Atmospheric Motion

Saturn: Journey to a Ringed World - Spotlight: Why go to Saturn?

During its final months, the Cassini spacecraft will climb repeatedly high above the planet’s north pole and then dive between the planet and the innermost edge of its dazzling rings.​

Map projection of Charon, the largest of Pluto's five moons, annotated with its first set of official feature names.

This composite image, which has become a popular poster, shows a global view of Earth at night, compiled from over 400 satellite images

This illustration depicts potential origins of methane found in the plume of gas and ice particles that sprays from Saturn's moon, Enceladus, based on research by scientists working with the Ion an...

This series of maps of Saturn's moon Iapetus shows how a computer model of migrating ice can explain most features of Iapetus' global appearance. The model starts with Iapetus uniformly covered in ...

This three-frame animation from NASA's Cassini spacecraft shows the swirling clouds in a vortex spawned by a great northern storm on Saturn. The clouds are moving in a clockwise direction. These...

This synthetic aperture radar image was obtained by the Cassini spacecraft on its recent pass by Titan's south pole on Dec. 20, 2007. This portion of the (T39) swath is of the region extending f...

An artist's rendition of the InSight lander operating on the surface of Mars.

This graphic, constructed from data obtained by NASA's Cassini spacecraft, shows the percentage of cloud coverage across the surface of Saturn's moon Titan. The color scale from black to yellow sig...

A simplified model of Jupiter's massive magnetic field, known as a  magnetosphere.

The University of Arizona's commemorative poster celebrating OSIRIS-REx’s successful sample collection of asteroid Bennu.

On Nov. 9, 2006, Cassini's composite infrared spectrometer captured its first view of the infrared heat radiation emanating from the "tiger stripe" fractures at the south pole of Saturn's moon Ence...

This still is from a short computer-animated film that highlights Cassini's accomplishments and Saturn and reveals the science-packed final orbits between April and September 2017.

This infrared projection map of Titan was composed from images taken by NASA's Cassini spacecraft, visual and infrared mapping spectrometer. The location of two regions that changed in brightness a...

+ See Unannotated Version + High Resolution Version This artist’s concept shows a possible model of Titan’s internal structure that incorporates data from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. In this m...

In its five-year tour of the Saturn system, Cassini has sent home a bounty of fruitful images showing delectable scenes that fill the mind with wonder and awe.

This computer-generated animation shows all of Cassini's orbits - affectionaly called the "ball of yarn" by mission planners.

This artist's concept shows "tides" on Titan raised by Saturn's gravity, as detected by NASA's Cassini spacecraft. Saturn's gravitational pull on Titan, its largest moon, varies as Titan orbits ...

This 2001 poster was created with the help of student artists in Los Angeles early in the Cassini mission. It depicts the mythological story of Saturn combined with images of space exploration.

An artist's concept of the Cassini spacecraft crossing Saturn's ring plane during one of the mission's final orbit.

This still is from a short computer-animated film that highlights Cassini's accomplishments and Saturn and reveals the science-packed final orbits between April and September 2017.

This graphic depicts the interplanetary flight path beginning with launch from Earth on 15 October 1997, followed by gravity assist flybys of Venus (26 April 1998 and 24 June 1999), Earth (18 Augus...

These illustrations indicate possible ways in which the water vapor and ice particles in the plume of Enceladus may be formed. The Cassini spacecraft recently found a small fraction of salt-rich ic...

Artist's rendition of the Pioneer 10 spacecraft at Jupiter.