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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.
done
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
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
I suspect that the term "parallel" was chosen because "coplanar" isn't as widely understood among the general public. When writing press-releases they have to strike a delicate balance between complete accuracy and comprehension. There's a sort of perverse Heisenberg Uncertainty principle at play, there.
Cool archive
Check out that 4th photo caption. Damn Microsoft and their interplanetary advertising campaign!!!
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
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.
For once, somebody who actually *deserves* goatse
Table-ized A.I.
Thanks to American taxpayers for footing a couple hundred million dollars for some great desktop backgrounds.