Voyager 1 Encounters Saturn

COVER: Saturn and two of its moons, Tethys (above) and Dione (below), were photographed by Voyager 1 on November 3, 1980, from 13 million kilometers (8 million miles). The shadow of Tethys is cast onto the cloudtops in the upper right corner of the image.
The pictures assembled in this publication are a part of the rich and varied harvest of information returned by Voyager 1 across nearly a billion miles of interplanetary space. These images are of great beauty as well as great scientific interest, serving to remind us of the awesome and breathtaking dimensions of the solar system we inhabit. Voyager is providing intriguing new information which should help us to understand how the Earth—and possibly the universe—was formed. Already there have been surprises and puzzles that paint a completely new picture of Saturn and its neighborhood, including the discovery of three new moons, startling information about Saturn’s rings, and observation of the unexpectedly complex structure of Saturn’s atmosphere and that of its largest moon, Titan. It will take years for scientists to assimilate completely the information which is cascading down from Voyager. What more will this marvel of technology have to tell us before it departs the solar system to travel endlessly among the stars?
Robert A. Frosch, Administrator National Aeronautics and Space Administration December 1980
The date of each photograph and the distance of the spacecraft from the planet or satellite are included with each picture.
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Voyager 1 was launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on September 5, 1977, beginning its journey to Jupiter, Saturn, and beyond.
No other generation has had the opportunity or the technology to reach beyond our world—to see, to touch, to hear the forces that shape our universe. In slightly over two decades, man has ingeniously explored five distant planets—and two dozen moons. We have seen their weather and surfaces, landed on some, probed the atmospheres of others, and listened to their radio noises.