NASA & ESA - Cassini-Huygens Mission to Saturn & Titan patch.
May 4, 2017
Animation above: Cassini took a movie sequence of images during its first dive between Saturn and its rings on April 26, 2017. Animation Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech.
A new movie sequence of images from NASA's Cassini spacecraft shows the view as the spacecraft swooped over Saturn during the first of its Grand Finale dives between the planet and its rings on April 26.
The movie comprises one hour of observations as the spacecraft moved southward over Saturn. It begins with a view of the swirling vortex at the planet's north pole, then heads past the outer boundary of the hexagon-shaped jet stream and beyond.
"I was surprised to see so many sharp edges along the hexagon's outer boundary and the eye-wall of the polar vortex," said Kunio Sayanagi, an associate of the Cassini imaging team based at Hampton University in Virginia, who helped produce the new movie. "Something must be keeping different latitudes from mixing to maintain those edges," he said.
Cassini's First Fantastic Dive Past Saturn
Video above: As NASA's Cassini spacecraft made its first-ever dive through the gap between Saturn and its rings on April 26, 2017, one of its imaging cameras took a series of rapid-fire images that were used to make this movie sequence. The video begins with a view of the vortex at Saturn's north pole, then heads past the outer boundary of the planet's hexagon-shaped jet stream and continues further southward. Video Credits: NASA/JPL.
Toward the end of the movie, the camera frame rotates as the spacecraft reorients to point its large, saucer-shaped antenna in the direction of the spacecraft's motion. The antenna was used as a protective shield during the crossing of Saturn's ring plane.
As the movie frames were captured, the Cassini spacecraft's altitude above the clouds dropped from 45,000 to 4,200 miles (72,400 to 6,700 kilometers). As this occurred, the smallest resolvable features in the atmosphere changed from 5.4 miles (8.7 kilometers) per pixel to 0.5 mile (810 meters) per pixel.
Image above: NASA's Cassini spacecraft is shown diving through the gap between Saturn and its rings in this artist's depiction. Image Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech.
"The images from the first pass were great, but we were conservative with the camera settings. We plan to make updates to our observations for a similar opportunity on June 28 that we think will result in even better views," said Andrew Ingersoll, a member of the Cassini imaging team based at Caltech in Pasadena, California.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, ESA (European Space Agency) and the Italian Space Agency. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, manages the mission for the agency's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. JPL is a division of the Caltech in Pasadena. The Cassini imaging operations center is based at Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado.
Related article:
Cassini Spacecraft Dives Between Saturn and Its Rings
http://orbiterchspacenews.blogspot.ch/2017/04/cassini-spacecraft-dives-between-saturn.html
For more information about Cassini, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/cassini
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov
http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Cassini-Huygens
Image (mentioned), Animation (mentioned), Video (mentioned), Text, Credits: NASA/JPL/Preston Dyches/CICLOPS/Space Science Institute/Steve Mullins.
Greetings, Orbiter.ch