Wednesday, October 23, 2013

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

An Incredible View of Saturn that Could Only Be Seen by a Visiting Spacecraft:
Saturn and its rings, as seen from above the planet by the Cassini spacecraft. Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute. Assembled by Gordan Ugarkovic.
Saturn and its rings, as seen from above the planet by the Cassini spacecraft. Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute. Assembled by Gordan Ugarkovic.
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. Gordon 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.(...)
Read the rest of An Incredible View of Saturn that Could Only Be Seen by a Visiting Spacecraft (235 words)

© nancy for Universe Today, 2013. |Permalink |No comment |
Post tags: ,

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

No comments:

Post a Comment