00:00 On this day in space.
00:03 On May 1st, 1949, Neptune's moon Nereid was discovered by the Dutch astronomer Gerard Kuiper.
00:09 This was the second of 14 moons discovered at Neptune.
00:13 It was also the last one to be discovered with certainty before NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft flew by Neptune in 1989.
00:19 Astronomers suspected they had observed a third moon through a telescope before,
00:23 but it wasn't actually seen until the Voyager 2 mission.
00:26 Kuiper spotted Nereid using an 82-inch reflector telescope at the McDonald Observatory in Texas.
00:32 He decided to name it after the sea nymphs in Greek mythology.
00:36 Neptune was the Roman god of the sea, so Kuiper was sticking with this nautical theme when he chose this name.
00:42 Despite years of astronomical observations, Nereid's exact shape is still a bit of a mystery.
00:48 Voyager 2 did get some pictures of Nereid, but they were taken from nearly 3 million miles away and were pretty pixelated.
00:55 However, spectroscopic observations have shown that it has a neutral color and may have water ice on its surface.
01:01 And that's what happened on this day in space.
01:04 [ music ]
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