Here’s some awesome just-released raw images from Cassini’s flyby of Dione earlier this morning! The low angle of sunlight brings out the detail of the moon’s rugged terrain, peppered with ancient craters of all sizes and gouged by long scars of steep, icy cliffs. Fantastic! Thanks to team leader Carolyn Porco for alerting us to…
Tag: Saturn
Auroral Arrhythmia
Just like Earth, Saturn has its own versions of northern (and southern) lights illuminating high-altitude rings around its polar latitudes. Understandably much larger and more powerful than our planet’s auroras, they are nevertheless caused by the same thing: energetic particles streaming out from the sun get caught in Saturn’s magnetic field and are funneled toward…
Moon Quartet
Four of Saturn’s 62 moons are seen passing each other in this animation, composed from 22 raw images taken by the Cassini spacecraft on July 27, 2010. Epimetheus, Prometheus, Janus and tiny Atlas all orbit Saturn within or near the ring system. As the animation begins, the potato-shaped Prometheus is just “rounding the bend” inside…
Shades of Blue
Just some more Saturn beauty. Composite of raw image data in RGB filters from Cassini’s wide-angle camera, taken on July 15, 2010. (Not sure what moon that is.) Have a great weekend! Image: NASA/JPL/SSI. Edited by J. Major.
An Icy Crescent
A color-composite image of Saturn’s moon Enceladus, assembled from RGB raw image data recorded by Cassini on July 4, 2010. The moon’s heavily textured and highly-reflective icy terrain is nicely accentuated by the low angle of sunlight. The Cassini spacecraft was over 104,000 miles from Enceladus when the images were taken. Image: NASA/JPL/SSI. Edited by…
Moons, Moons Everywhere
Released today, this image shows one of many small (half-mile wide) moons that orbit Saturn within the rings themselves, creating a “propellers” of gravitationally-tugged ring particles on either side of it. The Cassini team has been watching these interesting ring features for some time, and has carefully tracked eleven of the larger ones over the…
Daphnis Close-up
On July 5 the Cassini spacecraft took this image of Daphnis, a 4.5-mile-wide shepherd moon that orbits Saturn within the Keeler Gap. It’s the closest image yet of Daphnis, a moon that’s famous for the scallop-edged gravitational wake it makes on the edges of the gap as it passes. Read more on the Cassini mission…
Color Me Saturn
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…
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….
Lights in the Dark 