Thirty years ago this week, the Voyager 2 spacecraft flew past Neptune, providing the first up-close look at the last planet in the solar system*. The anniversary tugged generously at my heart. You see, I fell in love with Neptune as a kid, back when I was in the second grade.
We all had to read about a planet and tell a few sentences about why we liked it. I got assigned Neptune. Neptune? Everybody wanted Saturn or Mars, or at least Jupiter. But as I read about Neptune, distant and dim, I got hooked. It was a planetary underdog, full of mysterious possibilities.
In August of 1989, when Voyager 2 started sending back the first clear pictures of Neptune and its moons, the mysteries began giving way to marvels. Neptune is a world of giant methane storms and strange rings. Its biggest moon, Triton, is a captured dwarf planet, Pluto’s hyperactive cousin. Since then, Neptune has only become more interesting. We know now that it holds big clues to the formation of our solar system, and to the nature of the planetary systems around other stars.
