Voyager 1 at Saturn: An Encounter with a Multi-Ringed Giant

Abstract

The Voyager project, a national enterprise involving several thousand individuals who built the spacecraft, several hundred at Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory who fly it, and approximately a hundred scientists who are analyzing the data, began, in a sense, with one man and his telescope. In 1610 Galileo turned that telescope toward Saturn and observed some odd appendages, somewhat like cup handles. It wasn't until about 45 years later that Huygens with an improved telescope deduced that Saturn had a ring. He saw it as a single ring, a solid structure somehow suspended around Saturn. It was another 21 years before Cassini found that there wasn't a ring, but two rings around Saturn (the division between them is called the Cassini Division). Since that time, three more rings were reported by Earth-based observers, and Maxwell proved that the rings could not be solid structures but must consist of a large number of small bodies in orbit about Saturn.

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