Time to go “all way back” to 2006! In this Cassini image beautifully color calibrated by Gordan Ugarkovic we see the moon Mimas tucked into the shadow of Saturn’s rings. Nicknamed the “Death Star” moon, Mimas features a large crater with a sharp central peak, giving it a striking resemblance to the infamous sci-fi space…
Category: Saturn
The Color of Rhea
If someone were to ask you today what the most heavily-cratered world in the Solar System is, you can’t go wrong with saying “why, Rhea of course!” (I don’t know why someone would ask you that, but if anyone does you can now consider yourself well-prepared.) 🙂
Enceladus Sprays Its Secrets To Cassini
Enceladus, Saturn’s 318-mile-wide moon that’s become famous for its ice-spraying southern jets, is on astronomers’ short list of places in our own solar system where extraterrestrial life could be hiding — and on March 27, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft was in just the right place to try and sniff it out. Why does Cassini team director…
A Little Pas de Deux: Tethys and Dione
Saturn’s moon Tethys, its giant Odysseus crater in plain view, passes in front of of the slightly darker Dione in this animation made from several raw images acquired by Cassini earlier this month. Pretty cool!
Pretty as a Picture: Enceladus and Titan
Little Enceladus and enormous Titan are seen on either side of Saturn’s rings in this image, a color-composite I made from raw images acquired by Cassini on March 12, 2012. Read more here.
Rugged Rhea
Here’s a color-composite image of Rhea, made from raw images acquired by Cassini during a flyby on March 10, 2012. The color is derived from images taken in infrared, green and ultraviolet light.
Titan. In color.
On Jan. 30, the Cassini spacecraft executed a flyby maneuver of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, passing within 19,340 miles (31,130 km) of its surface. This color composite image of the cloud-covered moon was created by combining raw data acquired with Cassini’s Imaging Science System (ISS) in red, green, blue and clear color channels. The result…
From the LITD Archives: Eclipsing Mimas
Originally published on May 16, 2009. LITD is almost 3 years old! This animation, made from a series of 8 raw images taken by Cassini on May 14, shows Saturn’s moon Mimas being eclipsed by another object…..a neighboring moon, perhaps? It’s not mentioned, but it definitely seems to be something of similar size, and round….
The Colors of Titan’s Sky
Made from one of the most recent Cassini images, this is a color-composite showing a backlit Titan with its dense, multi-layered atmosphere scattering sunlight in different colors. Titan’s atmosphere is made up of methane and complex hydrocarbons and is ten times as thick as Earth’s. It is the only moon in our solar system known to have…
Saturn’s Spooky Sounds
Here’s a bit of space spookiness just in time for the Halloween season! It’s a recording of the intense radio emissions coming from Saturn, as detected by the Cassini spacecraft’s radio and plasma wave science instrument on November 22, 2003. Not exactly a direct audio recording (since Cassini is in space where there’s no “sound”…
Fantastic Four
New image from Cassini and the CICLOPS imaging team shows Titan, Dione, Pan and Pandora in the same shot! Pan is furthest to the left, a tiny moon tucked into the gap in the rings. Dione hovers in front of the cloud-covered Titan, and Pandora is the football-shaped moon just outside the edge of the…
Latest Images of Enceladus
On Saturday, Oct. 1, the Cassini spacecraft performed another flyby of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. Passing by at a distance of only 62 miles (99 km) Cassini took some fantastic images of the 318-mile-wide moon — most notably of its signature plumes of water ice spraying from fissures along its south pole!
Lights in the Dark 