The
Pioneer 11 spacecraft launched from Cape Canaveral forty years ago, on
April 5, 1973. Pioneer 11's path through Saturn's outer rings took it
within 21,000 km of the planet, where it discovered two new moons
(almost smacking into one of them in September 1979) and a new "F" ring. ' The spacecraft also discovered and charted the magnetosphere, magnetic
field and mapped the general structure of Saturn's interior. The
spacecraft's instruments measured the heat radiation from Saturn's
interior and found that its planet-sized moon, Titan, was too cold to
support life. ' This image from Pioneer 11 shows Saturn and its
moon Titan. The irregularities in ring silhouette and shadow are due to
technical anomalies in the preliminary data later corrected. At the time
this image was taken, Pioneer was 2,846,000 km (1,768,422 miles) from
Saturn.
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