Voyager 2 Flyby of Triton

NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft gave humanity its first glimpse of Neptune and its moon Triton in the summer of 1989. Like an old film, Voyager's historic footage of Triton has been "restored" and used to construct the best-ever global color map of that strange moon (See PIA18668). The map, produced by Dr. Paul Schenk, a scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, has also been used to make this movie recreating that historic Voyager encounter, which took place 25 years ago, on August 25, 1989.

Video credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Lunar & Planetary Institute

Note: For more information, see PIA18668: Map of Triton and Voyager Map Details Neptune's Strange Moon Triton.

Flight over Triton

This simulated voyage over the surface of Neptune's large moon Triton was produced using topographic maps derived from images acquired by NASA's Voyager spacecraft during its August 1989 flyby, 20 years ago.

Triton was the last solid object visited by the Voyager 2 spacecraft on its epic 10-year tour of the outer solar system. Voyager mapped only the hemisphere that faces Neptune, but revealed a very young surface scarred by rising blobs of ice (diapirs), faults, and volcanic pits and lava flows composed of water and other ices. The video begins near the western edge of this hemisphere with an approach over cantaloupe terrain and two large smooth walled plains. The video tracks due east for roughly 1500 kilometers over a large province of volcanic pits, calderas and smooth plains. As can be seen in this video, Triton is locally very rugged (with pits and mounds that are typically a few hundred meters [several hundred feet] high), but has no large mountains or deep basins and regional relief is low. The lack of large topographic features is a consequence of Triton's high internal heat and the low strength of most ices.

The video was produced by using a new topographic map of Triton, combined with a 1.65-kilometer resolution image mosaic. Topographic mapping was based on shape-from-shading analysis of the original Voyager images. Vertical relief has been exaggerated by a factor of 25 to aid interpretation.

Video credit: NASA/JPL/Universities Space Research Association/Lunar & Planetary Institute