PIA 08359
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With pastel blues, pinks, greens and golds, Saturn displays a dazzling diversity of colors and hues.
Here, Cassini looks upward at, and through, the sunlit side of the rings from about 19 degrees below the ringplane. The small moon Janus (179 kilometers, 111 miles across) can be spotted off the planet’s western limb near the image bottom.
Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to create this natural color view. The images were obtained with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Feb. 3, 2007 at a distance of approximately 1.1 million kilometers (700,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 60 kilometers (38 miles) per pixel.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The imaging team consists of scientists from the US, England, France, and Germany. The imaging operations center and team lead (Dr. C. Porco) are based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission, visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the Cassini imaging team home page, http://ciclops.org.
Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Released: March 1, 2007 (PIA 08359)
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Cray, you are a wise supercomputer, er human. I support 'Space Bonds' to support NASA thru these tough times, like a war bond only better, for peace and exploration, understandig and mitigating the damage we've done to our home planet is a must as well, or we will NEVER survive to get off this 'rock'.Hint: contact your Senator and Reps and suggest space bonds to them..repeatedly. Hopefully we can get thru their rocks, er...heads, we gotta do this or NASA just might go bust. I have heard rumor there are those that would like to disband NASA all together..Evil!! I think Humans are destined to explore and populate the stars, hopefully sooner than later. Cassini and MRO,MER and all our other robo-friends have wetted our appetites, and I don't know about you but I'm hungry to go. 7/10 of 1% of the Fed budget is all NASA gets, 54% goes to the middle east. If NASA got that kind of $$, just think of the possibilities...
I here you sister. Radiation, the long term effects of zero gravity on the body/cell development and bone mass, temp extremes, there are many issues to be resolved before we set foot on Mars, Saturn or their satellites. The Ion propulsion system in the Pluto probe is a step in the right direction, but we are in dire need of a major break through to make interstellar travel more feasible for us humans. Let’s hope NASA funding doesn’t get anymore cuts. Our future lies in us getting off this rock.
Let's go one step further in our spaceship and plunge into the pastel softness of Saturn, what would we see? How would we survive this journey? Might an artifical aura of a magnetic field around our ship save us from the radation? (Do I watch too many movies?)...anybody?
Cassini looking upwards at, and through, the sunlit side of the rings of the planet Saturn with a dazzling diversity of colors and hues, make you wounder what it might be like to be inside a space ship as you might approach the planet Saturn to visualise this image out side the window of your space ship. What a day that will be when we humans eventually get to travel to Saturn.
All these great images really are a source of inspiration. I think I'll go to bed early tonight, and spend some time flying around Saturn before finally going to sleep.
