This image from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft shows three moons — Rhea (top), Titan and Mimas (bottom). Titan appears fuzzy because we only see its cloud layers and light refracts within its atmosphere, extending the crescent. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute.The three moons shown here — Titan (3,200 miles or 5,150 kilometres across), Mimas (246 miles or 396 kilometres across), and Rhea (949 miles or 1,527 kilometres across) — show marked contrasts. Titan, the largest moon in this image, appears fuzzy because we only see its cloud layers. And because Titan’s atmosphere refracts light around the moon, its crescent “wraps” just a little further around the moon than it would on an airless body. Rhea (upper left) appears rough because its icy surface is heavily cratered. And a close inspection of Mimas (centre bottom), though difficult to see at this scale, shows surface irregularities due to its own violent history.
This view looks toward the anti-Saturn hemisphere of Titan. North on Titan is up. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on March 25, 2015.
The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.2 million miles (2.0 million kilometres) from Titan where the image scale is 75 miles (121 kilometres) per pixel. Mimas was 1.9 million miles (3.1 million kilometres) away with an image scale of 11.4 miles (18.4 kilometers) per pixel, while Rhea was 2.2 million miles (3.5 million kilometres) away with an image scale of 13.1 miles (21.1 kilometres) per pixel.
NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has begun returning its best-ever views of the northern extremes of Saturn’s icy, ocean-bearing moon Enceladus. Scientists expected the north polar region of Enceladus to be heavily cratered, based on low-resolution images from the Voyager mission, but the new high-resolution Cassini images show a landscape of stark contrasts.
Saturn’s clouds have roots deeper inside the planet’s atmosphere than scientists previously thought, and Saturn’s rings — now believed to have formed in the last 200 million years — appear to be raining organic molecules down on the planet, according to observations made by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft last year in the final weeks of its mission.
Ground controllers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory confirmed Thursday the Cassini spacecraft survived its first trip between Saturn and its rings, the closest any probe has ever come to the planet.
