- Sep 14, 2004
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The majesty of Saturn overwhelms in this image from Cassini. Saturn's moon Tethys glides past in its orbit, and the icy rings mask the frigid northern latitudes with their shadows. Tethys is 1,071 kilometers (665 miles) across. The image was taken in visible green light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on June 10, 2005, at a distance of approximately 1.4 million kilometers (900,000 miles) from Saturn. The image scale is 80 kilometers (50 miles) per pixel. http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/image-details.cfm?imageID=1606
With this false-color view, Cassini presents the closest look yet at Saturn's small moon Epimetheus (epp-ee-MEE-thee-uss). The color of Epimetheus in this view appears to vary in a non-uniform way across the different facets of the moon's irregular surface. Usually, color differences among planetary terrains identify regional variations in the chemical composition of surface materials. However, surface color variations can also be caused by wavelength-dependent differences in the way a particular material reflects light at different lighting angles. The color variation in this false-color view suggests such "photometric effects" because the surface appears to have a more bluish cast in areas where sunlight strikes the surface at greater angles. http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/image-details.cfm?imageID=1501
Saturn's moon Mimas has many large craters, but its Herschel crater dwarfs all the rest. This large crater 130 kilometers wide (80 miles) has a prominent central peak, seen here almost exactly on the terminator. This crater is the moon's most prominent feature, and the impact that formed it probably nearly destroyed Mimas. Mimas is 398 kilometers (247 miles) across. This view is predominantly of the leading hemisphere of Mimas. The image has been rotated so that north on Mimas is up. This image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow angle camera on Jan. 16, 2005, at a distance of approximately 213,000 kilometers (132,000 miles) from Mimas and at a Sun-Mimas-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 84 degrees. Resolution in the original image was about 1.3 kilometers (0.8 miles) per pixel. A combination of spectral filters sensitive to ultraviolet and polarized light was used to obtain this view. Contrast was enhanced and the image was magnified by a factor of two to aid visibility. http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/image-details.cfm?imageID=1352
This natural color image shows Titan's upper atmosphere -- an active place where methane molecules are being broken apart by solar ultraviolet light and the byproducts combine to form compounds like ethane and acetylene. The haze preferentially scatters blue and ultraviolet wavelengths of light, making its complex layered structure more easily visible at the shorter wavelengths used in this image. http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/image-details.cfm?imageID=1512
Although it is far too cold for blossoming flowers, summer does bring storm clouds and presumably rain to Titan's south polar region. The observed persistence of convective storm activity in the region during the southern Titan summer has led scientists to speculate that the dark, footprint-shaped feature near the upper left could be a past or present reservoir for Titan's methane rains. http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/image-details.cfm?imageID=1581
A spectacular landslide within the low-brightness region of Iapetus's surface known as Cassini Regio is visible in this image from Cassini. Iapetus is one of the moons of Saturn. The landslide material appears to have collapsed from a scarp 15 kilometers high (9 miles) that forms the rim of an ancient 600 kilometer (375 mile) impact basin. Unconsolidated rubble from the landslide extends halfway across a conspicuous, 120-kilometer diameter (75-mile) flat-floored impact crater that lies just inside the basin scarp. Landslides are common geological phenomena on many planetary bodies, including Earth and Mars. The appearance of this landslide on an icy satellite with low-brightness cratered terrain is reminiscent of landslide features that were observed during NASA's Galileo mission on the Jovian satellite Callisto. The fact that the Iapetus landslide traveled many kilometers from the basin scarp could indicate that the surface material is very fine-grained, and perhaps was fluffed by mechanical forces that allowed the landslide debris to flow extended distances. http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/image-details.cfm?imageID=1277
During its historic close encounter with Phoebe, the Cassini spacecraft captured a series of high resolution images of the small moon, six of which have been put together to create this mosaic.
Phoebe shows an unusual variation in brightness over its surface due to the existence on some crater slopes and floors of bright material - thought to contain ice - on what is otherwise one of the darkest known bodies in the solar system. Bright streaks on the rim of the large crater in the North (up in this image) may have been revealed by the collapse of overlying darker material from the crater wall. The large crater below right-of-center shows evidence of layered deposits of alternating bright and dark material. A possible mechanism for this apparent layering was discussed in an earlier image release. http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/image-details.cfm?imageID=911
