Titan is one of the 62 moons of planet Saturn, and is considered a very “planet like moon” being that it is the only natural satellite with a naturally dense atmosphere consisting mostly of nitrogen gas. The Cassini orbiter took this picture of Titan’s polar vortex from a distance of about 134,000 miles. The southern pole of Titan is in winter season but the Sun is still able to illuminate Titan’s polar vortex, while everything else is in shadow.
Cassini Orbiter spacecraft, which is a collaboration between NASA, the European Space Agency and Italian Space agency’s Cassini-Huygens mission, was used to come up with this composite view of Jupiter’s North Pole – while on its way to explore the planet Saturn and its moons. The onboard narrow-angle camera took numerous pictures over a period of two days in December 2000 and 36 of them were used to create this view, with a grid overlayed to divide the planet. The smallest visible features on this map are about 120 kilometers across and show a variety of colorful cloud features. The Great Red spot, the multi-coloured (red, brown and white) bands, and some small vortices are visible in this unique picture “looking down” on Jupiter.
This NASA video provides a nice slideshow of ultraviolet and infrared images of auroras at Saturn’s north and south poles. The images were taken by the Cassini spacecraft which is exploring the Saturn system (Cassini is currently on the Solstice mission) and the Hubble Space Telescope. Saturn has long fascinated humans with many historic and religious references – a topic to be explored further in the future.
