Emily LakdawallaJan 02, 2006

Cassini, Day By Day

I've just resurrected a feature on the site that has been lost since our redesign: the "Cassini, Day By Day" pages. I started building these after I got frustrated trying to follow the mission through JPL's raw image website. Don't get me wrong -- I have no complaints about the raw image website. The fact that they provide us such a window into what is going on every day with the Cassini mission is something that I am overwhelmingly grateful for. The problem is that there are so many pictures that it's very hard to use the official site to keep track of what they were looking at, when, and why. So I started building a set of pages where I post one image from each set of observations that Cassini performs, and keep a list of what kinds of pictures were taken during each observation, and link it to the plans for the tour. Some of this information I get from David Seal over in Cassini mission planning, and some of it I get from Joe Knapp's Cassini Cam site. I have a lot of work to do to go back through the mission, but I will do my best to keep this site reasonably up-to-date, if only so that I can keep up with what's going on!

For fun, I threw together an animation of a recent cool set of images captured by Cassini, one of many "mutual event" animations in which it holds still on one moon while watching others pass by in the same field of view:

Mutual event of Janus, Epimetheus, and Dione
Mutual event of Janus, Epimetheus, and Dione Cassini captured three of Saturn's moons in motion on 30 December 2005. The camera held still on Janus as larger Dione passed behind it (coming from the right) and smaller Epimetheus hovered overhead.Image: NASA / JPL-Caltech / SSI / Emily Lakdawalla

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