Cassini’s at it again! After its last flyby of Titan the spacecraft changed course, heading up and away from Saturn’s equatorial plane at an angle that will allow it to better study the rings and the planet’s polar regions. This raw image, captured on May 23, shows Cassini’s view as it heads upwards. It shows…
Tag: Pandora
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…
Cool Cassini Capture: Pandora
Cassini took this raw image of the 50-mile (81-km) -wide moon Pandora on May 7, 2011. The oval-shaped shepherd moon orbits Saturn just outside the F ring. Saturn’s long shadow is cast over the central portion of the rings in this image. Credit: NASA / JPL / Space Science Institute
Prime PDS Picks
Every six to nine months or so the Cassini Imaging Center dumps orbiter image data into NASA’s Planetary Data System, or PDS. This data is accessible to anyone with an internet connection, but it can be a little awkward to find exactly what you’re looking for (unless you’re familiar with the technical nomenclature of the…
Pandorama
This animation, made up of 7 raw image frames taken by Cassini’s wide-angle camera, shows Saturn’s ring system ponderously rotating, the reflected light off the gas giant illuminating the dark material of the Cassini Division. In the lower right the moon Pandora orbits outside the twisted cords of the F ring. The planet itself is…
Lights in the Dark 