Solar System’s Best Flybys – which one is your favourite?

Thanks to Cassini, we got spoiled for flybys over planets and moons – just think that we are now at number 111 (the last one was carried out on May, 7 over Titan’s Xanadu region – see this link for the footage).

More it’s to come, from Cassini itself promo_whereiscassininow_250w (the next one is a Dione Flyby. On Jun 16 2015, Cassini will pass at 517 km  – 321 mi – from the small Saturn’s moon and hopefully snap a few good shots) and from other probes, first of all New Horizons with its Pluto’s encounter July, 14 2015.

In the meantime, I decided to have a good look at the imagery about some other famous flybys – we have almost covered the whole Solar System with them – and  I had hard time to decide which ones are the most interesting / spectacular.
The list is long and distinguished, and can be retrieved here.
After some thinking, I decided the one over Neptune was the most spectacular so far, in terms of quality and scientific relevance of that mission.
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In the Summer of 1989 – on August, 25 – Voyager 2, after having visited the two gas giants and Uranus, traveled at just 3,000 miles above Neptune’s north pole, its closest approach ever to a planet during its 12-year run through the Solar System. Simply amazing.

As this was not enough of an achievement, a few hours later the spacecraft passed about 25,000 miles from Neptune’s largest moon, Triton, the last solid body visited on that journey (so far, but you never know).

Below is a video of that spectacular encounter:

There were, of course, a lot of other candidates for the place of the best flyby. What’s your chosen one?

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