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Image: NASA/JPL-CalTech/Space Science Institute
Look closely at the photo above and you can pick out 5 of Saturn's 60 natural satellites (Janus, Pandora, Enceladus, Mimas, and Rhea) as well as the planet's iconic rings:
A quintet of Saturn's moons come together in the Cassini spacecraft's field of view for this portrait.
Janus (179 kilometers, or 111 miles across) is on the far left. Pandora (81 kilometers, or 50 miles across) orbits between the A ring and the thin F ring near the middle of the image. Brightly reflective Enceladus (504 kilometers, or 313 miles across) appears above the center of the image. Saturn's second largest moon, Rhea (1,528 kilometers, or 949 miles across), is bisected by the right edge of the image. The smaller moon Mimas (396 kilometers, or 246 miles across) can be seen beyond Rhea also on the right side of the image.
This view looks toward the northern, sunlit side of the rings from just above the ringplane. Rhea is closest to Cassini here. The rings are beyond Rhea and Mimas. Enceladus is beyond the rings.
The image was taken in visible green light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on July 29, 2011. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.1 million kilometers (684,000 miles) from Rhea and 1.8 million kilometers (1.1 million miles) from Enceladus. Image scale is 7 kilometers (4 miles) per pixel on Rhea and 11 kilometers (7 miles) per pixel on Enceladus.
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What do you get when you pair incredible footage of Saturn and its moons with Nine Inch Nails? An awe inspiring black and white video showing clips NASA’s Cassini spacecraft took during its ongoing mission to the ringed planet.
If you haven’t been following the Cassini spacecraft’s second mission to Saturn, here’s a video that will hook you in. It features incredible black-and-white images of Saturn and its moons, all captured by Cassini’s “camera” — also known as the Cassini-Huygens Imaging Science Subsystem — and designer/director Chris Abbas, who edited together footage from Cassini’s archive and set it to a great Nine Inch Nails soundtrack.
Image: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona/University of Leicester
Earth is not the only planet with the phenomenon of polar lights, Saturn has ‘em too! NASA’s Cassini orbiter captured infrared images that revealed the stunning sights. From National Geographic’s Breaking Orbit Blog:
In the picture, the ring of green auroras might seem faint, but that curtain of light is shooting up about 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) from the cloud tops of Saturn’s south polar region.
In general, astronomers think auroras on Saturn occur via a process similar to the one that creates Earth’s polar lights.
Charged particles from the sun flow along the planet’s magnetic field lines, hitting the upper atmosphere at the poles. There the particles excite (or transfer energy to) atoms in the atmosphere, and the excited atoms release the excess energy as light.
In Saturn’s case, auroras can also be sparked by electromagnetic waves generated when the planet’s moons move through the charged gas that fills Saturn’s magnetosphere, the bubble around the planet created by its magnetic field.
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The picture above was taken by NASA’s Cassini space probe of Titan, a moon of Saturn. The glint of light at the top of the moon is of a lake — the first non-Earth lake ever seen. In Popular Science, Jeremy Hsu writes:
A haze of methane enshrouds Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, and prevents scientists from seeing most sunlight reflections off the surface. But NASA’s Cassini orbiter managed to snap a stunning image of sunlight glinting off a huge, liquid methane lake — a smoking gun that confirms liquid in the northern hemisphere.
Titan remains the only other planetary body besides Earth known to have liquid on its surface, and appears eerily similar to our world as far as rain and other weather patterns. But instead of liquid water, methane and ethane drizzle down from Titan’s atmosphere and fill the many lakes dotting the moon.
The newly revealed visual and infrared image was taken back on July 8, just as the sun had begun to directly shine upon the northern lakes near the start of spring on Titan. Scientists matched the reflection to the southern shoreline of Kraken Mare, a lake that covers almost 150,000 square miles and sits in the northern hemisphere.
Link | Photo: NASA
Surprise! Astronomers analyzing images taken by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft have found that Saturn has yet another moon in one of its outermost rings:
A faint pinprick of light embedded in one of Saturn’s outermost rings is now the 61st moon known to be circling the giant planet, astronomers announced today. [...]
Based on its brightness, astronomers estimate that the as-yet-unnamed moon is a third of a mile (half a kilometer) wide. This is tiny as far as moons go, but the object is likely the largest in its neighborhood.
