Cassini has been orbiting Saturn for over five years - meaning its mission in longer than the original Enterprise’s and, with recent results, is far better looking. Cassini captured images of the Saturnian equinox, a solar system event which happens only once every fifteen Earth years, and the results astonish even professional astronomers - if you look at the pictures, they’ll blow your mind.
The joint NASA/ESA/ASI (Italian Space Agency) operation saw the two tonne satellite enter orbit around the gas giant and launch the Huygens probe at Titan. A sentence which sounds like a science fiction set in a Greek Myth. For the last five years the satellite has been returning extraordinary images on the immense planet, with a higher “great picture to weight” ratio than every supermodel on the planet put together. The extended mission is made possible by plutonium-powered radio-thermal generators. (These were of course heavily protested at launch time, putting another tick in the “environmentalists against anything cool” column.)
The equinox enabled Cassini to capture sharp relief images of the incredible rings around Saturn with the Sun shining sideway-on (when you’re in space you’re really at the mercy of natural lighting). The results were amazing: rings thought to be ten meters thick, with variations of two stories at most, turned out to have vertical jumps the size of the Rocky mountains. The thing about space is you can hide things that big in it. The results captured during the week of perfect plane illumination will be studied for years to come, and the great thing about the internet age is that they aren’t just for the professionals - they stitched together a truly mind-boggling high resolution image just for us online-types to goggle at.
If you don’t click the link then you’re a liar: you’re saying you have better things to do with your time, and even if your job is head champagne tester at the Optimus Prime and Jetpack factory, that’s simply not true.
Luke McKinney
Cassini mission (make sure to click the full resolution image!)
The image
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