>> Narrator: Mystifying man
since the dawn of history,
Saturn bears the name
of the mythological god
of the harvest, who
reigned in the Golden Age.
[soft electronic music]
Traveling at more than
55,000 miles per hour,
Voyager 1 arrived
in November of 1980,
only 12 miles off course after
an interplanetary journey
of more than a billion miles.
Voyager's instruments
found Saturn's atmosphere
to be a cold ball of
hydrogen and helium gases,
racked by huge whirling
storms and whipped
by winds of up to
1,100 miles per hour.
Saturn's magnificent
rings, thought to have been
the result of collisions
between earlier moons
and asteroids, consist of
thousands of particles,
swirling pieces of rock and ice,
streaked like the grooves
in a phonograph record.
Voyager atmospheric scientist,
Dr. Andrew Ingersoll.
>> Dr. Ingersoll: What
Voyager discovered
was the incredible
structure in the rings.
Saturn's rings are really
composed of countless numbers
of particles, ranging
from the size of dust
and perhaps larger particles,
the size of houses.
These particles are constantly
bumping into each other.
These grooves are
there because the rings
are constantly being
disturbed by satellites
orbiting in with the smaller
ring particles themselves.
>> Narrator: As the Voyager
swept by, sunlight penetrated,
backlighting and
brilliantly illuminating
the splendor of the
rings, like the spokes
of a gigantic Catherine Wheel.
Voyager 1 flew within
2,500 miles of the surface
of Saturn's largest moon, Titan.
One of only three moons
in the solar system
known to have an atmosphere,
Titan may help unlock
secrets to the origins of life.
Voyager project scientist,
Dr. Edward Stone.
>> Dr. Stone: Certainly
one of the more exciting
discoveries at Saturn was
the atmosphere of Titan.
It's an atmosphere
which is mainly nitrogen
like that here on Earth,
but which contains methane
so that the photochemistry
going on there today
may resemble very strongly
that which occurred
here on Earth billions of
years ago before life evolved.
>> Narrator: By
swinging around Saturn,
after a close-up view of Titan,
Voyager 1 was propelled
out of the plane
of the Solar System.
It is now traveling
toward interstellar space.
