This is your Astronomy Tonight podcast.

On this day, August 8th, in the year 1989, NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft made its historic flyby of Neptune, becoming the first and only spacecraft to visit the distant ice giant. Talk about a long-distance relationship! Voyager 2 had been traveling through space for nearly 12 years before reaching Neptune, covering a mind-boggling distance of over 4.3 billion kilometers from Earth.

As Voyager 2 zipped past Neptune at a speed of about 90,000 kilometers per hour, it captured breathtaking images of the planet's striking blue atmosphere, swirling with massive storm systems and dark spots. The spacecraft's cameras revealed Neptune's Great Dark Spot, a storm system comparable in size to Earth, which has since disappeared and reappeared in different locations on the planet.

But the excitement didn't stop there! Voyager 2 also discovered six new moons orbiting Neptune, bringing the total known at the time to eight. The largest of these newly discovered moons was Proteus, a oddly-shaped world about 400 kilometers in diameter - that's roughly the distance from Los Angeles to San Francisco!

Perhaps most intriguingly, Voyager 2's flyby provided us with our first close-up look at Neptune's largest moon, Triton. This frozen world turned out to be full of surprises, with its retrograde orbit, icy volcanoes spewing nitrogen geysers, and a thin atmosphere. It's like the solar system's very own frozen paradise!

The data collected during this flyby continues to inform our understanding of ice giants and the outer solar system to this day. It's a testament to human ingenuity and our unquenchable thirst for exploration that a spacecraft launched in the 1970s is still teaching us about our cosmic neighborhood.

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