First spotted by the Voyager spacecraft thirty years ago, it wasn’t until Cassini that the linear features criscrossing Saturn’s moon Dione known as “wispy lines” were confirmed to be the icy faces of high cliff walls rising hundreds of feet from the moon’s frozen surface. Possibly caused by tectonic activity Dione’s cliff walls shine brightly…
Category: Saturn’s Moons
Mimas and the Rings
Mimas hovers in front of Saturn’s rings in a color image composed from raw Cassini data taken on January 31, 2011. I used data taken with Cassini’s green, infrared and ultraviolet spectral filters to compose this colorized version. Known as the “Death Star” moon, 250-mile (400 km) -wide Mimas’ northern hemisphere is dominated by the 80-mile…
Textured Trojan
First of all, get your mind out of the gutter. 😉 21-mile (35 km) -wide Helene is a “Trojan” moon of the much larger Dione, so called because it orbits Saturn within the path of Dione, 60º ahead of it. (Its little sister Trojan, 3-mile-wide Polydeuces, trails Dione at the rear 60º mark.) The Homeric…
The Feeling’s Mutual
Dione slips behind Rhea in this animation made from 19 raw images taken by the Cassini spacecraft on January 20, 2011. Called a mutual event, the two moons seem to just miss each other – even though in reality they are separated by over 93,400 miles! Rhea and Dione are similar in composition and size,….
A Close Pass
Here’s a close-up look at the extensively-cratered surface of Rhea, Saturn’s second-largest moon, captured by Cassini as it performed its closest flyby yet on the morning of January 11, 2010. Passing a mere 43 miles (69 km) over the surface, Cassini got a great look at some of the deep craters that literally cover the…
Blowing off Steam
Remind me again why I love Cassini? Oh yeah, because of images like this. 🙂
Backlit Dione
Here’s a beautiful new image just in from Cassini: the silhouette of 700-mile-wide Dione seen against the sunlit limb of Saturn, its rings seen edge-on just above the moon. Some of Dione’s heavily-cratered terrain can be discerned along its southeastern edge. I particularly like the light halo effects along the edges of the moon and…
The Many Faces of Enceladus
A recently uploaded raw image from Cassini, this is a full-frontal view of 318-mile-wide Enceladus taken on November 30, 2010 during the spacecraft’s most recent flyby. Of particular note here is the moon’s heavily grooved and fractured surface, mostly water ice and rock, but strangely split into two sections of differing terrain – most noticeably…
Dione and Tethys in Passing
Two of Saturn’s moons pass each other from Cassini’s perspective on December 6, 2010, in this animation compiled from 70 raw image files. This was more an experiment in using iMovie HD to create an animation from a lot of individual images than anything else…I didn’t take the time to clean up the specks and…
Enceladus and the Rings
Here’s a surreal image of ice-covered Enceladus with Saturn’s rings in the background, as seen by Cassini on November 30, 2010 during its latest flyby. Amazing! The spacecraft was about 28,500 miles (45,827 km) away from Enceladus when this image was taken. I adjusted the levels a bit to bring out some detail in the…
Spray It, Don’t Say It
Cassini’s done it again…images of Enceladus’ south-pole jets in all their icy glory are in from yesterday’s flyby! The one shown here, a raw image that I’ve rotated 180º (so south is “down”) shows the moon lit partly by sunlight (the sliver of white crescent along the left) and partly by “Saturnshine” (reflected sunlight off…
Spongebob Spacepants
Covered with deep, punched-in craters, Saturn’s 168-mile- (270-km-) wide moon Hyperion resembles a sea sponge more than it does a moon. But a moon it is…in fact, Hyperion is the largest irregularly-shaped moon in the solar system. This image, one of the first sent back from Cassini since awakening from its three-week-long “safe mode” following…
Lights in the Dark 