A gas giant planet, rings, and shadows
Another beautiful view of Saturn as seen by the Cassini spacecraft.
Favorite Saturn pictures.
It doesn’t get much better than this. The Cassini spacecraft took this glorious image of Saturn in 2006.
What’s cool about Cassini? Like all the tough little spacecraft sent from Earth to explore our solar system – our own neighborhood of space – Cassini is like an extension of our own human vision. It lets us see planets close–up, as if we ourselves were riding along.
Cassini went into orbit around Saturn on June 30, 2004. It’s the first human–built spacecraft to explore this planet and its system of rings and moons FROM orbit. The few other craft that have visited Saturn – the Pioneers and the Voyagers – just shot past on their way out of the solar system.
It’s also very cool that this mission is an international collaboration between three space agencies: NASA in the U.S., the European Space Agency (which built the Huygens probe that plunged into the thick atmosphere of Saturn’s moon Titan) and the Italian Space Agency (which provided Cassini’s high–gain communication antenna). Seventeen nations ultimately contributed to this effort to let humanity see Saturn more clearly. And today, every day according to Cassini’s webiste, more than 250 scientists worldwide are studying the data streaming back from Saturn.
Maybe, as this century passes, we’ll see this sort of international scientific effort related to things like fresh water, food for Earth’s inhabitants, energy, global health, biodiversity, and so on. That would be good!
More favorite Saturn pictures:
Saturn’s cloudtops, viewed at an angle
Saturn backlit, Earth from a billion miles away
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The Cassini spacecraft is way cool and so are the rings!
Cassini is a great spacecraft. Galileo was a similar spacecraft for Jupiter. I’d like to see orbiters at Uranus and Neptune, too.
awesome
haa
Cassini is awesome I too would like to see them orbit Neptune and uranus also I think we would learn alot from them I also feel we need a manned space craft to go to saturn and Jupiter atleat to orbit maybe land on saturn I think the government ought to spend more money on space travel maybe we could even venture to the newly discovered planets in othe solar systems…If we could figure out how to travel faster up there
cool i ll love to on it
In response to Gary Manley’s comment:
I don’t think it’s possible, given current technology, to “land” on Saturn or Jupiter at all. Remember that these planets are gas giants; they have no surface to speak of. The best that could be done is for a craft to float somewhere in the planet’s atmosphere, like a fish in the ocean. Even then there are large issues to deal with, like the atmospheric pressure, and any weather activity, like Jupiter’s Great Red Spot.
Manned travel to the outer planets in general, using current propulsion technology, requires large amounts of time. Right now, I don’t think that humanity has come up with a viable solution for spending that long in space. Astronauts aboard the International Space Station only stay for 6 months at a time. A trip to Jupiter or Saturn would take years.