Space pictures
The Cassini orbiter continues to provide some amazing pictures of the giant planet Saturn, its rings and many moons. In this instance it used its wide-angle camera from a distance of 897,000 kilometers from Saturn to capture part of the planet along with its baffling rings. Also (barely) seen in this image are two of Saturn’s tiny icy brotherly moons Prometheus (just above the A ring) and Epimetheus (further way, top left in the image).
The “dark sides” of celestial bodies are pretty interesting to look at and this is not exception. The ESA’s Rosetta craft took this rare picture of the dark side of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenk which it has been circling for the upcoming rendezvous with its Philae lander. Rosetta’s scientific imaging system (OSIRIS) snapped this picture in September, at a distance of just 19 kilometers from the comet and gives us some indications of surface structures.
November 12, 2014 is just five days away and this is when the historic mission to deploy the European Space Agency’s Philae lander on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko will occur. The Rosetta spacecraft has been orbiting and scouting this comet for many months. Rosetta used its on-board OSIRIS narrow-angle camera to take this picture of the comet’s surface from a distance of just 30 kilometers. The circled area is designated “Site J” – the primary landing site for Philae on this distant comet.
In what is believed to be a first, the high resolution camera on-board the Mars Orbiter may have discovered frost on a non-polar region of the planet. While photographing a crater in the Northern Plains, it may have discovered a thin layer of bright frost on part of the crater’s wall. Since carbon dioxide is not stable under (Martian) summer conditions, this is likely a patch of water ice.
NASA’s Cassini orbiter has taken many wonderful pictures of Saturn and its moons with this snapshot of Titan being one of them. The near-infrared, color mosaic of the giant planet sized Titan was taken by an interesting camera on the orbiter called the Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS). This camera takes pictures in 352 colours at the same time with wavelengths in the 300-5100 nano meter range, which is greater than what can be discerned by the human eye. This image shows the sun glinting off of Titan’s northern polar seas.
