On This Day spotlights a historic New York Times front-page article. For teaching ideas, visit this resource.
1980
VOYAGER 1 SWEEPS BY SATURN’S MOONS
PASADENA, Calif., Nov. 12 — An American spaceship of discovery, Voyager 1, sailed past Saturn and through its archipelago of moons today in the first close photographic reconnaissance of the solar system’s second largest planet.
Voyager’s cameras surveyed the grayish-white icy moons and found a huge crater with a central peak on Mimas, a sprinkling of large craters on Dione, bright cobweb markings on Rhea and Dione and a 500-mile-long canyon cutting through the frozen surface on one side of Tethys and a jumble of craters on the other side.
Until now these worlds, ranging in diameter from a couple of hundred to thousands of miles, had been mere points of light in Earth telescopes.
This event occurred on Nov. 12, but appeared in the Nov. 13 issue of The New York Times. Read the entire article or explore this issue in full in TimesMachine.
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