A New Look at the Saturn System: The Voyager 2 Images

Abstract

Voyager 2 photography has complemented that of Voyager I in revealing many additional characteristics of Saturn and its satellites and rings. Saturn's atmosphere contains persistent oval cloud features reminiscent of features on Jupiter. Smaller irregular features track out a pattern of zonal winds that is symmetric about Saturn's equator and appears to extend to great depth. Winds are predominantly eastward and reach 500 meters per second at the equator. Titan has several haze layers with significantly varying optical properties and a northern polar "collar" that is dark at short wavelengths. Several satellites have been photographed at substantially improved resolution. Enceladus' surface ranges from old, densely cratered terrain to relatively young, uncratered plains crossed by grooves and faults. Tethys has a crater 400 kilometers in diameter whose floor has domed to match Tethys' surface curvature and a deep trench that extends at least 270 degrees around Tethys' circumference. Hyperion is cratered and irregular in shape. Iapetus' bright, trailing hemisphere includes several dark-floored craters, and Phoebe has a very low albedo and rotates in the direction opposite to that of its orbital revolution with a period of 9 hours. Within Saturn's rings, the "birth" of a spoke has been observed, and surprising azimuthal and time variability is found in the ringlet structure of the outer B ring. These observations lead to speculations about Saturn's internal structure and about the collisional and thermal history of the rings and satellites.

Organic environments on Saturn’s moon, Titan: Simulating chemical reactions and analyzing products by FT-ICR and ion-trap mass spectrometry

“…The mid-to-upper troposphere is in radiative equilibrium with some moist convection (liquid C 1 and C 2 hydrocarbons). Thermal infrared opacity originates from collisions among CH 4 , N 2 , and H 2 , while optical opacity is afforded by at least one hydrocarbon aerosol haze layer [13][14][15][16][17]. The stratospheric heating is provided by haze that absorbs ultraviolet (UV) and blue sunlight.…”

Titan's smile and collar: HST Observations of seasonal change 1994–2000

“…The visible appearance of Saturn's moon Titan in images from the Voyager encounters in 1980 and 1981 was dominated by the interhemispheric difference in albedo, often termed the North-South Asymmetry (NSA): the northern hemisphere was about 20% darker at blue and green wavelengths [Smith et al 1981[Smith et al , 1982. Another feature was a dark polar hood, above latitudes of about 65øN.…”

Viscous Overstability in Saturn's B-Ring II. Hydrodynamic Theory and Comparison to Simulations

“…The Voyager missions revealed a pronounced radial structure of the B-ring and the inner A-ring of Saturn appearing on a wide range of length scales down to the resolution limit of the Voyager observations (Smith et al 1982;Esposito et al 1983a,b). Several explanations for the formation of the structure have been proposed in the literature.…”