Saturn’s moon tagged posts

Unprocessed images of Saturn’s moon Atlas was taken on April 12, 2017, by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute

These raw, unprocessed images of Saturn’s moon, Atlas, were taken on April 12, 2017, by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. The flyby had a close-approach distance of about 7,000 miles (11,000 kilometers). These images are the closest ever taken of Atlas and will help to characterize its shape and geology. Atlas (19 miles, or 30 kilometers across) orbits Saturn just outside the A ring—the outermost of the planet’s bright, main rings.

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/cassini-sees-flying-saucer-moon-atlas-up-close

An artist’s rendering of the surface of Titan, a moon of Saturn. Courtesy: iPhoto Stock, manjik. Inset: This composite image shows an infrared view of Saturn’s moon Titan from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, acquired during the mission’s “T-114” flyby on Nov. 13, 2015.
Credit: NASA/JPL

The grains that cover Saturn’s moon act like clingy packing peanuts. Experiments led by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology suggest the particles that cover the surface of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, are “electrically charged.” When the wind blows hard enough (~15 mph), Titan’s non-silicate granules get kicked up and start to hop in a motion referred to as saltation...

Image showing the thickness of Enceladus’s ice shell, which reaches 35 kilometers in the cratered equatorial regions (shown in yellow) and less than 5 kilometers in the active south polar region (shown in blue). Credit: © LPG-CNRS-U. Nantes/U. Charles, Prague

With eruptions of ice and water vapor, and an ocean covered by an ice shell, Saturn’s moon Enceladus is one of the most fascinating in the Solar System, especially as interpretations of data provided by the Cassini spacecraft have been contradictory until now. An international team recently proposed a new model that reconciles different data sets and shows that the ice shell at Enceladus’s south pole may be only a few kilometers thick...