Triton

Assembled from 15 blocks · 2 evidence · 17 related

1. Story
2. Neptune's largest moon, and the object the Neptune encounter was actually shaped around. It orbits backwards relative to Neptune's rotation, which is the signature of a captured body rather than one formed in place, and it is extraordinarily cold — Voyager 2 measured a surface temperature of about 38 kelvin, the coldest directly measured anywhere in the solar system at the time. Against that expectation of a frozen dead surface, the images showed a young, sparsely cratered terrain and dark plumes rising several kilometres and streaking downwind, apparently nitrogen driven by seasonal solar heating. It remains the only close look anyone has had at a large captured Kuiper-belt object. Not a place on Earth.
3. Knowledge
4. Neptune
5. Triton
6. Connections
7. Neptune
8. Voyager 2 passes Neptune and Triton, ending the planetary programme
9. Voyager 2
10. Triton
11. The Grand Tour alignment
12. Voyager 2 passes Neptune and Triton, ending the planetary programme
13. Evidence
14. 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.
15. 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.