For today's blog posting I decided to check in with NASA's Cassini Mission. As previously reported, this spacecraft is exploring the gas giant planets.
The Cassini spacecraft took the above angled view of Saturn, showing the southern reaches of the planet with the rings on a dramatic diagonal. 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. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.8 million miles (2.9 million kilometers.
In the above image Saturn's moon Mimas peeps out from behind the larger moon Dione.
Mimas (246 miles, or 396 kilometers across) is near the bottom center of the image. Saturn's rings are also visible in the top right. This view looks toward the anti-Saturn side of Dione (698 miles, or 1,123 kilometers across). The image was taken on Dec. 12, 2011. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 377,000 miles (606,000 kilometers) from Mimas and approximately 56,000 miles (91,000 kilometers) from Dione.
In the above photo Saturn's moons Daphnis and Pan demonstrate their effects on the planet's rings. Daphnis (5 miles, or 8 kilometers across), on the left of the image, orbits in the Keeler Gap of the A ring. The moon's gravitational pull perturbs the orbits of the particles of the A ring forming the gap's edge and sculpts the edge into waves that move both in the ring's plane (radially) and out of the ring's plane.
Pan (17 miles, or 28 kilometers across), in the top right of the image, orbits in the Encke Gap of the A ring. The effects of that moon's gravity can be seen as dark wakes on the parts of the rings below Pan in the image, propagating towards the middle of the image. The image was taken on June 3, 2010. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 329,000 miles (529,000 kilometers) from Saturn.
In this image Cassini looks over the heavily cratered surface of Rhea during the spacecraft's flyby of the moon on March 10, 2012. The image was taken at a distance of approximately 27,000 miles (43,000 kilometers).
In this picture 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.
Enceladus (313 miles, or 504 kilometers across) is in the center of the image. Titan (3,200 miles, or 5,150 kilometers across) can faintly be seen in the background beyond the rings. The image was taken in on March 12, 2012. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 600,000 miles (1 million kilometers).
This image that looks across Saturn's rings finds the moon Prometheus, a shepherd of the thin F ring. Prometheus (53 miles, or 86 kilometers across) looks like a small white bulge near the F ring -- the outermost ring seen here -- above the center of the image. Kinky, discontinuous ringlets can also be seen in the Encke Gap of the A ring on the left of the image. The image was taken in on Jan. 1, 2012. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.1 million miles (1.8 million kilometers) from Prometheus.
A quintet of Saturn's moons come together in the above Cassini photo. 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.
Saturn's third-largest moon Dione can be seen in the above photo through the haze of its largest moon, Titan. This view looks toward Titan (3200 miles, 5150 kilometers across) and Dione (698 miles, 1123 kilometers across). The image was obtained on May 21, 2011 at a distance of approximately 1.4 million miles (2.3 million kilometers) from Titan 2 million miles (3.2 million kilometers) from Dione.
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 credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
NASA Web Page http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/multimedia/latest-images-collection_archive_1.html
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