Highest highlights from Saturn
Posted: Thursday, March 01, 2007 5:50 PM by Alan Boyle
NASA / JPL SSI |
The Cassini probe provided this top-down view of Saturn and its
rings. Click on the image to view more highlights from Cassini.
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The Cassini orbiter has delivered new views of Saturn as seen from a vantage point no other spacecraft has ever had, hundreds of thousands of miles above the planet. "Finally, here are the views that we've waited years for," Cassini imaging team leader Carolyn Porco says in today's update from NASA.
"Sailing high above Saturn and seeing the rings spread out beneath us like a giant, copper medallion is like exploring an alien world we've never seen before. It just doesn't look like the same place. It's so utterly breathtaking, it almost gives you vertigo," says Porco, a senior research scientist at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.
The observations come from an orbit inclined as much as 60 degrees above the ring plane. "Generally, we went to higher altitudes to be able to see down on the rings and see the polar regions of the planet," Porco told me in a follow-up interview.
The top-down perspective has provided all-around view of the planet's complex ring system as well as Saturn's polar storms. "This is the geometry we have to be in, in order to do that," she explained.
One picture has been processed to show nothing but rings, highlighting bright clumps in the material that have been found to move around over time. "It's a cottage industry to keep track of them," Porco joked. In the full-resolution picture, three moons can be spotted scattered around the rings.
A time-lapse sequence records Cassini's space trek through the plane of the rings, at a distance of 500,000 miles from Saturn (900,000 kilometers). You can watch six moons whizzing by over the course of 12 hours, compressed into just 38 seconds of video. (It's easier to spot the moons in this higher-resolution video.)
Cassini has been focusing on more than Saturn and the rings, of course: Yet another intriguing image of Titan, Saturn's biggest moon, was released last week - showing what appears to be a lake almost as big as the Caspian Sea in the north polar region. Radar imagery, meanwhile, has revealed an island the size of Hawaii's Big Island sitting in the middle of a large lake.
Scientists say these lakes are likely to consist of liquid hydrocarbons, and the fact that the biggest lakes are seen at high latitudes may be telling us something about the methane-driven climate patterns on Titan. Why is all this so intriguing? The smog-shrouded moon has often been compared to Earth in its early days - so as Cassini's study of the Saturnian system nears the three-year mark, you can expect to hear more about Titan in general and the lakes in particular.
To keep up with Cassini, check out NASA's Web portal as well as the home page for Porco's imaging team - and don't miss our updated slideshow of Cassini's greatest hits.
Update for 1:35 p.m. ET March 2: More highlights from the Saturn imagery get the documentary treatment in this video clip put together by NBC News.
