Categories: CassiniNASASaturn

Five Saturn Moons Stun In Cassini Spacecraft Archival Image

This picture is from a couple of years ago, but still worth the extra look. The Cassini spacecraft — busily circling Saturn and gathering data on the ringed planet and its moons — managed to grab five of Saturn’s 62 known moons in one shot. The European Space Agency highlighted the picture on its home page this week.

From left to right, you can see Janus, Pandora, Enceladus, Mimas and Rhea. Don’t be fooled by the rings near Rhea; those are actually Saturn’s rings. Rhea is just blocking the view of the planet from Saturn’s perspective during this picture portrait, which was taken on July 29, 2011.

The cornucopia of moons around Saturn is part of what makes that particular planet so interesting. Titan, the largest, is perhaps the most well-known because of its strange orange haze that intrigued astronomers when the twin Voyager spacecraft zoomed through the system in the 1980s. Cassini arrived in 2004 and revealed many more moons to science for the first time.

Color-composite of Titan made from raw Cassini images acquired on April 13, 2013 (added 4/17) NASA/JPL/SSI. Composite by J. Major.

“The dozens of icy moons orbiting Saturn vary drastically in shape, size, surface age and origin. Some of these worlds have hard, rough surfaces, while others are porous bodies coated in a fine blanket of icy particles. All have greater or smaller numbers of craters, and many have ridges and valleys,” NASA wrote on a web page about Saturn’s moons.

“Some, like Dione and Tethys, show evidence of tectonic activity, where forces from within ripped apart their surfaces. Many, like Rhea and Tethys, appear to have formed billions of years ago, while others, like Janus and Epimetheus, could have originally been part of larger bodies that broke up. The study and comparison of these moons tells us a great deal about the history of the Saturn System and of the solar system at large.”

And new discoveries are coming out all the time. Earlier this year, for example, astronomers said that the moon Dione could have had active geysers coming from its surface, such as what is likely happening on Enceladus.

Elizabeth Howell

Elizabeth Howell is the senior writer at Universe Today. She also works for Space.com, Space Exploration Network, the NASA Lunar Science Institute, NASA Astrobiology Magazine and LiveScience, among others. Career highlights include watching three shuttle launches, and going on a two-week simulated Mars expedition in rural Utah. You can follow her on Twitter @howellspace or contact her at her website.

Recent Posts

The Milky Way Might be Part of an Even Larger Structure than Laniakea

If you want to pinpoint your place in the Universe, start with your cosmic address.…

11 hours ago

Webb Detects Carbon Dioxide and Hydrogen Perodixe on Pluto’s moon Charon

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has revealed magnificent things about the Universe. Using its…

11 hours ago

The GALAH Fourth Data Release Provides Vital Data on One Million Stars in the Milky Way.

For the past ten years, Australia’s ARC Centre of Excellence in All Sky Astrophysics in…

1 day ago

The Sun Unleashes its Strongest Flare This Cycle

As we approach the peak of Solar Cycle 25, we can expect more and more…

2 days ago

What’s the Best Material for a Lunar Tower?

Physical infrastructure on the Moon will be critical to any long-term human presence there as…

2 days ago

What Does a Trip to Mars Do to the Brain?

It’s not long before a conversation about space travel is likely to turn to the…

2 days ago