A somewhat truish colorized image of Saturn’s southern hemisphere, taken by Cassini on June 26, 2010 from a distance of 1,354,284 miles (that’s over five times the distance from Earth to the moon!) I substituted Cassini’s infrared and ultraviolet raw image channels for red and blue, respectively, and adjusted the combined results (with a native…
Tag: Cassini
This Week in Space
Season 1, episode 23: SpaceX issues a financial challenge to the big space contractors, last shuttle launches slip, video diary from Mars 500 crew, IKAROS’ successful solar sail, kids discover Martian cave, John Glenn joins the save shuttle fray, Cassini takes a dip in Titan’s atmosphere, new Hubble images show star formation, extreme exoplanet weather,…
A World of Secrets
Wrapped in its clouds and haze Saturn’s moon Titan teases us with its secrets. What sort of strange geologic events are happening on its surface? Volcanoes oozing water ice, natural gas rainstorms, rivers flowing with liquid methane into enormous glassy lakes, temperatures that would freeze most Earthly creatures solid within minutes. And now, the big…
Life on Titan?
There’s been a lot of buzz in the space news world recently about findings by NASA scientists that may indicate the possibility of some sort of biological activity on Saturn’s cloud-covered moon, Titan. This has been carried to many different levels of excitement, depending on the individual reporters…what has NOT been announced is anything definitive…
Wispy Lines
A closer look at the surface of Rhea, Saturn’s second-largest moon, reveals some of its signature “wispy lines”…the bright exposed faces of steep cliffs on the icy 950-mile-wide moon. Taken by the Cassini spacecraft on June 3, 2010, the image above has been level-adjusted to bring out surface details. Being composed of 75% water ice,…
Ring Racer
Man, I just LOVE this stuff. 🙂 This has to be one of the coolest images yet of one of my favorite subjects: Saturn’s moon Daphnis casting a shadow and riling up the rings as it travels along the 26-mile-wide Keeler Gap, a channel it keeps clear around the outer edge of the A ring….
Hyperion
Here’s a wonderful color mosaic of Saturn’s moon Hyperion, assembled by Gordan Ugarkovic from four Cassini narrow-angle camera images. The moon’s heavily cratered sponge-like surface can be seen in vivid detail due to the high phase angle of sunlight, making its rough texture even more pronounced. At 255 x 163 x 137 miles in diameter,…
Titanesque
Here’s an image of Titan as seen by Cassini on May 23, 2010. I combined data from the red, green and blue color filters as well as overlaying some surface detail of the moon’s dark dune fields captured with the spacecraft’s cloud-piercing near-infrared camera. Image: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute/J. Major
A Clouded Giant
Image data are now coming in from today’s flyby of Titan, the image above is a rotated color-composite made from three raw images taken with Cassini’s red, green and blue visible light color filters. (I think I got the north-south alignment right…) Titan’s high-level hydrocarbon haze is visible, a pale blue and violet band encircling…
Through the Plumes
Emily Lakdawalla of The Planetary Society calls this “the most amazing image of Enceladus Cassini has captured yet.” While I like some of the images from November’s flyby a bit more, this is still very, very cool! It is a combination of two images (processed by unmannedspaceflight.com member Astro0) taken during the same flyby event,…
Peekaboo Moon
Here’s another color composite from Cassini, showing Rhea on the far side of the rings, its northern tip peeking through the Cassini Division. (I’m not 100% sure what smaller moon that is on the left, but my guess is either Janus or Epimetheus.) What I find interesting in this image is the bright streak within…
Skimming the Rings
Saturn’s second-largest moon Rhea passes across the face of the ringed planet in this image, color-combined from three raw images taken by Cassini on May 8, 2010. The rings are seen on edge here, a dark horizontal stripe running underneath the cratered 950-mile-wide moon, their wide shadows cast onto Saturn’s atmosphere below. I really love…
Lights in the Dark 