The planet Saturn is seen in all its glory in the first batch of color images taken by the Cassini spacecraft on its way to the ringed planet, which will last for another 20 months
The planet Saturn is seen in all its glory in the first batch of color images taken by the Cassini spacecraft on its way to the ringed planet, which will last for another 20 months.
The image was taken at a distance of 285 million kilometers, almost twice the distance between the Earth and the Sun. The photo was taken as part of an engineering experiment and it was performed with several filters on October 21, 2002.
It is now summer in Saturn's southern hemisphere. The sun is 27 degrees below the equator and creates a shadow of the rings. The shadow extends partially across the rings, leaving the outer A ring in full sunlight. The previous spacecraft that visited Saturn, Voyager 2 (in 1979) arrived in early spring in the Northern Hemisphere. Most of the phenomena photographed by Voyager - apparent spots on the rings, clouds and nebulae in the atmosphere, as well as moons used as shepherds for the rings - all these are not visible in the current Cassini image. But there is nothing to worry about. Cassini will spend several years near Saturn, unlike Voyager which just passed by.
Titan, Saturn's largest moon is visible in the upper left. It is the only moon that can be clearly seen from a distance. In the photo you can see that the brightness of Titan is 3 times greater than that of Saturn. Titan is also the attraction for scientists on the Cassini-Huygens mission. They will study its nebulous atmosphere as well as land special equipment on its surface to look for evidence of organic processes similar to those on the early Earth, before life formed.
Cassini will enter orbit around Saturn on July 1, 2004. It will release the hitchhiking spacecraft, Huygens (by the way, of the European Space Agency), which will glide into Titan's atmosphere on January 14, 2005.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a joint mission of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency.
