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…
Tag: Titan
Moons of Three
Saturn’s moons Dione and Titan lined up with the planet’s rings, seen here nearly edge-on, from the point of view of the Cassini spacecraft’s camera on September 17, 2011. This is a composite of three raw images taken with Cassini’s red, green and blue visible-light clear filters. Dione, 700 miles wide, is dwarfed by the…
Big Sisters
Here’s a color-composite image of Rhea and Titan, Saturn’s largest moons. Made from raw images acquired by the Cassini spacecraft on June 16, 2011, this really shows the vast difference in size and appearance of the two moons. Rhea, seen in the foreground, is an icy, airless and heavily-cratered world 950 miles wide. Titan, on…
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…
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…
A Setting Titan
A series of 13 raw images from Cassini, taken October 18, 2010, has been looped together to create this animation showing Titan “setting” behind the nighttime limb of Saturn. Check out the refraction along Saturn’s atmosphere! Very cool. (The images are oriented so the ringplane – seen at left – is running vertically.) This is the view…
Stars and Stripes (and Titan!)
A color-composite RGB image of Titan, with a sliver of the rings and a scattering of stars in the background, taken by Cassini on October 18, 2010 from a distance of over 1.53 million miles. At 3,200 miles in diameter Titan is larger than the planet Mercury, boasting a complex – yet chilly – atmosphere…
Titan’s High-Level Haze
Composite RGB spectral data image from Cassini’s latest flyby of Titan, September 24, 2010. Not much image adjustment needed, this was basically “out of the box”! I love the coloration in the different atmospheric layers. Original raw image can be seen here. Image: NASA/JPL/SSI. Edited by J. Major. Flickr – Photo Sharing!
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…
Lights in the Dark 