NASA Cassini: Infrared Image of Saturn's Rings

Although it may look to our eyes like other images of the rings, this infrared image of Saturn's rings was taken by the Cassini spacecraft using a special filter that will only admit light polarised in one direction. 

Scientists can use these images to learn more about the nature of the particles that make up Saturn's rings.

The bright spot in the rings is the "opposition surge" where the Sun-Ring-Spacecraft angle passes through zero degrees. 

Ring scientists can also use the size and magnitude of this bright spot to learn more about the surface properties of the ring particles.

This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 19 degrees above the ringplane. 

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Aug. 18, 2013 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 705 nanometers.

The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 712,000 miles (1.1 million kilometers) from Saturn and at a Sun-rings-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 7 degrees. 

Image scale is 43 miles (68 kilometers) per pixel.

Image Credit: NASA /JPL-Caltech /Space Science Institute (SSI)

NASA Wise Image: The latest infra-red map of the Universe

The map of the whole sky was compiled by NASA's infrared space telescope, WISE, and is made up of 560 million stars, galaxies and other objects.

The Milky Way's disk and central bulge are traced out in blue, representing infrared light with a wavelength of 3.4 micrometres, which mainly comes from stars.

The bluish blobs to the bottom right are our two largest satellite galaxies, the Large and Small Magellanic clouds, more than 150,000 light years away. Andromeda forms a small blue streak to the lower left, and the image is dotted with more distant galaxies.

Longer-wavelength radiation, coloured green and red, comes from dust clouds. Just above the galactic disk near the centre of the image is the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex, only 130 light years away, where new stars are forming.

Among the discoveries made by WISE are many near-Earth asteroids, as well as a new class of super-cool stars called Y-dwarfs.

BAE's ADAPTIV technology renders vehicles invisible to infrared

Infrared imaging is used for a range of military applications - such as target acquisition, night vision, homing and tracking - which means that any vehicle with some kind of infrared “invisibility cloak” would hold significant advantages on the battlefield.

BAE Systems has tested just such a technology that not only allows vehicles to blend into their surroundings, but can also let it mimic other vehicles or natural objects.

Dubbed "ADAPTIV," the patented infrared cloaking technology developed at BAE consists of sheets of hexagonal panels that act as pixels when attached to the exterior of the vehicle.

These pixels can individually change temperature very rapidly and combine to display an infrared image of the background scenery captured from cameras onboard the vehicle, allowing even a moving tank to match its surroundings.

BAE has also put together a library of images to display the heat signature of other vehicles, such as cars, trucks, and natural objects, such as large rocks.

WISE Captures a Cosmic Rose - NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

WISE Captures a Cosmic Rose - NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

A new infrared image from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, shows a cosmic rosebud blossoming with new stars.

The stars, called the Berkeley 59 cluster, are the blue dots to the right of the image center. They are ripening out of the dust cloud from which they formed, and at just a few million years old, are young on stellar time scales.

The rosebud-like red glow surrounding the hot, young stars is warm dust heated by the stars. Green "leafy" nebulosity enfolds the cluster, showing the edges of the dense, dusty cloud. This green material is from heated polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, molecules that can be found on Earth in barbecue pits, exhaust pipes and other places where combustion has occurred.

Red sources within the green nebula indicate a second generation of stars forming at the surface of the natal cloud, possibly as a consequence of heating and compression from the younger stars.

A supernova remnant associated with this region, called NGC 7822, indicates that a massive star has already exploded, blowing the cloud open in a "champagne flow" and leaving behind this floral remnant. Blue dots sprinkled throughout are foreground stars in our Milky Way galaxy.

Born of Fire! - NASA Hubble (HST) NICMOS image of the Milky Way

This infrared image of the centre of our Milky Way galaxy combines the sharp imaging of the Hubble Space Telescope's Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS) with colour imagery from a previous Spitzer Space Telescope survey

Picture: KPS / ZUMA / REX FEATURES