An Incredible View of Saturn that Could Only Be Seen by a Visiting Spacecraft

By Nancy Atkinson - October 17, 2013 at 3:58 PM UTC | Planetary Science
saturn_20131010-e1417854764439.jpg

So what did NASA do during the US government shutdown? You can't just turn off spacecraft that are operating millions of miles away, so missions like the Mars rovers and the Cassini spacecraft at Saturn continued to send back images to Earth during the 16 days that most of NASA wasn't up and running like usual. On October 10, 2013, as Cassini flew high above the planet's equatorial plane, the spacecraft's camera took 36 images of Saturn, a dozen each using the various red, green, and blue filters used to create color images. The images were transferred back to Earth and put on the

Cassini raw images page.

Gordan Ugarkovic from Croatia, and a member of the image editing wizards at

UnmannedSpaceflight.com

, grabbed the raw files, processed them, then assembled the images into this jaw-dropping mosaic.

This is a view from Saturn that we could never get from Earth; only a spacecraft orbiting the planet could take it.

You can see the north pole and the swirling maelstrom of clouds that creates the hexagonal polar vortex, the thin bands in Saturn's atmosphere, and -- of course -- what really stands out is the incredible view of Saturn's rings. To see the original 3 MB version, see

this page on UMSF.

"You shouldn't be surprised to see processing artifacts here and there," cautioned Ugarkovic via email to Universe Today. "It is, after all, based on raw JPEG images only."

See more of Gordan's work at

his Flickr page.

You can read more details about this from

Emily Lakdawalla at the Planetary Society

, or

Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy/Slate.

But in the words of

UMSF's Astro0

, "That's the sort of view I've dreamed I would only ever see in a science fiction movie or if we had some kind of amazing futuristic spacecraft orbiting around that distant ringed planet....WAIT! We do!"

For more of what NASA did during the shutdown, Bill Dunford at

Riding With Robots put together a great summary

, quoting the

@SarcasticRover

that "You can't shut down awesome." Bill started the

ThingsNASAMightTweet

hashtag that reminded everyone of all the things NASA does, but they couldn't tweet about during the shutdown. People from around the world chimed in, adding what was important to them about NASA, and as of today, tweets with that hashtag have passed 27 million impressions.

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy Atkinson is a space journalist and author with a passion for telling the stories of people involved in space exploration and astronomy. She is currently retired from daily writing, but worked at Universe Today for 20 years as a writer and editor. She also contributed articles to The Planetary Society, Ad Astra (National Space Society), New Scientist and many other online outlets.

Her 2019 book, "Eight Years to the Moon: The History of the Apollo Missions,” shares the untold stories of engineers and scientists who worked behind the scenes to make the Apollo program so successful, despite the daunting odds against it. Her first book “Incredible Stories From Space: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Missions Changing Our View of the Cosmos” (2016) tells the stories of 37 scientists and engineers that work on several current NASA robotic missions to explore the solar system and beyond.

Nancy is also a NASA/JPL Solar System Ambassador, and through this program, she has the opportunity to share her passion of space and astronomy with children and adults through presentations and programs. Nancy's personal website is nancyatkinson.com