Cassini probe at Saturn... (warning -- large images!)

http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/small-moons/images/PIA06066.jpg

I remember doing the Michaelson-Morley experiment at school and getting a result, within error limits, close to the documented speed of light in air. "Bloody hell," I thought.

"That's no moon. It's a space station!"

http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/large-moons/images/PIA05423.jpg

http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.cfm

But the main reason to go to the page -- Huygens is now hours away from arriving at Titan:

http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/news/events/huygensDescent/index.cfm

Initial data won't be arriving until 7:24 am PST tomorrow at the earliest -- which is perfect as I'll be at work, settled in and ready to waste many hours watching to see what we've found.

http://www.esa.int/images/imageL,132.jpg

1300 GMT here - think it may only have 'landed' about NOW ?
>1500 GMT before first data may be received/confirmed...

am excited like i was young again

John Humphries was making a big deal about "tangerine seas" this morning, and if there isn't a tangerine sea and marmalade sky in these photos I am gonna be so disappointed.

latest time revision for possible data = approx 1715 CET / 1615 GMT

looks like announcement about to be made...

bbc news24 is going to be watched to within an inch of its life when i get home

http://esamultimedia.esa.int/images/cassini_huygens/huygens_land/landing_01_H.jpg

Higher up than the midrange shot:

http://esamultimedia.esa.int/images/cassini_huygens/huygens_land/landing_02_H.jpg

More photos and reports soon.

A 360 view from about 8 kilometers up.

A smaller section of same:

http://esamultimedia.esa.int/images/cassini_huygens/huygens_land/Picture2.jpg

And the first color ground image.

I guess you can say you weren't disappointed!

Another view of that 'coastline' area:

ihttp://esamultimedia.esa.int/images/cassini_huygens/huygens_land/press_release_050120/HRICoastLineMoasic_H.jpg

"In total, the core of our team has invested something like 80 man years on this experiment, 18 of which are mine," Atkinson wrote. "I think right now the key lesson is this — if you're looking for a job with instant and guaranteed success, this isn't it."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/spl/hi/pop_ups/05/sci_nat_enl_1108646012/img/1.jpg

The 440km-wide circular feature resembles a large crater or part of a ringed basin, either of which could have been formed when a comet or asteroid tens of km in size slammed into Titan. This is the first impact feature identified in radar images of Titan. (Image: Nasa/JPL)

http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/videos/video-details.cfm?videoID=99

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/0505/saturnplane_cassini.jpg

http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/spl/hi/pop_ups/05/sci_nat_enl_1132146654/img/1.jpg

http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/videothumbnails/images/IMG002117-br402.jpg

...s on the surface.

Titan's all cold and stuff!

I was kind of disappointed about "earth-like" comparisons in the narrative. Dudes, it's METHANE RAIN and -180 degrees. It ain't earth. (OR IS IT??)

It's ROCHESTER, NY!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6908190.stm

another moon, only 2km in diam. are these really worth classing as moons i ask yer. Aren't they just spin-offs from the ring of rocks?

Well but they're special rocks.

special as in olympics?

Images coming in from yesterday's close flyby of Iapetus

http://www.planetary.org/image/iapetus_cassini_20070910_SATUSHINE001_PRIME_colormos_lg.jpg

http://www.planetary.org/image/iapetus_cassini_20070910_ICYMAP003_UVIS_mosaic_regan_lg.jpg

these are kind of creepy.

More evidence for Titan having a subsurface ocean

Late late mission barnstorming over Saturn

Although the first mission extension for Cassini hasn't officially been approved yet by NASA Headquarters (which strikes me as being kind of silly, since the primary mission comes to a close in less than two months!!), the mission is already trying to figure out what to do beyond the two-year proposed Extended Mission. Last week there was a meeting of the Outer Planets Assessment Group, and Cassini's Deputy Project Scientist, Linda Spilker, gave a presentation on what to expect from the extended missions (here it is, in PDF format, well worth a look). There was a lot of stuff about the science to be expected from the extended mission, and a proposal for an extended-extended mission, but the real stunner was a scenario she presented for Cassini's end-of-life: to spend the very, very last phase of the mission in an orbit that threads Cassini between Saturn's cloud tops and the innermost D ring.

Folks, the gap between Saturn and the D ring is only about 3,000 kilometers wide. I suppose for a mission to a place like Mars, 3,000 kilometers of leeway is quite a lot. But Saturn is 120,000 kilometers across, and the main ring system extends another 60,000 kilometers or so above Saturn; Cassini would have to do an orbital maneuver to majorly drop its periapsis (closest approach point) to right in between the planet and its rings, leaping over the main ring system in the process. The idea seems totally crazy.

Crazy... and AWESOME

That needs to happen. (Like they've got anything to lose!)

god that would be incredible

beautiful thread btw

Go for another two years

The US space agency (Nasa) has extended the international Cassini-Huygens mission by two years.

The unmanned Cassini-Huygens spacecraft entered orbit around Saturn in 2004 on a mission that was supposed to come to an end in July this year.

The two-year mission extension will encompass some 60 extra orbits of Saturn and more flybys of its moons.
These will include 26 flybys of Titan - its biggest moon - seven of Enceladus, and one each of Dione, Rhea and Helene

Looking for life in Enceladus’ plume

Now in press at Astrobiology is a look at the possibilities of life on Enceladus that holds out hope for detecting biomarkers with data gathered during a Cassini flyby. That’s an exciting possibility, depending as it does not on an orbiter or lander mission from an indefinite future but on equipment we’ve currently got in Saturn space. And the Enceladus picture remains fascinating because of the possibility that some microbial systems on Earth that operate far beneath the surface may offer examples of how life could evolve on a cold and distant moon of Saturn.

We’ve already found a dozen icy particle jets coming out of Enceladus’ south polar regions, all pumping material into a plume that extends for thousands of kilometers. A 2005 Cassini flyby revealed, among other things, water vapor, methane and simple organic compounds, even as other Cassini instrumentation showed the moon’s south polar region to be anomalously warm. If there is liquid water under the south polar region, could life have evolved there? If so, the paper raises the possibility that methane may be a biomarker. For that matter, could life have come there from elsewhere? The paper argues both are possible:

Also, http://twitter.com/CassiniSaturn

TWITTER HAS GONE TOO FAR

Lakes on Titan!

awesome we can go hydrocarbon-skiing.

Cassini images shadows cast by thousands of ring boulders and particles

http://www.universetoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/saturn-shadow-crop.jpg

That is so way cool. Thanks!

For any London ILXors or folks visiting, great looking exhibition of Cassini images at the Royal Observatory:

Visions of Saturn

Stronger hints of an ocean inside Enceladus

PASADENA, Calif. -- For the first time, scientists working on NASA's Cassini mission have detected sodium salts in ice grains of Saturn's outermost ring. Detecting salty ice indicates that Saturn's moon Enceladus, which primarily replenishes the ring with material from discharging jets, could harbor a reservoir of liquid water -- perhaps an ocean -- beneath its surface.

Cassini discovered the water-ice jets in 2005 on Enceladus. These jets expel tiny ice grains and vapor, some of which escape the moon's gravity and form Saturn's outermost ring. Cassini's cosmic dust analyzer has examined the composition of those grains and found salt within them.

"We believe that the salty minerals deep inside Enceladus washed out from rock at the bottom of a liquid layer," said Frank Postberg, Cassini scientist for the cosmic dust analyzer at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg, Germany. Postberg is lead author of a study that appears in the June 25 issue of the journal Nature.

Scientists on Cassini's cosmic dust detector team conclude that liquid water must be present because it is the only way to dissolve the significant amounts of minerals that would account for the levels of salt detected. The process of sublimation, the mechanism by which vapor is released directly from solid ice in the crust, cannot account for the presence of salt.

Plains of Titan to be Named for Dune novels

The US Geological Survey Astrogeology Science Center announced the first plain or "planitia" given a name will be designated as Chusuk Planitia. Chusuk was a planet from the Dune series, known for its musical instruments.

http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/dune/images/thumb/2/26/Baliset.jpg/180px-Baliset.jpg

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/files/2009/08/cassini_fring_punch.jpg

Weird.

This image, taken as Saturn approaches its August 2009 equinox, shows a shadow being cast by a narrow, vertically extended feature in the F ring.

Imaging scientists are working to understand the origin of structures such as this one, but they think this image may show the shadow of an object on an inclined orbit which has punched through the F ring and dragged material along in its path.

Must be escapees from the prison colony.

Cassini made it's closest pass to Enceladus yet over the weekend and the pictures are knocking me out of my tree. Raw image download.

If you can only look at one, make it this one

http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/raw/casJPGFullS54/N00145397.jpg

YES

Ummm, WOW!

http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/moons/images/PIA12481-br500.jpg

Reflection of Sunlight off Titan Lake
December 17, 2009 Full-Res: PIA12481

This image shows the first flash of sunlight reflected off a lake on Saturn’s moon Titan. The glint off a mirror-like surface is known as a specular reflection. This kind of glint was detected by the visual and infrared mapping spectrometer (VIMS) on NASA’s Cassini spacecraft on July 8, 2009. It confirmed the presence of liquid in the moon’s northern hemisphere, where lakes are more numerous and larger than those in the southern hemisphere. Scientists using VIMS had confirmed the presence of liquid in Ontario Lacus, the largest lake in the southern hemisphere, in 2008.

The northern hemisphere was shrouded in darkness for nearly 15 years, but the sun began to illuminate the area again as it approached its spring equinox in August 2009. VIMS was able to detect the glint as the viewing geometry changed. Titan’s hazy atmosphere also scatters and absorbs many wavelengths of light, including most of the visible light spectrum. But the VIMS instrument enabled scientists to look for the glint in infrared wavelengths that were able to penetrate through the moon’s atmosphere. This image was created using wavelengths of light in the 5 micron range.

By comparing the new image to radar and near-infrared light images acquired from 2006 to 2008, Cassini scientists were able to correlate the reflection to the southern shoreline of a Titan lake called Kraken Mare. The sprawling Kraken Mare covers about 400,000 square kilometers (150,000 square miles). The reflection appeared to come from a part of the lake around 71 degrees north latitude and 337 degrees west latitude.

Insane. (And great.)

Wow--that is so amazing. Now we just need some methane-breathing Titan native wildlife to start flying around visibly in the atmosphere.

I know this is stating the obvious, but the fact that this little probe is flying round out there, taking these amazing shots, and it's all being uploaded straight on the net for us to gawk at---there's not an aspect of this that doesn't blow my mind.

Britain cut all its funding for this mission yesterday : (

Srsly, that kind of fucking short-sighted idiocy is the *true* Broken Britain that the tossers who make these decisions likely rail against.

Back to the positive - amazing new pictures, this thread continues to be wholeheartedly For The Ages.

Britain cut all its funding for this mission yesterday : (

Britain clobbered it's funding for all of astronomy and physics yesterday. http://www.saveastronomy.org.uk/ is tracking the damage. (This is probably worth a different thread. Back to the amazing Saturn info)

Just realized that I forgot to post this

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/12/15/science/15obmoon_ready/articleInline.jpg

December 15, 2009
Solving a Tonal Mystery in Orbit Around Saturn
By HENRY FOUNTAIN

Researchers have solved what may be the oldest mystery in planetary science: the two-tone surface of Saturn’s moon Iapetus.

The odd feature — the moon’s trailing side is about 10 times brighter than its leading side — has been a mystery since it was first observed by Giovanni Cassini in 1671. In two papers published online by Science, researchers have unraveled the mystery, using images and data from instruments aboard the spacecraft named for Cassini.

The studies confirm an earlier idea that dust, most likely from another of Saturn’s moons, falls on the leading side of Iapetus as it orbits the planet.

“It’s just like a motorcyclist, who only gets the flies on the leading side of the helmet rather than the trailing side,” said Tillmann Denk of the Free University of Berlin, an author with John R. Spencer of the Southwest Research Institute of one of the papers and lead author of the other.

But the pattern of the surface features — the dark area extends to the trailing side at the equator, for example — is not fully explained by the deposition dust. Rather, the researchers say, the reason has a lot to do with the moon’s rotation on its axis, which takes 80 earth days.

Such a slow rotation (“midday” lasts for a couple of weeks) allows the distant Sun to warm the dark dust-covered areas enough that water ice becomes vapor.

The vapor migrates elsewhere, freezing to ice again when it reaches colder areas. The areas where the ice was lost become darker, and those that gained ice become brighter.

Just as FYI, put feed://ciclops.org/rssfeed.php into your RSS feed reader for daily Saturn images and updates on what's going on.

Being kind of amazed by these photos of the rings:
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/photos/imagedetails/index.cfm?imageId=3774
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/photos/imagedetails/index.cfm?imageId=3779

I mean, I've always grown up seeing paintings and raytracings and so on which look exactly like that, but this time you have to stop and go, actually, this is real, this is a photo.

Titan's haze and clouds are well-known but there's fog now too

Astronomers say the presence of fog provides the first direct evidence for the exchange of material between the surface and the atmosphere, and thus of an active hydrological cycle, which previously had only been known to exist on Earth.

The discovery was made using data from the Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS) onboard the Cassini spacecraft, which has been observing Saturn's system for the past five years. The VIMS instrument provides "hyperspectral" imaging, covering a large swath of the visible and infrared spectrum.

Researchers investigated all Cassini data collected over the moon's south pole from October 2006 through March 2007, and filtered the data to separate out features occurring at different depths in the atmosphere, ranging from 20 kilometers (12.4 miles) to .25 kilometers (820 feet) above the surface. Using other filters, they homed in on "bright" features caused by the scattering of light off small particles—such as the methane droplets present in clouds.

In this way, they isolated clouds located about 750 meters (less than a half-mile) above the ground. These clouds did not extend into the higher altitudes—into the moon's troposphere, where regular clouds form. In other words, says Brown, they had found fog.

"Fog—or clouds, or dew, or condensation in general—can form whenever air reaches about 100 percent humidity," Brown says. "There are two ways to get there. The first is obvious: add water (on Earth) or methane (on Titan) to the surrounding air. The second is much more common: make the air colder so it can hold less water (or liquid methane), and all of that excess needs to condense."

On Earth, this is the most common method of making fog, Brown says. "That fog you often see at sunrise hugging the ground is caused by ground-level air cooling overnight, to the point where it cannot hang onto its water. As the sun rises and the air heats, the fog goes away."

Similarly, fog can form when wet air passes over cold ground; as the air cools, the water condenses. And mountain fog occurs when air gets pushed up the side of a mountain and cools, causing the water to condense.

However, none of these mechanisms work on Titan.

The reason is that Titan's muggy atmosphere takes a notoriously long time to cool (or warm). "If you were to turn the sun totally off, Titan's atmosphere would still take something like 100 years to cool down," Brown says. "Even the coldest parts of the surface are much too warm to ever cause fog to condense."

Mountain fog is also out of the question, he adds. "A Titanian mountain would have to be about 15,000 feet high before the air would get cold enough to condense," he says. And yet the tallest mountains the moon could possibly carry (because of its fragile, icy crust) would be no more than 3000 feet high.

The only possible way to make Titanian fog, then, is to add humidity to the air. And the only way to do that, Brown says, is by evaporating liquid—in this case, methane, the most common hydrocarbon on the moon, which exists in solid, liquid, and gaseous forms.

Brown notes that evaporating methane on Titan "means it must have rained, and rain means streams and pools and erosion and geology. The presence of fog on Titan proves, for the first time, that the moon has a currently active methane hydrological cycle."

The presence of fog also proves that the moon must be dotted with methane pools, Brown says. That's because any ground-level air, after becoming 100 percent humid and turning into fog, would instantly rise up into the atmosphere like a giant cumulus cloud. "The only way to make the fog stick around on the ground is to both add humidity and cool the air just a little," he explains. "The way to cool the air just a little is to have it in contact with something cold, like a pool of evaporating liquid methane."

Meet Prometheus the space yam

http://www.planetary.org/image/cassini_prometheus_rgb-over-stacked-clear_20091226_lg.png

So remember those spokes in the B-ring of Saturn? They're 100% water ice

http://www.universetoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/spokes-b-ring-2.jpg

A nicely banal answer (not everything needs to be mysterious!)

And Cassini is go to keep on going (potentially through 2017)

Visiting the Death Star

http://www.planetary.org/image/cassini_mimas_color_hurcewicz_lg.jpg

No trench no credibility

Lightning spotted visually in Saturn's atmosphere

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/cassini/20100414/pia12575-browse.jpg

(there's a movie at the NASA link)

The Big Picture goes to Saturn: http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/05/checking_in_on_saturn.html

does anybody know when NASA's gonna probe uranus?

seriously, though

Saturn's tiny moon Helene, seen here by Cassini on March 03, 2010. Discovered in 1980, Helene is only 35 km (28 mi) wide. (NASA/JPL) #

the fact that we can discover something so small floating in space is mind boggling.

I also love this:

Cassini scientists were able to correlate the reflection to the southern shoreline of a Titan lake called Kraken Mare. The sprawling Kraken Mare covers about 400,000 sq km (150,000 sq mi).

kraken mare!

Not from Cassini, but related: Image of the Day: Saturn's Newly Discovered Immense Outer Ring

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope discovered an enormous ring around Saturn -- by far the largest of the giant planet's many rings. The belt lies at the far reaches of the Saturnian system, with an orbit tilted 27 degrees from the main ring plane. The bulk of its material starts about six million kilometers (3.7 million miles) away from the planet and extends outward roughly another 12 million kilometers (7.4 million miles). One of Saturn's farthest moons, Phoebe, circles within the newfound ring, and is likely the source of its material.

Saturn's newest halo is thick, too -- its vertical height is about 20 times the diameter of the planet. It would take about one billion Earths stacked together to fill the ring.

"This is one supersized ring," said Anne Verbiscer, an astronomer at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. "If you could see the ring, it would span the width of two full moons' worth of sky, one on either side of Saturn."

The ring itself is tenuous, made up of a thin array of ice and dust particles. Spitzer's infrared eyes were able to spot the glow of the band's cool dust. The telescope, launched in 2003, is currently 107 million kilometers (66 million miles) from Earth in orbit around the sun.

The discovery may help solve an age-old riddle of one of Saturn's moons. Iapetus has a strange appearance -- one side is bright and the other is really dark, in a pattern that resembles the yin-yang symbol. The astronomer Giovanni Cassini first spotted the moon in 1671, and years later figured out it has a dark side, now named Cassini Regio in his honor. A stunning picture of Iapetus taken by NASA's Cassini spacecraft is online http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA08384 .

Saturn's newest addition could explain how Cassini Regio came to be. The ring is circling in the same direction as Phoebe, while Iapetus, the other rings and most of Saturn's moons are all going the opposite way. According to the scientists, some of the dark and dusty material from the outer ring moves inward toward Iapetus, slamming the icy moon like bugs on a windshield.

"Astronomers have long suspected that there is a connection between Saturn's outer moon Phoebe and the dark material on Iapetus," said Hamilton. "This new ring provides convincing evidence of that relationship."

The ring would be difficult to see with visible-light telescopes. Its particles are diffuse and may even extend beyond the bulk of the ring material all the way in to Saturn and all the way out to interplanetary space. The relatively small numbers of particles in the ring wouldn't reflect much visible light, especially out at Saturn where sunlight is weak.

"The particles are so far apart that if you were to stand in the ring, you wouldn't even know it," said Verbiscer.

Spitzer was able to sense the glow of the cool dust, which is only about 80 Kelvin (minus 316 degrees Fahrenheit). Cool objects shine with infrared, or thermal radiation; for example, even a cup of ice cream is blazing with infrared light. "By focusing on the glow of the ring's cool dust, Spitzer made it easy to find," said Verbiscer.

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/.a/6a00d8341bf7f753ef0134838e3391970c-pi

so cool!

yup 80 kelvin

Springtime on Titan

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/cassini/20100921/pia13400-640.jpg

Saturn's rings are basically a giant vinyl LP that acts like a galaxy

http://s3.amazonaws.com/ciclops_ir_2010/6549_15847_1.jpg

http://s3.amazonaws.com/ciclops_ir_2010/6480_15489_1.jpg

Enceladus Fissures Keep Getting Warmer and More Complex

As Cassini scientists await the data from today’s flyby of Enceladus, images and data from August of this year have provided more insight into the active fissures on the icy moon’s south polar region. These geyser-spewing fractures are warmer and more complicated than previously thought.

“The exquisite resolution obtained on one segment of the Damascus fracture — one of the most active regions within the south polar terrain — has revealed a surface temperature reaching a staggering 190 Kelvin, or 120 degrees below zero Fahrenheit,” said Cassini imaging team lead Carolyn Porco, in an email announcing the new images. “Far from the fractures, the temperature of the south polar terrain dips as low as 52 Kelvin, or 365 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.”

Porco said that what this means is that a phenomenal amount of heat is emerging from the fractures which are “undoubtedly the result of the tidal flexing of Enceladus brought about by its orbital resonance with Dione. However, details of this heating process are still unclear and are being studied at this very moment.”

By way of comparison, Antarctica at it's coldest is about -120F. However, these kinds of surface temperatures at the distance of Saturn is pretty special.

No CGI used in this fly-by video of Saturn - it's made up entirely of images

this is The Thread That Keeps On Giving. Great work again, ET.

wow!!

There's a nice interview with the guy who did it here.
http://www.outsideinthemovie.com/filmmaker/

Also additional vid on how he did some of it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4ghSOjlc6Y

Holy fuck, that's just beautiful.

Cassiniqatsi

(sorry about the name... couldn't help myself. anyway, go watch it!)

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2011-190

PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA's Cassini spacecraft has discovered the best evidence yet for a large-scale saltwater reservoir beneath the icy crust of Saturn's moon Enceladus. The data came from the spacecraft's direct analysis of salt-rich ice grains close to the jets ejected from the moon.

Data from Cassini's cosmic dust analyzer show the grains expelled from fissures, known as tiger stripes, are relatively small and predominantly low in salt far away from the moon. But closer to the moon's surface, Cassini found that relatively large grains rich with sodium and potassium dominate the plumes. The salt-rich particles have an "ocean-like" composition and indicate that most, if not all, of the expelled ice and water vapor comes from the evaporation of liquid salt water. The findings appear in this week's issue of the journal Nature.

"There currently is no plausible way to produce a steady outflow of salt-rich grains from solid ice across all the tiger stripes other than salt water under Enceladus's icy surface," said Frank Postberg, a Cassini team scientist at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, and the lead author on the paper. When water freezes, the salt is squeezed out, leaving pure water ice behind. If the plumes emanated from ice, they should have very little salt in them.

I love me that probe.

are they investigating the whole enceladus?

This recent picture of Enceladus is knocking me out.

http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6193/6209087320_89518e324f_z.jpg

The geyser jets are backlit by the sun and Enceladus here is lit by Saturn-shine.

wow

Crazy great.

cool. but is that, like, a shit load of trucks coming towards us over the horizon?

Read the end of Elvis T's comment again...

Too late, I can only think of Sam Rockwell mining Enceladus...

cool. but is that, like, a shit load of trucks coming towards us over the horizon?

― Summer Slam! (Ste), Wednesday, 5 October 2011 09:24 (5 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

otm looks like burning man

Dione has a very very thin oxygen atmosphere

http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/moons/images/PIA07691-br500.jpg

Time to migrate.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/wp-content/gallery/titan-seasons/titan-saturn-moon-north-pole-space-planetary-science.jpg

Saturn’s Largest Moon Seen in Unprecedented Detail

http://www.universetoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/iapetus-landslides-580x288.jpg

Subject line says it all: Massive Ice Avalanches on Iapetus

What things might sound like on Titan (the waterfall and splashdown sounds are great!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNm6ExSSitU

the people i work with are v upset because this thing got selected by a science panel instead of an x-ray telescope, but tbh i think it looks awesome

http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/area/index.cfm?fareaid=107

some more links

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17773383
andyxl.wordpress.com/2012/04/19/x-ray-astronomy-crunch/
andyxl.wordpress.com/2012/04/23/turbulence-in-the-gravy-waves/

http://www.universetoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/3359901087_4c82b07365_o-580x580.jpg

That's no moon, that's a Kuiper Belt Object

Saturn’s curious moon Phoebe features a heavily-cratered shape and orbits the ringed planet backwards at a considerable distance of over 8 million miles (12.8 million km). According to recent news from the Cassini mission Phoebe may actually be a Kuiper Belt object, having more in common with planets than it does with any of Saturn’s other satellites.

132 miles (212 km) in diameter, Phoebe is the largest of Saturn’s irregular moons — a cloud of small, rocky worlds held in distant orbits at highly inclined paths. Its backwards (retrograde) motion around Saturn and dense composition are dead giveaways that it didn’t form in situ within the Saturnian system, but rather was captured at some point when it strayed too close to the gas giant.

In fact it’s now thought that Phoebe may be a remnant from the formation of the Solar System — a planetesimal — with its own unique history predating its adoption into Saturn’s extended family of moons.

juice confirmed: http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2012/may/02/juice-picked-for-launch. launch in 2022, reaches jupiters moons in 2030, so perhaps a bit early to change the thread title, but it's going to be rad.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srLlka2C7FM

Looking at landslides on Iapetus: http://www.planetary.org/blogs/guest-blogs/20121001-iapetus-sturzstroms.html

Saturn's North Polar Vortex

https://planetary.s3.amazonaws.com/assets/images/6-saturn/2012/20121127_N00198348_filtered_f840.jpg

The vortex itself is just a small feature at the center of the northern hexagon

https://planetary.s3.amazonaws.com/assets/images/6-saturn/2012/20121127_W00077190_f840.jpg

Close-up picture is about 3km per pixel - picture-width is about as big as the Moon.

Guh at all that. The hexagon! If only Clarke had learned about THAT.

holy fuck, that's amazing

Not a Cassini image, just cool space stuff: ‘Overmassive’ black hole holds the mass of 17 billion suns: http://theconversation.edu.au/overmassive-black-hole-holds-the-mass-of-17-billion-suns-11066

https://c479107.ssl.cf2.rackcdn.com/files/18142/area14mp/rqhkdpgd-1354155621.jpg

O_O at the hexagon

I'm totally starting a Hawkwind-esque space rock band called SATURN'S HEXAGON

Hawksagon

the hexagon does not care, it does not love

It's thought to be linked to these radio emmisions.
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/multimedia/pia07966.html

Hexagon in color

http://ut-images.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/SaturnHex-RGB-11-28-12-JMajor-580x546.jpg

http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/wiredscience/2012/12/Iapetus.jpg

More Iapetus theories

Iapetus, one of Saturn’s weirdest moons, has an enormous equatorial mountain ridge, a spiky belt that rises 12 miles above the moon’s surface. How Iapetus built that belt – the only one of its kind ever observed – has been a persistent conundrum.

Now, scientists suggest that a giant impact early in Iapetus’ history knocked the moon around, dramatically slowing its rotation rate and deforming its crust. After 1 million years, Iapetus began to resemble the walnut-shaped satellite it is today: flatter at the poles, and with a ridge extending most of the way around its middle, suggested planetary scientist Gabriel Tobie of France’s University of Nantes here at the American Geophysical Union conference Dec. 4.

Earlier ideas describing the birth of the Iapetian belt invoke tectonic activity within the moon itself, or the brief presence of a impact-produced satellite – a smaller body that wandered too close to Iapetus and was shredded, briefly forming a ring that disintegrated over the moon’s equator.

Tobie and his colleagues simulated the Iapetian early years and came up with a different story. Shortly after it formed, Iapetus spun around itself once every six hours or so. But after about 10 million years of unperturbed rotation, an object between 500 and 650 miles wide zoomed in and face-planted on the moon.

The collision disrupted the moon’s rotation rate, immediately slowing it to more than 30 hours per pirouette. Such rapid braking stretched and deformed the moon’s crust, flattening its poles and pinching the ridge around its middle, Tobie demonstrated in a 3-D simulation. “It is possible for a single impact to change the rotation of Iapetus,” he said, noting a 500-mile-wide crater that could be a scar left over from the collision. “We can generate a ridge only if the body rotates very, very fast initially.”

While the theory is intriguing, some scientists at the presentation were skeptical, suggesting that it might not be as easy to despin the moon as suggested, and that the simulation may not have gotten Iapetus’ interior quite right. Another persistent mystery is the fact that the ridge isn’t wrapped all the way around the moon.

Like the rest of the theories, this newest idea can’t answer those questions, yet.

We got space rivers

http://www.esa.int/var/esa/storage/images/esa_multimedia/images/2012/11/titan_s_nile_river/12132842-1-eng-GB/Titan_s_Nile_River_small.jpg

Not sure where else to put this, but here's a 25-minute tour of the international space station hosted by astronaut Sunita Williams.

http://kottke.org/13/01/a-tour-of-the-international-space-station

NASA Probe Observes Meteors Colliding with Saturn's Rings

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/cassini/20130425/pia14938-640.jpg

Dear god I love this kind of stuff.

would have been cooler if they had caught a meteor colliding with the rings around uranus

New pictures of the hexagon and the hexagon's eye.

http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/744877main_pia14944-946.jpg

http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/744879main_pia14946-946.jpg

Cassini Finds Hints of Activity at Saturn Moon Dione

The north pole of Dione. The feature just left of the terminator at bottom is Janiculum Dorsa, a long, roughly north-south trending ridge.
From a distance, most of the Saturnian moon Dione resembles a bland cueball. Thanks to close-up images of a 500-mile-long (800-kilometer-long) mountain on the moon from NASA's Cassini spacecraft, scientists have found more evidence for the idea that Dione was likely active in the past. It could still be active now.

"A picture is emerging that suggests Dione could be a fossil of the wondrous activity Cassini discovered spraying from Saturn's geyser moon Enceladus or perhaps a weaker copycat Enceladus," said Bonnie Buratti of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., who leads the Cassini science team that studies icy satellites. "There may turn out to be many more active worlds with water out there than we previously thought."

Other bodies in the solar system thought to have a subsurface ocean – including Saturn's moons Enceladus and Titan and Jupiter's moon Europa – are among the most geologically active worlds in our solar system. They have been intriguing targets for geologists and scientists looking for the building blocks of life elsewhere in the solar system. The presence of a subsurface ocean at Dione would boost the astrobiological potential of this once-boring iceball.

Hints of Dione's activity have recently come from Cassini, which has been exploring the Saturn system since 2004. The spacecraft’s magnetometer has detected a faint particle stream coming from the moon, and images showed evidence for a possible liquid or slushy layer under its rock-hard ice crust. Other Cassini images have also revealed ancient, inactive fractures at Dione similar to those seen at Enceladus that currently spray water ice and organic particles.

The mountain examined in the latest paper -- published in March in the journal Icarus -- is called Janiculum Dorsa and ranges in height from about 0.6 to 1.2 miles (1 to 2 kilometers). The moon's crust appears to pucker under this mountain as much as about 0.3 mile (0.5 kilometer).

Wave at Saturn

One of the most exciting Cassini events in 2013 will be the unusual opportunity on July 19 to image the whole Saturn system as it is backlit by the sun. With Saturn covering the harsh light of the sun, we will be gathering unique ring science and also catching a glimpse of our very own home planet.

The main science goal for the mosaic we are making of the Saturn system is to look at the more diffuse rings that encircle Saturn and check for change over time. A previous mosaic of the Saturn system Cassini made in 2006 revealed that the dusty E ring, which is fed by the water-ice plume of the moon Enceladus, had unexpectedly large variations in brightness and color around its orbit. We'll want to see how that looks seven Earth years and a Saturnian season later, giving us clues to the forces at work in the Saturn system. We'll do this analysis by collecting data from our visual and infrared mapping spectrometer, composite infrared mapping spectrometer and ultraviolet imaging spectrograph in addition to the imaging cameras.
But one of the best parts of the mosaic we're making on July 19 is that we'll be able to take a picture of Earth – and all of you -- from about 898 million miles (1.44 billion kilometers) away. The Earth will appear to be just a pixel, but you can see in this simulated close-up what parts of it will be illuminated.

http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/images/SolSysSim6_final_642x361.jpg

Opportunities to image Earth from the outer solar system are few and far between and special care must be taken so we don't blind our cameras by looking in the direction of the sun, where Earth is. There have been only two images of Earth from the outer solar system in all the time humankind has been venturing out into space. The first and most distant was one was taken 23 years ago by NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft from 4 billion miles (6 billion kilometers away), showing Earth as a pale blue dot . The other opportunity was Cassini's image in 2006 from 926 million miles (1.49 billion kilometers).

North America and part of the Atlantic Ocean are expected to be illuminated when NASA's Cassini spacecraft takes a snapshot of Earth on July 19, 2013. This view is a close-up simulation. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/images/earth_saturn_highphase_NO_DATE_640x360.jpg

We think Cassini's July image is a special opportunity for Earthlings to wave at our photographer in the Saturn system and learn more about my favorite planet, its rings and moons. We hope you'll go outside, look in the direction of Saturn and send us pictures of yourselves waving. You can share your pictures by joining our Flickr group Wave at Saturn, adding them to our Wave at Saturn Facebook event page or tagging pictures on Twitter #waveatsaturn. We hope to make a special collage of all these images if we get enough of them.
The Cassini portrait session of Earth will last about 15 minutes from 2:27 to 2:42 p.m. PDT (21:27 to 21:42 UTC).

And the photo for real...

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/images/mediumsize/PIA17171_ip.jpg

That's us in the right-middle

Enceledus in the E Ring

http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5471/9457336045_a10b241763_o.png

Just read this short ebook, a Kindle single, The Pioneer Detectives: Did a Distant Spacecraft Prove Einstein and Newton Wrong? by Konstantin Kakaes, which I recommend to you, despite the sensationalist title.

As griping in its way as one of those Scandinavian procedurals in which much coffee is drunk and many cigarettes are smoked whilst the investigators vainly search for a lead.

http://planetary.s3.amazonaws.com/assets/images/6-saturn/2013/20131016_saturn_20131010.jpg

http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2013/10161711-saturn-mosaic-gordan.html

Fucking amazing.

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/images/mediumsize/PIA17172_ip.jpg

On July 19, 2013, in an event celebrated the world over, NASA's Cassini spacecraft slipped into Saturn's shadow and turned to image the planet, seven of its moons, its inner rings -- and, in the background, our home planet, Earth.

This image spans about 404,880 miles (651,591 kilometers) across.

info and larger versions showing earth, mars, venus and moons.

Looking back at Iapetus

http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/moons/images/PIA17142-br500.jpg

http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/moons/images/PIA17142-br500.jpg

Look out honey, 'cause I'm using cosmology.

http://photos-h.ak.instagram.com/hphotos-ak-ash/10251408_267670203415391_495424700_n.jpg

NASA's instagram today

May as well put this here too.
Went to the Mt Wilson Observatory, saw a few things through the 60" telescope. Saw Jupiter, Mars, Saturn, the entire Sombrero galaxy (M104), a globular cluster (M3), and the Cat's Eye nebula.

Only Saturn seemed like it would turn out well on my point-and-shoot, so it's the only one I attempted (camera held right up to the eyepiece). It looked much more distinct in person, I could see streaks on its surface and a black band separating the sections of the rings. Seeing Sombrero was the most impressive - an entire galaxy in the view of my puny eye.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v609/nickn/Saturn_sm.jpg

Hooray, someone made it to the Atlas Obscura event! (couldn't go myself)

Cool picture regardless of conditions

Actually this was a fundraiser for the Black Rock Observatory, a Burning Man project. http://www.blackrockobservatory.com/

The AO event is at the end of June.

http://images.sciencedaily.com/2014/06/140622142124-large.jpg

Mysterious 'magic island' appears on Saturn's moon Titan

Now you don't see it. Now, you do. And now you don't see it again. Astronomers have discovered a bright, mysterious geologic object -- where one never existed -- on Cassini mission radar images of Ligeia Mare, the second-largest sea on Saturn's moon Titan. Scientifically speaking, this spot is considered a "transient feature," but the astronomers have playfully dubbed it "Magic Island."

Reporting in the journal Nature Geoscience June 22, the scientists say this may be the first observation of dynamic, geological processes in Titan's northern hemisphere. "This discovery tells us that the liquids in Titan's northern hemisphere are not simply stagnant and unchanging, but rather that changes do occur," said Jason Hofgartner, a Cornell University graduate student in the field of planetary sciences, and the paper's lead author. "We don't know precisely what caused this 'magic island' to appear, but we'd like to study it further."

Ten years in orbit

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8sNsmkXb8M

Ten years! Amazing work all this time.

Rosetta Arrives At Target Comet

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/images/mediumsize/PIA18641_ip.jpg

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/rosetta/20140805/rosetta20140806b-640.jpg

Is there a general "space images" thread that I should have posted this in?

But when is Rosetta going to do a flyby of Uranus

xp there's this: Astronomy Picture Of The Day

http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/images/PIA18431_690x3451.jpg

Swirling Cloud at Titan's Pole is Cold and Toxic

Scientists analyzing data from NASA's Cassini mission have discovered that a giant, toxic cloud is hovering over the south pole of Saturn's largest moon, Titan, after the atmosphere there cooled dramatically.

The scientists found that this giant polar vortex contains frozen particles of the toxic compound hydrogen cyanide, or HCN.

i think i prefer lo-res images of space to hi-res. look how cool this is. so mysterious. no caption & your imagination runs wild.

walrus stampede, imo

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/cassini/20141016/cassini20141016-full.jpg

Cassini Caught in Hyperion's Particle Beam

Static electricity is known to play an important role on Earth's airless, dusty moon, but evidence of static charge building up on other objects in the solar system has been elusive until now. A new analysis of data from NASA's Cassini mission has revealed that, during a 2005 flyby of Saturn's moon Hyperion, the spacecraft was briefly bathed in a beam of electrons coming from the moon's electrostatically charged surface.

The finding represents the first confirmed detection of a charged surface on an object other than our moon, although it is predicted to occur on many different bodies, including asteroids and comets.

"...picture taken of a comet from the Rosetta probe." As shared by an fb friend. I didn't know the probe was going to land on Rosetta (iow, not sure what I'm looking at here).

http://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/files/2014/10/ESA_Rosetta_NAVCAM_141018_D.jpg

that's the "neck" of the comet, seen at a distance of something like 7km. rosetta is orbiting increasingly closer and will deploy the landing probe (a separate craft) in a few weeks.

I was wondering about that object in the distance, I couldn't tell if that was just a longer view of the same shot, superimposed on the close-up, or a separate entity.

that's the "head", attached to the part in the foreground. there are plenty of images of the comet in its entirety showing the odd shape.

OK, I see it now, it looked like a separate object. I posted pictures Aug 7, and I think I can tell the angle this latest shot was taken from in it (upper right looking down).

Cassini Caught in Hyperion's Particle Beam

Static electricity is known to play an important role on Earth's airless, dusty moon, but evidence of static charge building up on other objects in the solar system has been elusive until now. A new analysis of data from NASA's Cassini mission has revealed that, during a 2005 flyby of Saturn's moon Hyperion, the spacecraft was briefly bathed in a beam of electrons coming from the moon's electrostatically charged surface.
The finding represents the first confirmed detection of a charged surface on an object other than our moon, although it is predicted to occur on many different bodies, including asteroids and comets.

― Elvis Telecom, Friday, October 17, 2014 5:16 AM (1 week ago) Bookmark

But do you think Uranus emits electron beams?

Sunlit seas of Titan.

http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/w2ui6jcj6xtonw9gi6g9.png

I like the "large images!" warning

Eagerly waiting to see pictures of the sun reflected off the seas of Uranus

Don't know where to put so: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/06/science/astronomers-observe-supernova-and-find-theyre-watching-reruns.html?_r=0

What the Enceladus flyby next week will look like.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuAgTEunHFA

Love these little probes just chugging along out there, being amazing

http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/system/resources/detail_files/7395_7395_saturn_gill_infrared_ai_wm_display.jpg

Top Cassini Images for 2016: https://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/news/2983/cassini-top-10-images-2016/

Sad to see the mission soon to end but damn if it hasn't produced wonders all along.

By the way, those who like gas giant cloudscapes for desktop backgrounds etc. should check out this 2010 reprocessed mosaic of Jupiter's Great Red Spot from Voyager I.

xp I have that one saved and sometimes I just break it out and stare at it. In the words of Nigel Tufnel, "too much fuckin' perspective".
Cassini has been one of the greatest scientific triumphs I can remember. I often recall reading about Carolyn Porco back in 1980 when she was a mission specialist on Voyager, and here she is 36 years later heading up my favourite solar system mission of all (well, I guess Voyager rules them all, but Cassini has been the most engaging and involving). I remember saturating our dialup connection watching the live feed from Huygens' descent, now THAT has to be one of the most incredible pieces of engineering and execution we have ever achieved.
I'm sad(ish) for the end but I CANNOT WAIT to see the science from the ring dive orbits.

Sudden flashback memory of watching Huygens' landing at a Starbucks because of the free wi-fi

Mimas
http://saturnraw.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/raw/casJPGFullS97/N00275752.jpg

Yeah, it looks like a clay model for 'The Little Prince'.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrGAQCq9BMU

And per the video Elvis T posted, the Grand Finale mission began yesterday with the first successful dive between rings and planet

https://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/news/3032/nasa-spacecraft-dives-between-saturn-and-its-rings/

Sad to see it end over the next few months but damn, just like Galileo was, what a heck of a great mission.

uranus

Four days to go. The finale has been wonderful these past few months.

https://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/

The last visit to Titan is complete, it's en route towards a full Saturn plunge.

if the destruction of cassini is to prevent altering the biological environments of the orbiting moons then why did we drop the huygens probe on titan

O heartless cynic.

I for one am sad! But also, hasn't this been one of the most successful NASA missions ever? And I think now they're planning to go to Jupiter's Europa as a result of things they learned on this mission.

Nothing can replace my pure and total love for Voyager, but Cassini comes pretty close

Cassini-Huygens: Preventing Biological Contamination

The Huygens probe which landed on Titan was not sterilized as the chances of finding life were considered insignificant. From further investigations it is evident that chances for life on Titan are higher than initially thought. Although forward contamination in this case is still considered unlikely, it reinforces the need to ensure we protect extra-terrestrial chances of life.

Nice photographic summary of the mission here: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/09/14/science/cassini-saturn-images.html

it's also just cool to blow up your damn spaceship in the atmosphere of a planet billions of miles away xp

Scuttlin' into Saturn

The final images from our nearly 20 years in space are arriving. Unprocessed images are available at: https://t.co/8r5YwwIKVp #GrandFinale pic.twitter.com/46ivtDAdqd

— CassiniSaturn (@CassiniSaturn) September 14, 2017

Here is Enceladus, as a crescent, lit by Saturnshine. Our last view. Processed to RGB by me. pic.twitter.com/zr2JsjXj4q

— Emily Lakdawalla (@elakdawalla) September 15, 2017

Here is my first crack at assembling the Enceladus-setting animation. Missing some frames, need to align to make it smoother pic.twitter.com/SARPsYjWze

— Emily Lakdawalla (@elakdawalla) September 15, 2017

Melodramatic, but he's earned it

I made the mistake of imagining what it would be like to be Cassini, watching Saturn grow larger & larger, sending my discoveries home...

— Bobak Ferdowsi (@tweetsoutloud) September 14, 2017

And there it went...

RIP big man

Thx & RIP

the nytimes link james posted has some truly breathtaking images, holy shit

rip cassini, you had a hell of an eye for photography

Was asleep when it happened, but maybe for the best.

Can anyone explain the process behind transmitting these amazing images back to earth?

cassini was towing an ethernet cable hardwired to a computer in houston iirc

once it got past mars the lag meant it couldn't play a decent round of doom anymore

For calstars, copied from an actually useful yahoo answers page:

By radio waves. The transmission is programmed into the computers on Cassini at a particular time and the receiving stations of the Deeps Space network are ready to receive the data stream 46 hours later.

"...The Cassini spacecraft is supported by two major components of the JPL's Interplanetary Network Directorate (IND).

Telecommunications and data acquisition support is provided by the NASA Deep Space Network, the world's largest, most sensitive spacecraft communications network. The DSN consists of three deep space communications complexes located approximately 120 degrees of longitude apart around the world: at Goldstone, California; near Madrid, Spain; and near Canberra, Australia. This placement permits continuous communication with deep space spacecraft. The DSN supports Earth orbiter spacecraft communications, as well as, radio and radar astronomy observations for the exploraton of the solar system and the universe.

The DSN provides the vital two-way communications link that guides and controls the Cassini spacecraft. The DSN 34-meter-diameter (112-foot) and 70-meter-diameter antennas are precision pointed, high-gain, parabolic reflector antennas with high power transmitters and ultra low noise (3 Kelvin operating temperature) amplifiers. Each deep space communication complex provides capabilities required to perform telemetry data processing including signal reception and amplification, signal demodulation and decoding, and data packet extraction. A capability to control the spacecraft via commands received from the Cassini project and transmitted from the DSN using 20 kilowatt transmitters is provided. Precision navigation is provided by measurements of signal phase and generation of range data which make use of the ultrastable frequency and timing capabilities of the DSN. All DSN complexes are linked to JPL via a world-wide communications network.

Cassini is also supported by IND's Advanced Multimission Operations System. Known as AMMOS, this system provides a common set of mission operations services and tools to the Cassini mission, as well as to other JPL spaceflight projects. They include capabilities which enable Cassini engineers to do mission planning and analysis, develop pre-planned sets of commands to the spacecraft, perform trajectory calculations for navigating the spacecraft, and process telemetry data (i.e., downlink data from the spacecraft). The AMMOS also provides capabilities for the Cassini Flight team to display and analyze key measurements, such as readings of temperature, pressure, and power, from the spacecraft. Other mission operations services include simulation of telemetry and command data, data management and retrieval of all data types used by the Cassini project, and data archiving.

Brilliant. I will have to read that several times before it makes sense. I didn't know radio waves could carry imagery.

Cheers James!

radio can carry anything digital

I want to visit the Canberra DSN post now, if I ever get to travel there again

Nice in-house profile of members of the team and the build-up to the end.

https://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/news/3122/cassinis-family-takes-the-plunge/

Can anyone explain...

The telemetry downlink speed wasn't terrible. 14.2 baud, during Saturn orbit phase, if I'm reading this correctly. A state of the art 1991 phone modem.

Oops, 14400 kbit/s.

By comparison, New Horizons, sending back the data from its Pluto flyby, and using both antennas, was limited to 2000 bits per second. Your 1995 AOL dial-up was 28 times faster. Space porn requires patience.

Emptying out the Cassini conference room. (thread)

This is the ⁦@CassiniSaturn⁩ - VIMS Operations Center (read: conference room). For the rest of the month, my job is to dismantle it - making sure the stuff that needs to be destroyed gets destroyed, sorting out the rest. This is going to be fun! pic.twitter.com/fiPQxfRr2e

— Emily J (@EmExAstris) September 5, 2019

Somebody just pointed me to this page, maybe it’s already mentioned upthread or elsewhere:
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html