Most exciting year for solar system exploration? Options

[Phil Stooke]

1979, Jupiter - yes, that was an amazing time. Oddly, from our perspective today, perhaps, there wasn't a huge promotion of Voyager 1 in advance. There were once even questions about whether a camera was needed on Voyager - the particles and fields folk thought that was all there was to do in the outer solar system. What would a camera show? Fuzzy clouds and cratered moons or smooth iceballs, and who could be interested in that? I recall seeing the pictures of Jupiter get larger over a 3 month period - I got the Voyager Bulletin by mail every week or so and listened to Don Bane's recorded telephone messages, which were daily near the encounter. The press was fairly quiet until very close to the flyby. Then things changed very fast - active volcanoes on Io, bizarre fracture patterns on Ganymede and Europa, bulls-eye rings on Callisto, and Jupiter's cloud features stayed sharp almost to the limit of resolution. The pictures were all over the news. Voyager 2 got a lot more attention, and so did both flybys of Saturn.

Phil

[tanjent]

I thought Mars Pathfinder in 1997 was exciting because it was not quite a first. You might say it was the first successful robotic return to a place we had already visited, after two decades when it seemed we had lost the knack. And of course it didn't do any harm that we had recently been primed by reading the first two Kim Stanley Robinson novels.

Fact check - "Blue Mars" was published in 1996; I guess I was just slow to get hold of it.

[JRehling]

I'll post here because I was thinking of a related "Best of" list: Worlds that turned out to be significantly more interesting than expected:

Io
Europa
Enceladus
Triton
Pluto
Titan
Ganymede

Of course, it depends on who's doing the "expecting." Compared to the 1877 hype, Mars turned out to be a lot less interesting than expected, and so did Venus. From 1981 to the present, however, Mars has probably increased in interestingness.