Two Voyagers to Saturn

Abstract

The pages which follow may be taken as a celebration of the impending encounter of Voyager 2 with Saturn and are a pointer to the richness of data likely to be gathered in the next few days and weeks. Although there may be some to whom the work of these two remarkable spacecraft will be proof of how even more remarkable would have been the Grand Tour of the Solar System planned in the 1960s but executed only in the form of the two Voyagers, to most people the encounters with Jupiter and Saturn will seem exciting enough for the time being. Yet there are Uranus and Neptune to come. This group of scientific articles includes some of the first detailed attempts to make sense of last year's Voyager 1 observations of Saturn—and Nature acknowledges its debt to Dr G. E. Hunt of University College, London for having helped to recruit these articles and to give shape to the ground they cover. The scope is necessarily restricted, for there is hardly a branch of planetary astronomy which has not been changed in some way by the data from Voyager 1—and which is not about to be changed again.