Where In The Universe Challenge #128

By Nancy Atkinson - December 8, 2010 at 4:00 PM UTC | Observing
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Ready for another Where In The Universe Challenge? Here's #128! Take a look and see if you can name where in the Universe this image is from. Give yourself extra points if you can name the spacecraft responsible for the image. As usual, we'll provide the image today, but won't reveal the answer until later. This gives you a chance to mull over the image and provide your answer/guess in the comment section. Please, no links or extensive explanations of what you think this is — give everyone the chance to guess.

UPDATE: Answer now published below!

This is Saturn's F-ring, as seen by Voyager 1 on November 12, 1980. Of course we have better, higher resolution images of the F-ring from Cassini, but this was our first close-up glimpse of this strange, two-strand braided rings. Voyager 1 took the image at a distance of about 750,000 km.

See more images from the Voyager mission at this link from NASA.

Check back next week for another test of your visual knowledge of the cosmos!

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