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torgothegreat God Delusion
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Serene Scene (Saturn with Tethys)
Even in a peaceful looking scene such as this one of Saturn and its moon Tethys, the Cassini spacecraft reveals clues about how Saturn is ever-changing.
Saturn’s northern hemisphere still shows the scars of the huge storm that raged through much of 2011 (see Chronicling Saturn’s Northern Storm). And, day by day, the shadows cast by the rings on the planet’s southern hemisphere are growing wider as the seasons progress toward northern summer. See The Rite of Spring and Sliding Shadows to learn about the changing seasons and the shadows cast by the rings.
Million-Ring Circus
1. RINGS FROM AFAR
Measuring 175,000 miles wide but as little as 30 feet thick, Saturn’s rings contain debris of varying ages and composition, all revolving at different speeds.
2. THREE MOONS
Titan and Dione, along with speck-sized Prometheus appear in rare alignment. Tiny so-called shepherd moons help shape the rings and prevent them from dispersing.
3. TITAN
Concentric rings wind in front of Satrun’s biggest moon, Titan, with tiny Janus in teh foreground. The rings are so massive that they have their own atmosphere, separate from Saturn’s. Cassini found evidence of oxygen all around the icy rings.
4. RINGS CLOSE UP
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Cast
The moon Tethys casting its shadow on Saturn’s rings, April 29th, 2009.
Zooming in on Saturn’s Rings
Credit: NASA, ESA and E. Karkoschka (University of Arizona)
Saturn is ready for her close-up. This image, taken by the Hubble Space telescope in 2004, offers a stunning view of the planet’s rings. Saturn boasts 9 continuous main rings as well as three fragmentary arcs; they’re made mostly of ice with some dust and rock mixed in. In this image, the main body of the planet casts a dark shadow on the rings.
When it comes to Saturn’s moons, Phoebe tends to be overshadowed by its siblings. Titan’s size earns her the title of Saturn’s biggest moon (and the second-biggest moon in our solar system), while Enceladus boasts those attention-getting fountains of water and ice pouring from its south pole. But new data from the Cassini mission shows that Phoebe might be more interesting than we thought, with a different origin and more planet-like qualities than Saturn’s other moons.
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The Tale Continues..
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
The brightly reflective moon Enceladus appears before Saturn’s rings while the larger moon Titan looms in the distance.
Jets of water ice and vapor emanating from the south pole of Enceladus (hinting at subsurface sea rich in organics), and liquid hydrocarbons ponding on the surface on the surface of Titan make these two of the most fascinating moons in the Saturnian system. See A Tale of Two Moons to learn more about these fascinating moons.
Pictures of Saturn
1. A psychedelic view of Saturn. A composite image made from pictures taken by the Cassini spacecraft from a distance of approximately 511,000 miles (822,000 kilometers) from Saturn.
2. Saturn, The Lord of the Rings. A natural-color photograph of Saturn and its rings shot by Cassini spacecraft’s wide-angle camera from a distance of approximately 764,000 miles (1.23 million kilometers) from Saturn.
3. The Spectacular Rings of Saturn. A false-color image of Saturn’s main rings made by combining data from Cassini’s ultraviolet imaging spectrograph.
4. Saturn’s moon Rhea orbiting the giant gas-planet. Rhea is 949 miles (1,528 kilometers) across and it is the second largest moon of Saturn. This picture was shot by the Cassini spacecraft from a distance of about 700,000 miles (1.2 million kilometers) from Saturn and 422,000 miles (679,000 kilometers) from Rhea.
5. Saturn in infrared. An infrared view of Saturn and its rings captured by the Cassini spacecraft from a vantage point located 900,000 miles (1.4 million kilometers) above the planet’s northern latitudes.
6. Rhea, gliding in front of Saturn. Captured by the Cassini spacecraft.
7. Saturn in false color. A false color, near-infrared, Hubble Space Telescope image of Saturn. The varying compositions and heights of its cloud layers are indicated by different colors. The clouds are thought to consist mainly of ammonia ice crystals. Tethys and Dione, two of Saturn’s moon can be seen as tiny dots in the upper right and lower left portions of the image, respectively.
8. The Dark Side of Saturn/Saturn Eclipse. A photograph of Saturn eclipsing the Sun, captured by the Cassini spacecraft on September 15, 2006. The dark side of Saturn is partially lit by sunlight reflected from its own rings. The rings themselves are lit by slight forward scattering of sunlight. In the high resolution image, the Earth is visible as a pale blue dot just above the bright main rings, on the left side of the image.
Credits: NASA, ESA, JPL/Caltech
Saturn’s Rings after Equinox - Larry Esposito (SETI Talks) (by setiinstitute)
SETI Talks archive: http://seti.org/talks
Saturn’s Equinox 2009: Oblique lighting exposed vertical structure and embedded objects. The rings were the coldest ever. Dr. Esposito will show how images inspired new occultation and spectral analysis that show abundant structure in the perturbed regions. The rings are more variable and complex than we had expected prior to this seasonal viewing geometry.
Two Moons In Passing
In the image: Animation of Tethys passing in front of Dione from Cassini’s point of view.
Saturn’s moon Tethys passes in front of its slightly larger sister Dione in this animation made from 25 raw images acquired by Cassini on March 14, 2012. Pretty cool!
Tethys and Dione are similar in diameter, being 1,062 kilometers (660 miles) wide and 1,123 kilometers (698 miles) wide, respectively. Both are heavily cratered, ice-rich worlds.
In this view, Tethys’ enormous Odysseus crater can be seen on its northern hemisphere. 400 km (250 miles) across, Odysseus is two-fifths the diameter of Tethys itself, suggesting that it was created early in the moon’s history when it was still partially molten — or else the impact would have shattered the moon apart entirely.
The more extensively-cratered trailing side of Dione is visible here, its signature “wispy lines“ rotated out of view. Since it makes sense that a moon’s leading face should be more heavily cratered, it’s thought that Dione has been spun around by an impact event in the distant past.
If you look closely, a slight rotation in Tethys can also be discerned from the first frame to the last.
Credit: NASA/JPL/SSI. Animation by Jason Major.
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Saturn’s Gravity Warps Icy Moon’s Erupting Jets
The strong pull of Saturn’s gravity stretches and strains huge cracks on one of the planet’s icy moons that spray icy, geyser-like jets, a new study finds.
New images from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, in orbit around Saturn, reveal clues that have enabled scientists, for the first time, to make a connection between Saturn’s gravity and the jet-spewing fissures on the planet’s sixth largest moon, Enceladus.
“This new work gives scientists insight into the mechanics of these picturesque jets at Enceladus and shows that Saturn really stresses Enceladus,” Terry Hurford, a Cassini scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., said in a statement.
A Sliver of Saturn’s Moon Enceladus
NASA’s Cassini spacecraft snapped this picture of a dark Enceladus, the sixth-largest of Saturn’s moons and one of the most interesting to scientists because of the presence of water ice on its surface and geological activity. In the image, some of this icy geological action is visible at the moon’s southern end where plumes of water-ice spray up from the terrain. Cassini took the picture at a distance of 83,000 miles on February 20, 2012.
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Saturn from Above
Credit: Cassini Imaging Team, SSI, JPL, ESA, NASA
Dione Has Her Faults (False Color)
This view highlights tectonic faults and craters on Dione, an icy world that has undoubtedly experienced geologic activity since its formation.Image credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
To create the enhanced-color view, ultraviolet, green and infrared images were combined into a single black and white picture that isolates and maps regional color differences. This “color map” was then superposed over a clear-filter image. The origin of the color differences is not yet understood, but may be caused by subtle differences in the surface composition or the sizes of grains making up the icy soil.
This view looks toward the leading hemisphere on Dione (1,126 kilometers, or 700 miles across). North is up and rotated 20 degrees to the right.
See PIA07690 for a similar monochrome view.
All images were acquired with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Dec. 24, 2005 at a distance of approximately 151,000 kilometers (94,000 miles) from Dione and at a Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 99 degrees. Image scale is 896 meters (2,940 feet) per pixel.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.
Image addition date: 2006-01-31
News: Cassini Detects Hint of Fresh Air at Dione | Dione’s image gallery
