The Cassini Orbiter provides us with a view that is impossible to get from Earth. From a distance of approximately 2 million km, it is able to capture Saturn in this state where only a thin sliver of the planet is lit by the Sun, while the rest is essentially dark for its “night” (except for some faint illumination where its rings are reflecting some light back onto the planet). The lit portion looks a lot like the crescent shape that we regularly see of our Moon.
The Cassini spacecraft captured a couple of awesome sights at once. We can clearly see Saturn’s north polar vortex with its very intriguing and vast hexagonal shape (this area on Saturn is believed to be wider than two Earths!) and the planet’s expansive rings. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 2.2 million kilometers from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-Cassini spacecraft angle of 43 degrees.
NASA’s Voyager 1 took this grainy picture of Enceladus on November 12, 1980 from a distance of 655,000 kilometers (393,000 miles).
Enceladus is the sixth largest moon/satellite of the planet Saturn and the fourteenth satellite, ordered by distance from the planet. It seems to be composed of (liquid) water under an icy surface. This creates a lack of visible surface detail on the satellite and makes it very different from other, larger Saturnian moons. Enceladus is named after the Giant Enceladus of Greek mythology.
Galileo Galilei was the first person to notice something strange around Saturn and in 1655, Christian Huygens studied the planet with a better telescope and wrote down his strange observations in code.
“It is girdled by a think flat ring, nowhere touching, included to the ecliptic.”
There are four main groups of rings around Saturn lying on the same plane, in-line with the planet’s equator. The rings extend outwards for about 170,000 miles. These rings are separated by distinct gaps and the rings are composed of pieces of ice coated rubble, orbiting the planet. More rings seem to be added over time as we get better data about Saturn. The source of Saturn’s rings are believed to be either the remnants of the original nebular material that formed Saturn or that they are what’s left of its former moon Veritas, which broke up because it came too close to the planet Saturn.
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.
