Recent Cassini Images

For today's blog posting I decided to check in with the Cassini spacecraft and see what new images have been posted.  The images and information below are from the website http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/ . 

The above image shows the northern hemisphere of the ringed planet.  Saturn's winds race furiously around the planet, blowing at speeds in excess of 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) per hour at the equator. As they do so, they form distinct belts and zones which encircle the planet's pole, as well as its famous hexagon. These zonal winds spin off swirls and eddies, which are significant storms in their own right.

 

The above photo shows Saturn, some if its rings, and the shadows of the rings cast onto the planet's surface.  Saturn's rings cast shadows on the planet, except their shadows appear to be inside out! The edge of the outermost A ring can be seen at the top left corner of the image. Moving towards the bottom of the page, one can see the faint Cassini Division, the opaque B ring and the innermost C ring, which contains several ringlets that appear dark against Saturn in this geometry. The bottom half of the image features the shadows of these rings in reverse order superposed against the disk of the planet: the C ring, the B ring, the Cassini Division and the inner half of the A ring. 

This view from NASA's Cassini spacecraft features the planet Uranus, imaged by Cassini for the first time. Uranus is the pale blue dot in the upper left portion of the photo.  The planet's natural color is blue because its visible atmosphere contains methane gas and few aerosols or clouds. Methane on Uranus – and its sapphire-colored sibling, Neptune – absorbs red wavelengths of incoming sunlight, but allows blue wavelengths to escape back into space, resulting in the predominantly bluish color seen here.

The bright ring cutting across the image center is Saturn's narrow F ring.  Uranus was approximately 28.6 astronomical units from Cassini and Saturn when this view was obtained. An astronomical unit is the average distance from Earth to the sun, equal to 93,000,000 miles (150,000,000 kilometers).
 

The above diagram illustrates the possible interior of Saturn's moon Enceladus based on a gravity investigation by NASA's Cassini spacecraft and NASA's Deep Space Network, reported in April 2014. The gravity measurements suggest an ice outer shell and a low density, rocky core with a regional water ocean sandwiched in between at high southern latitudes.

Views from Cassini's imaging science subsystem were used to depict the surface geology of Enceladus and the plume of water jets gushing from fractures near the moon's south pole.
Enceladus is 313 miles (504 kilometers) in diameter.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute