![]() In the final, most intricate and challenging 24 hours of its career, it "performed everything it was supposed to do," Stone said. The bizarre moon provided a fitting swan song for the antiquated one-ton spacecraft, completing a 12-year, 4.5 billion-mile reconnaissance of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune that has rewritten textbooks. Triton was Voyager's last port of call before turning its back on the solar system and heading toward the stars and a voyage to infinity. Ten years ago, he said, a study showed that Triton was redder than it is today. The blue comes from surface ice crystals that scatter light in the same way as the Earth's blue atmosphere and the "fantastically bright" whites may be results of recent snowstorms that covered some of the red. "It is red, white and blue." The red, or pinkish, hues come from radiation-damaged methane ice that falls as pink snow, he said. "This world is dazzlingly different, and it's got color, too," planetary scientist Carl Sagan said. Triton's lakes could be made of frozen nitrogen, methane and ammonia, Soderblom said. Unlike Hawaii, however, the surface of Triton is several hundred degrees below zero Fahrenheit. Triton "will occupy geologists for years to come." "My God, it looks like Hawaii," said planetary scientist and author Bruce Murray, referring to Triton's volcanic craters, or calderas, resembling those on Venus and Mars. ![]() Today's images "revealed a world unlike any we've seen," said Voyager project scientist Edward Stone of the California Institute of Technology. Although Voyager will continue for several days to relay data acquired and stored during the flyby, the pictures seen today left scientists reveling in a wealth of new information and new mysteries. Geological Survey, deputy leader of the imaging science team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is managing the mission for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Its pink, white and blue surface, a combination of rigid and soft features like the crisscross crust and filling of a cherry pie, is snaked with moonquake faults, haloed dark spots that resemble poppy flowers and other spots resembling "pinched bellybuttons." "Wow! What a way to leave the solar system," exclaimed Laurence Soderblom of the U.S. This haze is supported by an atmosphere, possibly nitrogen, with as little as 1/1,000th the surface pressure of Earth. Voyager photographed a layer of haze at least nine miles high, apparently embedded in a photochemical smog. ![]() ![]() More startling yet, scientists were studying evidence that the moon has its own aurora, or "northern lights," indicating that it has a magnetic field and a liquid core. 25 - The intrepid explorer Voyager 2 closed its long-running theater of the planets today with stunning close-ups of Neptune's moon Triton, revealing a pastel wonderland of dormant "cryo-volcanos" that once spewed supercold liquids, a bizarre confusion of landscapes carved from exotic ices and possible electric nitrogen winds. ![]()
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