Cassini spacecraft image: Saturn's moons Tethys, Hyperion and Prometheus

The Cassini spacecraft captures a rare family photo of three of Saturn's moons that couldn't be more different from each other!

As the largest of the three, Tethys (image center) is round and has a variety of terrains across its surface.

Meanwhile, Hyperion (to the upper-left of Tethys) is the "wild one" with a chaotic spin and Prometheus (lower-left) is a tiny moon that busies itself sculpting the F ring.

To learn more about the surface of Tethys (660 miles, or 1,062 kilometers across), see PIA17164.

More on the chaotic spin of Hyperion (168 miles, or 270 kilometers across) can be found at PIA07683, and discover more about the role of Prometheus (53 miles, or 86 kilometers across) in shaping the F ring in PIA12786.

This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 1 degree above the ringplane. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on July 14, 2014.

The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.2 million miles (1.9 million kilometers) from Tethys and at a Sun-Tethys-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 22 degrees.

Image scale is 7 miles (11 kilometers) per pixel.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency.

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C.

The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL.

The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.

NASA Cassini Image: Wispy cracks of Dione

Image courtesy NASA /JPL-Caltech /Space Science Institute.

Although the crack-like features seen here on Dione's surface appear wispy and faded, they are in reality a series of geologically fresh fractures!

Lit terrain seen here is on the trailing hemisphere of Dione.

North on Dione (698 miles, or 1,123 kilometers across) is up and rotated 29 degrees to the left.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Sept. 10, 2013.

The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 554,000 miles (892,000 kilometers) from Dione. Image scale is three miles (five kilometers) per pixel.

See PIA10560 to learn more about Dione's wispy terrain.

NASA's Cassini Spacecraft: Saturn's rings cast shadows on the planet

The spectacular rings of Saturn cast dark shadows on the ringed planet as the winter season approaches in Saturn's southern hemisphere in this view from the Cassini spacecraft. 

With the cold season comes a blue hue on Saturn that is likely caused by a drop in ultraviolet sunlight and haze it produces. This image was taken on July 29, 2013 and released on Dec. 23.

Credit: NASA /JPL-Caltech /Space Science Institute

NASA's Cassini spacecraft has capped 2013 with a spectacular new collection of Saturn photos showcasing the planet's beauty, as well with its trademark rings and strange moons.

The newly released Saturn photos by Cassini include two views of Enceladus, Saturn's sixth-largest moon. Enceladus is a winter-appropriate ice world.

Geysers at its poles shoot ice particles into space, some of which make it into orbit around Saturn. Some of this space "snow" becomes part of Saturn's E ring, Saturn's second outermost ring that is made of microscopic particles.

Other images highlight Saturn's largest moon, Titan. There are no jolly elves at Titan's north pole; liquid methane and ethane seas appear as splotchy features near the moon's poles.

At the south pole, a high-altitude vortex swirls. The hazy orange atmosphere of Titan is thought to resemble the atmosphere of early Earth.

NASA Cassini Spacecraft Image: Saturn and its iconic rings

The Cassini spacecraft captured this image with its wide-angle camera on Aug. 12, 2013, using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 728 nanometers.

Credit: NASA /JPL-Caltech /Space Science Institute

NASA released a new infrared view of Saturn from the Cassini spacecraft, in which the ringed planet's thick clouds have the soft feel of an "impressionist's painting."

Looking toward the sunlit side of Saturn's rings, the black-and-white image was captured with the Cassini spacecraft's wide-angle camera on Aug. 12, 2013, from about 994,000 miles (1.6 million kilometers) away from Saturn's surface, according to NASA.

The camera used a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of near-infrared light, showing the planet at a scale of 57 miles (92 km) per pixel.

About a month earlier, the Cassini probe captured an even more unusual image of Saturn. On July 19, 2013, spacecraft looked back at the planet when the sun was in a total eclipse.

The phenomenon provided a stunning backlight for Saturn's rings and a rare unobstructed view of Earth, which appeared as a tiny speck of light. Mars and Venus were also captured in the image.

It can be difficult to tease out Saturn's atmosphere from its interior since the planet has no solid surface.

Like its fellow gas giant Jupiter, Saturn boasts wide bands of clouds, which can be pushed along by fast-moving winds. NASA's Voyager mission recorded wind speeds of more than 1,100 mph (1,800 kph) at Saturn's equator.

The Cassini mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Italian Space Agency.

It launched in 1997 and settled into orbit around Saturn in July 2004 to explore the planet as well as its rings and its many moons.

In 2005, Cassini deployed a lander called Huygens towards Titan, Saturn's largest moon, to collect new information about the strangely Earth-like celestial body.

Cassini's mission is expected to continue until 2017, after which it will hurl itself into Saturn's atmosphere and burn up.

NASA Cassini spacecraft obtains best views of Saturn hexagon

This colourful view from NASA's Cassini mission is the highest-resolution view of the unique six-sided jet stream at Saturn's north pole known as "the hexagon." 

This movie, made from images obtained by Cassini's imaging cameras, is the first to show the hexagon in colour filters, and the first movie to show a complete view from the north pole down to about 70 degrees north latitude. 

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech /SSI/Hampton

NASA's Cassini spacecraft has obtained the highest-resolution movie yet of a unique six-sided jet stream, known as the hexagon, around Saturn's north pole.

This is the first hexagon movie of its kind, using color filters, and the first to show a complete view of the top of Saturn down to about 70 degrees latitude.

Spanning about 20,000 miles (30,000 kilometers) across, the hexagon is a wavy jet stream of 200-mile-per-hour winds (about 322 kilometers per hour) with a massive, rotating storm at the center.

There is no weather feature exactly, consistently like this anywhere else in the solar system.

"The hexagon is just a current of air, and weather features out there that share similarities to this are notoriously turbulent and unstable," said Andrew Ingersoll, a Cassini imaging team member at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

"A hurricane on Earth typically lasts a week, but this has been here for decades—and who knows—maybe centuries."

Weather patterns on Earth are interrupted when they encounter friction from landforms or ice caps.

Scientists suspect the stability of the hexagon has something to do with the lack of solid landforms on Saturn, which is essentially a giant ball of gas.

Better views of the hexagon are available now because the sun began to illuminate its interior in late 2012.

Cassini captured images of the hexagon over a 10-hour time span with high-resolution cameras, giving scientists a good look at the motion of cloud structures within.

This infrared movie from NASA's Cassini mission shows the churning of the curious six-sided jet stream at Saturn's north pole known as "the hexagon."

The movie, which was sped up here, covers 2 hours and 45 minutes in real time. It was made from data obtained by Cassini's visual and infrared mapping spectrometer in the 5-micron wavelength of radiation. 

This channel shows clouds in silhouette against infrared light emanating from Saturn's interior.

These clouds are composed of relatively large particles and are thick, blocking light so they appear dark.

These kinds of clouds tend to lie deep in Saturn's atmosphere, at about 3 bars of pressure. 

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

They saw the storm around the pole, as well as small vortices rotating in the opposite direction of the hexagon.

Some of the vortices are swept along with the jet stream as if on a racetrack. The largest of these vortices spans about 2,200 miles (3,500 kilometers), or about twice the size of the largest hurricane recorded on Earth.

Scientists analyzed these images in false colour, a rendering method that makes it easier to distinguish differences among the types of particles suspended in the atmosphere—relatively small particles that make up haze—inside and outside the hexagon.

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