Brown, team leader for the Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS) The University of Arizona has more planetary scientists and students involved in the Cassini-Huygens mission than any other university. Karkoschka is a member of the DISR science team. Martin Tomasko of UA's Lunar and Planetary Lab leads the Descent Imager Spectral Radiometer (DISR) experiment that will take data during the probe's two-or-more-hour descent through Titan's atmosphere. Six months later it will release its piggybacked Huygens probe for descent through Titan's thick atmosphere. (Former UA planetary sciences Professor Bradford Smith headed the Voyager imaging team.) Since 1990, Hubble has produced high-resolution Saturn images, tracking storms and auroral activity while providing crisp views of the rings over time and from various angles.Ĭassini will begin a four-year mission in orbit around Saturn when it arrives on JPDT (JUTC). NASA's Voyager-2 space probe flew by Saturn in August 1981. Over two decades have passed since a spacecraft last visited Saturn. The differences between the Hubble and Cassini images are mainly due to the different sets of filters used. Enceladus, one of Saturn's 31 known moons, appears near the south pole at the bottom of the image. The view is from 13 degrees below the equator. The narrow angle image taken May 16, when the spacecraft was 24.3 million kilometers (15.1 million miles) from Saturn, was made using a combination of red, green and blue filters. Even the magnificent rings, at nearly their maximum tilt toward Earth, show subtle hues, which suggest the trace chemical differences in their icy composition.Ĭassini has two cameras, a wide angle and a narrow angle. Like Jupiter, all bands are parallel to Saturn's equator. Saturn displays its familiar banded structure, and haze and clouds of various altitudes. The subtle pastel colors of ammonia-methane clouds trace a variety of atmospheric dynamics. "This renders colors similar to what an astronaut would see if it were possible to watch Saturn through the Hubble Space Telescope," he said. Karkoschka combined camera exposures in four filters (blue, blue-green, green, and red) into Hubble's new Saturn image. Cassini's images grew sharper than Hubble's when the spacecraft came to within 23 million kilometers (14 million miles) of Saturn earlier this month.
Cassini will ultimately far exceed the resolution of Hubble during its close encounter with Saturn. Hubble's exquisite optics, coupled with the high resolution of its Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), allow it to take pictures of Saturn which are nearly as sharp as Cassini's, even though Hubble is nearly a billion miles farther from Saturn than Cassini is. UA Professor Alfred McEwen is a member of the ISS team. Starting this week, the Cassini Imaging Team will be releasing more new views of the ringed planet on the Cassini Imaging Team website at, said ISS team leader Carolyn Porco of the Space Science Institute in Boulder. Cassini is still about 20 million kilometers (about 12.4 million miles) away and only 36 days from reaching Saturn. When Cassini returned its picture of Saturn on May 16, it was so close to the planet that the Imaging Science Subsystem (ISS) narrow-angle camera could not fit the whole planet in its field-of-view. Electronic image files and additional information are online at. The picture is so sharp that many individual ringlets can be seen in the planet's ring plane. For the first time, astronomers can compare equally sharp views of Saturn from two very different perspectives.Įrich Karkoschka of the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory took Hubble's latest view of Saturn on March 22, 2004. Cassini has a very different view of Saturn than Hubble's Earth-centered view.
Hurt, T.As the Cassini spacecraft hurtles toward a rendezvous with Saturn on June 30 (July 1, Universal Time), both Cassini and the Earth-orbiting Hubble Space Telescope snapped spectacular pictures of the planet and its magnificent rings.Ĭassini is approaching Saturn at an oblique angle to the sun and from below the ecliptic plane. Observations from space telescopes have revealed thousands of exoplanets of different of sizes, compositions, temperatures, and atmospheres, including seven rocky Earth-sized planets of the TRAPPIST-1 system, 40 light-years from Earth (artist’s illustration).
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