Word: cassini
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...knew from Voyager that these phenomena probably existed," says Cassini planetary scientist Josh Colwell, "but there's never been anything this clear. The resolution in these pictures is unprecedented." Says an ecstatic Porco: "I'm surprised at how surprised I am by the beauty of these images...
...pictures from Cassini reveal, the interaction of this orbiting material can create bizarre effects. The edge of one ring shows elegant scalloping, presumably caused by the gravitational wake of a moon cruising alongside it. As the moon sails by at predictable intervals, the random collisions of ring particles become more rhythmic, forming tidy peaks and troughs...
They'll get better. Although Cassini will never again be as close to the rings as it was last week, it took only black-and-white pictures on the way into orbit. From now on, it will shoot between 100 and 200 images a day, most of them in color. The spacecraft will assemble mosaics of the rings, photographing them section by section and arranging the pictures in sequence from the center of the bands...
...Cassini-Huygens traveled all the way to Saturn and returned nothing but data on the planet and its rings, the mission would probably still be judged a success. Yet the true scientific goods will come when the spacecraft trains its instruments on the swirl of Saturnian moons. It would be nearly impossible for one ship to visit all 31 known satellites in Saturn's litter, so NASA has selected nine of them, both for their scientific promise and their comparatively convenient locations. The exotic names of the chosen moons--Phoebe, Titan, Iapetus, Enceladus, Mimas, Tethys, Hyperion, Dione and Rhea--hint...
...trailing edge white. There are many theories advanced for this--including the possibility that there are hemisphere-wide volcanoes or that the moon is picking up dust as it moves through its orbit, staining its face and leaving the other side clean. "We have all kinds of questions," says Cassini physicist Larry Soderblum. "Were there volcanoes? Were there oceans of some mystical hydrocarbon that froze...