Saturn’s Wispy F Ring
(Source: Wired)
Dwarfed by Saturn
Saturn’s moon Mimas appears near Saturn, dwarfed by its parent planet in this image. Mimas (246 miles, or 396 kilometers across) appears tiny compared to the storms clearly visible in far northern and southern hemispheres of Saturn. This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 18 degrees below the ringplane. North on Saturn is up and rotated 27 degrees to the left.
“I do know that kind fate allowed me to find a couple of nice ideas after many years of feverish labor,” Einstein (at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 1940) once wrote to a fellow physicist.
(Source: smithsonianmag.com)
Angling Saturn
The Cassini spacecraft takes an angled view toward Saturn, showing the southern reaches of the planet with the rings on a dramatic diagonal.
North on Saturn is up and rotated 16 degrees to the left. This view looks toward the southern, unilluminated side of the rings from about 14 degrees below the ringplane. The rings cast wide shadows on the planet’s southern hemisphere.
The moon Enceladus (313 miles, or 504 kilometers across) appears as a small, bright speck in the lower left of the image.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on June 15, 2012 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 752 nanometers. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.8 million miles (2.9 million kilometers) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 72 degrees. Image scale is 11 miles (17 kilometers) 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 in Washington. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
Shadow Dancing
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
Saturn’s moon Daphnis makes waves in the Keeler Gap of the planet’s A ring in this view taken around the time of Saturn’s August 2009 equinox. Shadows cast by Daphnis fall on the A ring, just below the center of the image. The image was taken in visible light on Aug. 16, 2009. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.3 million miles (2.1 million kilometers) from Saturn.
Beauty in Black and White
1. Southern Moon Lights
Moons Tethys and Rhea are visible beyond Saturn’s southern hemisphere. They orbit in the plane of the planet’s rings, but from this vantage point appear to be below the planet. Tethys is near the center of the image, and Rhea is on the lower right. Image taken June 29,2010
2. Storms in the South
Wind speeds on Saturn’s surface can reach speeds up to 1,100 miles per hour, and the planet also has lightning storms. Its atmosphere is composed of hydrogen and small amounts of helium and methane. It is the only planet in our solar system that is less dense than water (by about 30 percent). This image was taken April 30, 2010.
3. Making the Rounds
The moon Tethys makes its way around Saturn. Tethys is an icy moon, thought to be composed almost entirely of liquid ice all the way through because its density is almost exactly that of water. This image was taken June 9, 2010.
4. Moon Waves
In the rings on the left, the moon Daphnis (5 miles across) affects ring material as it orbits. The material on the inner edge of Daphnis orbits faster than the moon, and the material on the outer edge orbits more slowly, which causes the waves. On the right, Pan (17 miles across) also causes waves.
