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Planetary News: Cassini-Huygens (2007)

New Images from Cassini Commemorate Ten Years in Space

 

October 18, 2007
Saturn family portrait (or, the view from Iapetus)
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Saturn family portrait (or, the view from Iapetus)
From a distance of roughly three million kilometers (two million miles), Cassini contemplated almost the entire system of Saturn, its rings, and its moons. From left to right, the moons are: Dione; Enceladus (just to the left of the rings); Mimas (just above the rings in front of the ring shadow on the left side of Saturn); Rhea (at roughly 11:00 at the edge of Saturn's disk); Tethys (to the right of and slightly above the rings); and finally orange Titan (lower right). Only one large moon is missing from the view, Iapetus, which lay almost directly behind Cassini when this family portrait was taken. Credit: NASA / JPL / SSI

This week marks ten years since NASA's Cassini spacecraft departed planet Earth and embarked on a circuitous journey of several billion miles across the solar system to the planet Saturn.

To celebrate ten years in space, the mission's imaging team released new images and movies of the ringed planet and some of its satellites.

Headlining this bounty are two expansive and stunning natural color mosaics of Saturn and its rings. One of these is the view seen by the spacecraft as it looked back towards Saturn from its close encounter with the moon Iapetus last month, and shows the shadow-draped planet surrounded by its rings and many of its major icy moons. Another view peers down onto the planet's swirling blue and gold clouds and its splendid rings from a vantage point high above Saturn's equator.

Along with several other colorful views of the planet, the team released dramatic vistas (including one stereo image) of the cratered faces of a few of the planet's icy moons, a high resolution survey of the main ring system in natural color, colorful glimpses of Titan, and an updated black-and-white map of Titan's surface.

Two new movies from Cassini also available. One sequence shows the detailed motions of the F-ring as its shepherd moon Prometheus approaches the ring, draws material from it, and gouges a channel in the dust-sized material remaining there.

There is also a breathtaking flyover movie of the 10-kilometer (6-mile) high equatorial ridge on Iapetus, acquired when Cassini was only a few thousand kilometers about the surface.

Imaging team leader Carolyn Porco at the Space Science Institute said, "To the thousands upon thousands of fellow explorers who have traveled along with us since we departed Earth 10 years ago, who have followed our adventures across the solar system and into orbit around Saturn, and who have since been as awestruck as we have at our findings there, we say, 'Happy Anniversary! It's been a pleasure flying with you.'"

The new images and movies are available at http://ciclops.org, http://www.nasa.gov/cassini and http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov.