Neptune

Assembled from 12 blocks · 2 evidence · 17 related

1. Story
2. The last planet either spacecraft visited, on 25 August 1989, and — like Uranus — visited exactly once. Voyager 2 passed close over the northern hemisphere, using Neptune's gravity to bend its path south towards Triton, which was the real target of the encounter. It found a large dark storm system in the atmosphere, winds among the fastest measured anywhere in the solar system, and a ring system with distinct dense arcs. The Neptune encounter ended the planetary phase of the Voyager programme twelve years after launch, and everything the two spacecraft have done in the thirty-seven years since has been measurement of the medium they are passing through rather than of any object. Not a place on Earth.
3. Knowledge
4. Neptune
5. Connections
6. Voyager 2
7. Triton
8. The Grand Tour alignment
9. Voyager 2 passes Neptune and Triton, ending the planetary programme
10. Evidence
11. The encounter dates and principal findings at Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, including the Jovian ring, the resolved ring structure at Saturn, the tilted and offset Uranian magnetic field and the newly found moons at both ice giants. V55 verification basis: THE PAGES WERE NOT REACHED — science.nasa.gov is blocked by this session's egress proxy and the search budget was exhausted. Everything attributed here is standard mission record from general knowledge; a curator must confirm each encounter date and each count of newly discovered moons against NASA's own pages.
12. The Voyager 2 imaging results for the Neptune system, including the dark storm system in Neptune's atmosphere and Triton's sparsely cratered surface, plumes and surface temperature of about 38 K. V55 verification basis: NOT CHECKED IN THIS RUN; volume and title are given from standard citation practice and require confirmation.