Slashdot Mirror
Cassini Returns Amazing New Imagery from Saturn
SeaDour writes "The Cassini spacecraft has recently entered a highly-inclined orbit around Saturn, revealing some never-before-seen images of the planet's ring system as seen from above and below the planet. 'Sailing high above Saturn and seeing the rings spread out beneath us like a giant, copper medallion is like exploring an alien world we've never seen before. It just doesn't look like the same place. It's so utterly breath-taking, it almost gives you vertigo.' The spacecraft will eventually return to its standard orbit parallel to the ring plane in late June."
Go here http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/index .cfm
to get bigger and more images from NASA, instead of the currently ddo.. I mean /.ed news sites.
The linked photo site was almost immediately Slashdotted so I'm not sure what they contained, but there are pictures on NASA's site here:
0 070301.html
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/media/2
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/overview/index.cfm
Cassini-Huygens is an international collaboration between three space agencies. Seventeen nations contributed to building the spacecraft. The Cassini orbiter was built and managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The Huygens probe was built by the European Space Agency. The Italian Space agency provided Cassini's high-gain communication antenna. More than 250 scientists worldwide are studying the data streaming back from Saturn on a daily basis.
--ob
FYI, the crappy "ciclops" site is the homepage of the Cassini imaging team: Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for Operations.
The different angles are actually very important when working on the rings. The photometry changes radically at different phase angles, from different latitudes, and when viewing different ring longitude. From the variations we can deduce a great deal about structures in the rings, particle sizes, and so forth.
The U.S. contributed $2.6 billion dollars to this mission.