This life-like movie sequence captures Saturn's rings during a ring plane crossing--which Cassini makes twice per orbit--from the spacecraft's point of view. The movie begins with a view of the sunlit side of the rings. As the spacecraft speeds from south to north, the rings appear to tilt downward and collapse to a thin plane, and then open again to reveal the un-illuminated side of the ring plane, where sunlight filters through only dimly.
The Great Crossing --
The Movie (7 MB)
posted by y2karl
on Apr 22, 2007 -
13 comments
Unidentified Titan Object Saturn's moon Titan shows an unusual bright spot that has scientists mystified. The spot, approximately the size and shape of West Virginia, is just southeast of the bright region called Xanadu and is visible to multiple instruments on the Cassini spacecraft.
posted by Diamornte
on May 25, 2005 -
32 comments
Saturn's enigmatic moon
Titan holds on to its mysteries.
Radar images reveal quite a bit of variation but no clear interpretation. The hazy atmosphere prevents the sudden shock of discovery that characterized the Voyager and Galileo flybys of the moons of Jupiter, revealing little more than
fuzzy Rorschach blobs. With less than 1% of the surface mapped, researchers suspect that Titan has a
young surface shaped by processes that have yet to be revealed.
posted by KirkJobSluder
on Nov 5, 2004 -
5 comments
"Standard orbit, aye, sir." Following a nail-biting ring-plane crossing and 96-minute engine burn,
Cassini has arrived, and is now in orbit around Saturn, 84 light-minutes away, sending in
the first closeup pictures of the planet's rings. Also see the Planetary Society's
details on the Orbit Insertion, Spaceflight Now's
mission updates in weblog-like format, and
raw images from the spacecraft as they come. Kudos, JPL! (Aside: the press has yet to tire of
Lord of the Rings references.)
posted by brownpau
on Jul 1, 2004 -
14 comments
give jack saturn his old job back! of course one could assault me for posting something found from the infamous
j.ko that has to do with
blogger - and lord knows there's enough of those threads already - but i found this to be too interesting to pass up.
if you weren't already aware, pyra [blogger's parent company/alter ego] is
looking for someone to handle customer support and jack saturn [who had the job before and hasn't had one since] is looking to get his job back. i don't know about anyone else, but i'd like to see the old team have the chance to come back....
posted by boogah
on Jul 25, 2002 -
62 comments
The Solar System Simulator 'is
designed to simulate - as realistically as possible - what one would actually see from any point in the Solar System. The software looks up the positions of the Sun, planets and satellites from ephemeris files developed here at JPL, as well as star positions and colors from a variety of stellar databasees, and uses special-purpose renderers to draw a color scene. Texture maps for each of the planets and physical models for planetary rings have been derived (in most cases) from scientific data collected by various JPL spacecraft.' Far too complicated for me to even begin to understand, still I've always wondered what Saturn
looks like from Triton.
posted by RobertLoch
on Mar 27, 2002 -
15 comments
