Originally posted on March 3, 2009: A great spiraling whirlpool of wind-whipped clouds wraps around Saturn’s southern pole, photographed here in polarized infrared light by Cassini on July 15, 2008. Towering white clouds mark areas of rising heat from deep within the atmosphere. The winds around the vortex have been measured at over 300 mph….
Tag: Cassini
Titan’s Spring Showers
It’s spring here in Earth’s northern hemisphere – and on Saturn’s cloudy moon Titan as well! This image, taken by Cassini in October of last year, shows bright clouds covering part of the moon’s equatorial and southern regions. These clouds were not always visible…in fact, they formed relatively quickly as Saturn and its moons moved…
Northern Exposure
Cassini gets a nice look at Enceladus’ icy, cratered north pole in this image, taken on December 21, 2010. In the background we catch a glimpse of Saturn’s rings as well! Fantastic image. The Cassini spacecraft was about 20,000 miles (34000 km) from Enceladus when this was taken, using its narrow-angle camera. 318 miles across…
Tethys and Saturn
660-mile-wide Tethys orbits in front of Saturn and the rings in this image from Cassini, taken on March 8, 2011. The rings cast their shadows onto the Saturn’s southern equatorial cloudtops as the planet continues moving into its summer season. The 155-mile-wide Melanthius Crater can be seen near Tethys’ south pole. A smaller…
Dione in the Distance
Cassini looks past the southern pole of Rhea to get a view of Dione on the far side of the rings in this image, captured on January 11, 2011. Rhea, Saturn’s second-largest moon, is approximately 950 miles in diameter and is literally covered in craters. Dione, also heavily cratered, is nearly 700 miles wide. It’s…
Slicing Saturn
In this beautiful image from Cassini we see a dramatically-lit Saturn, its rings slicing across its equator as a thin bright line and casting shadows onto its atmosphere below. A great example of how Saturn’s gigantic ring system is hundreds of thousands of miles wide but only about 30 feet thick! This image was captured…
Shining Bright
Here’s a portrait of Enceladus, seen against a backdrop of Saturn’s atmosphere and ringplane seen edge-on. The ice-covered moon is one of the most reflective bodies in the solar system, bouncing back nearly all the sunlight that strikes it. Enceladus’ surface contains many different kinds of terrain, from older heavily-cratered regions to smoother, newer…
Dione’s Wispy Cliffs
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…
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…
Lights in the Dark 