Posts tagged with ‘saturn’

Photos taken by the Huygens probe as it was landing on the moon Titan

On January 14, 2005, the Huygens space probe landed on the surface of Saturn’s moon Titan (shown left). Organized as a joint mission by the Italian Space Agency, ESA and NASA, the Huygens’ touchdown marked the first spacecraft landing in the outer solar system and still remains the most distant landing of any craft launched from Earth to this day.

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Check out this stunning photo of a backlit Saturn, taken by the Cassini probe

On Oct. 17, 2012, during its 174th orbit around the gas giant, Cassini was deliberately positioned within Saturn’s shadow, a perfect location from which to look in the direction of the sun and take a backlit view of the rings and the dark side of the planet. Looking back towards the sun is a geometry referred to by planetary scientists as “high solar phase;” near the center of your target’s shadow is the highest phase possible. This is a very scientifically advantageous and coveted viewing position, as it can reveal details about both the rings and atmosphere that cannot be seen in lower solar phase.

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Crazy image of the gigantic swirling vortex over Saturn’s north pole

Being a gas giant, Saturn is full of storms. But the most impressive of all is the massive raging vortex at Saturn’s north pole. Taken from NASA’s Cassini probe.

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The most gorgeous photo of Saturn’s moon Enceladus yet

Taken in January of last year, this is probably the best image you’ll ever see of Enceladus, not just because of the detail, but because the moon was positioned just so that Saturn gave it just enough shadow to provide detail. Normally, the icy moon of Enceladus would be bright white.

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Gorgeous photo of Titan and its sister moon Dionne, taken from the Cassini spacecraft

This breathtaking image is actually a composite of the most recent photos sent back from Cassini as it travels around Saturn and its moons.

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Saturn’s moon Enceladus appears to be covered in a fine layer of snow. SKI TRIP!

Saturn’s moon Enceladus appears to be cloaked in drifts of powdery snow around 330 feet (100 meters) thick, scientists announced this week.

The researchers think superfine snowflakes are blasted out of geyser-like jets, which emanate from long fissures called tiger stripes on the moon’s southern hemisphere. Some of the snow from these plumes falls back to the moon’s surface, coating older fractures and craters in a slow process of accumulation.

“The particles are only a fraction of a millimeter in size … even finer than talcum powder,” study leader Paul Schenk, a planetary scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas, said in a statement. “This would make for the finest powder a skier could hope for.”

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This picture of Saturn is very real, very gorgeous. I want to move to Saturn right now.

In the shadow of Saturn, unexpected wonders appear. The robotic Cassini spacecraft now orbiting Saturn drifted in giant planet’s shadow for about 12 hours in 2006 and looked back toward the eclipsed Sun. Cassini saw a view unlike any other. First, the night side of Saturn is seen to be partly lit by light reflected from its own majestic ring system. Next, the rings themselves appear dark when silhouetted against Saturn, but quite bright when viewed away from Saturn, slightly scattering sunlight, in this exaggerated color image. Saturn’s rings light up so much that new rings were discovered, although they are hard to see in the image. Seen in spectacular detail, however, is Saturn’s E ring, the ring created by the newly discovered ice-fountains of the moon Enceladus and the outermost ring visible above. Far in the distance, at the left, just above the bright main rings, is the almost ignorable pale blue dot of Earth.

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Gigantic mega storm from hell raging across the face of Saturn

One of the most violent weather events in the Solar System began to erupt on Saturn last December and is still enthralling astronomers, the British journal Nature reports.

Two studies draw on observations by professional and amateur astronomers using a broad range of equipment, from relatively small ground-based telescopes to NASA’s scoutcraft Cassini. Saturn, like Jupiter, is no stranger to convective storms. It too is a ‘gas giant’, a planet comprising layers of thick, roiling gases, rather than a rock, like Earth, Mars, Venus and Mercury. The difference, though, is that Jupiter’s mega-storms tend to erupt unexpectedly, but Saturn’s monster storms occur almost periodically.

Storms occur on average once every Saturnian year - nearly 29.5 Earth years - and appear to be linked to the summer solstice, when the planet’s orbit brings it a bit closer to the Sun and its atmosphere warms a little. The event is known as the Great White Spot (a counterpart to the swirling Great Red Spot on Jupiter) because of the mass of brilliant white storm clouds that erupt in the upper atmosphere.

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