PIA12318: World of Clouds and Ice
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- Original Caption Released with Image:
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Looking cool and serene, Saturn shares its soft glow with Cassini.
This view of Saturn, its rings and the moon Tethys represents "Target 1"
in the fall 2009 edition of the Cassini Scientist for a Day contest. (See
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/education/scientistforaday8thedition/.)
The contest is designed to give students a taste of life as a scientist by
challenging them to write an essay describing the value of one target
choice among three for Cassini to image.
A bonus feature in the image is the presence of bright spokes on and just
above the ansa, or curved edge of the darkened ringplane. The spokes are
made visible here by sunlight scattering through the dust-sized icy
particles and toward Cassini's cameras.
Images taken using red, blue and green spectral filters were combined to
create this color view. The images were acquired with the Cassini
wide-angle camera on Oct. 11, 2009 at a distance of 1.7 million kilometers
(1 million miles) from Saturn.
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 mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington,
D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed
and assembled at JPL.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/.
- Image Credit:
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NASA/JPL
Image Addition Date: -
2009-10-22
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Image and caption provided by the Planetary Photojournal --
PIA12318
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