Ian
priscilla 1Images From Saturn
June 18th 2010 03:09
Saturn is the sixth planet from the Sun and the second largest planet in the Solar System, after Jupiter.
Saturn is well known for its prominent system of rings, consisting mostly of ice particles with a smaller amount of rocky debris and dust. Sixty-one known moons also orbit the planet
Cassini–Huygens and its obiter are NASA robotic spacecraft currently on a mission studying the planet Saturn and its many moons.
Collected here are a handful of recent images from the Saturnian system, sourced from the Big Picture at Boston.com here.
The Cassini spacecraft captured this natural color view of Saturn almost a month after the planet's August 2009 equinox. The shadow cast on the planet by the rings remains narrow. Mimas can be seen as a speck at lower left. Image obtained with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on September 4th, 2009 from approximately 2.7 million km (1.7 million mi) away from Saturn.
On December 25, 2009, Cassini was on the dark side of Saturn and took this image looking toward the moon Enceladus, seen at top, beyond the planet and its rings. Light passing through Saturn's atmosphere creates the bright arc seen from the top to the bottom of the image. At bottom center, the light passing through is blocked by shadows from the rings.
The moon Prometheus creates an intricate pattern of perturbation in Saturn's F ring while the moon Daphnis disturbs the A ring in this image taken after the planet's August 2009 equinox. Prometheus (86 km, or 53 mi across) can be seen between the thin F ring and the A ring in the middle left of the image. The gravity of potato-shaped Prometheus periodically creates streamer-channels in the F ring. Near the bottom of the image, Daphnis (8 km, or 5 mi across) can be seen creating edge waves in the Keeler Gap of the A ring. The moon has an inclined orbit and its gravitational pull perturbs the orbits of the particles of the A ring, forming the Keeler Gap's edge, and sculpts the edge into waves having both horizontal (radial) and out-of-plane components. Image acquired on Aug. 22, 2009 with a scale of 12 km (7 mi) per pixel.
Cassini approaches close to the moon Enceladus on November 21, 2009, approximately 2,028 km away, showing fissures and ridges in the icy surface.
The shadow of Saturn's largest moon darkens a huge portion of the gas giant planet. Titan (5,150 km, or 3,200 mi across) is not pictured here, but its shadow is elongated across Saturn's upper atmosphere. The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on November 7th, 2009 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 752 nanometers. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 2.1 million km (1.3 million mi) from Saturn.
Saturn is well known for its prominent system of rings, consisting mostly of ice particles with a smaller amount of rocky debris and dust. Sixty-one known moons also orbit the planet
Cassini–Huygens and its obiter are NASA robotic spacecraft currently on a mission studying the planet Saturn and its many moons.
Collected here are a handful of recent images from the Saturnian system, sourced from the Big Picture at Boston.com here.
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