Society

Spend the year in space, one week at a time

Recent Weeks

May 14, 2012 - Monkey Nebula

May 7, 2012 - Getting a Grip on INTELSAT

April 30, 2012 - Dust in the Wind

April 23, 2012 - Celebrate Astronomy Day

April 16, 2012 - Rover Rides Again

April 9, 2012 - Mercury’s Marvelous Morphology

April 2, 2012 - A Matter of Truss

March 26, 2012 - Hubble Bubble

March 19, 2012 - Rocket Pioneer Centennial

March 12, 2012 - Southern Lights on Saturn

March 5, 2012 - A New Star in Town

February 27, 2012 - Hubble Upgrade

February 20, 2012 - Sideways Supernova

February 13, 2012 - Auroras Gone Wild

February 6, 2012 - Hubble Telescope Tune-Up

January 30, 2012 - Lunar Orbiter Liftoff

January 23, 2012 - Magellan Turns up the Stereo

January 16, 2012 - Southern Sibling Sees Stars

January 9, 2012 - Hitching a Ride Home

January 2, 2012 - Transforming the Space Frontier

December 26, 2011 - These Laws Can't Be Broken

December 19, 2011 - Long and Winding Road

December 12, 2011 - Blast from the Past

December 5, 2011 - It’s Just Like Folding a Map

November 28, 2011 - A Warmer, Wetter Mars

November 21, 2011 - Spy in the Sky

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The Week in Space

August 22-28, 2011

Playing Host After billions of years of solitude in the outer reaches of the solar system, Saturn hosted a spate of interplanetary visitors in quick succession. In September, 1979, Pioneer 11 became the first spacecraft to fly past Saturn, followed by Voyager 1 in November, 1980. And in August, 1981, thirty years ago this week, Voyager 2 had a close encounter with the giant ringed planet. It studied Saturn’s complex ring system and its atmosphere (enhanced in the photo above to emphasize cloud structure and three small storms), photographed seven newly discovered moons, and found a plasma ring around the planet 300 times hotter than the Sun’s corona. Voyager 2 visited Uranus in 1986 and Neptune in 1989, then continued toward interstellar space. It is still sending data back to Earth from 8 billion miles away.

Image credit: NASA / JPL