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Great Red Spot
Published:
December 7, 2004
Great Red Spot
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This topographical map of Ceres, made with images from NASA's Dawn spacecraft, shows all of the dwarf planet's named features as of September 2016. Dawn celebrated nine years since launch on Septem...
Ceres Feature Names: September 2016
Cassini spied a crater-covered Dione in this image from Dec. 8, 2004. The bright, wispy streaks for which Dione is known are located on the moon's night side to the west. The streaky terrain was im...
Pocked Moon
+ View labeled version of the image Using images like the one presented here, Cassini imaging scientists have made a major finding about the mechanism powering the general circulation of Saturn. ...
Powering Saturn's Jets (without labels)
This infrared image of Saturn's moon Titan shows a large burst of clouds in the moon’s south polar region. These clouds form and move much like those on Earth, but in a much slower, more lingering...
Titan's South Polar Cloud Burst
The Huygens probe descends through Titan's murky, brownish-orange atmosphere of nitrogen and carbon-based molecules, beaming its findings to the distant Cassini orbiter. The probe is equipped with...
Probe over Titan
From about a degree above the unilluminated side of Saturn's ringplane, the Cassini spacecraft spies two of the small moons that skirt the edges of the planet's rings. Atlas (32 kilometers, or 20 ...
Ring Rocks
This image from NASA's Dawn spacecraft is of the south pole region of the asteroid Vesta, a mountain is rising approximately 9 miles (15 kilometers) above the floor of a crater.
Impressive Mountain Tops on Vesta
Sand dunes on the slopes of Nectaris Montes within Coprates Chasma, which is part of Mars' giant Valles Marineris canyon system, as seen by the HiRISE camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbit...
Dunes in Nectaris Montes
The Cassini spacecraft looks beyond Saturn's limb toward the icy face of Mimas, the innermost of the planet's major moons. This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 3 degrees ...
Mimas Adrift
Two companion moons share the sky before the Cassini spacecraft. Tethys is seen here with one of its two Trojan moons. Calypso, which trails the larger moon in its orbit by 60 degrees, is a couple ...
Tethys and Calypso
+ See Movie A brilliant spot of sunlight, the opposition effect, travels outward across the rings as the Cassini spacecraft orbits Saturn. This surge in ring brightness is created around the p...
Surging Onward
Old spokes never die, they just fade away. That is the current thinking of scientists who study these ephemeral features in Saturn's rings. This "difference image" is actually a composite of two i...
Aging Spokes
This narrow angle field-of-view artist's rendering shows Titan's surface with Saturn dimly in the background through Titan's thick atmosphere of methane, ethane and (mostly) nitrogen. The Cassini s...
Crater Lake on Titan
Cassini scientists continue their quest to understand the origin and evolution of the newly discovered features observed in Saturn's A ring which have become known as "propellers." In this image, t...
Earhart in the A Ring
This image from NASA's Dawn spacecraft shows Caparronia crater on asteroid Vesta, an unusually shaped, irregular rim that is sharp and fresh in some areas and more rounded and degraded in others.
Impact Crater with Unusual Rim
This video describes a computer model that proposes a flow vortex in Saturn's upper atmosphere or ionosphere can explain periodic signatures observed by NASA's Cassini spacecraft in Saturn's magnet...
Diagnosing Saturn's Magnetic Pulse
The Cassini spacecraft took a series of images on Sept. 9, 2006 as it watched the bright red giant star Aldebaran slip behind Saturn's rings. This type of observation is known as a stellar occultat...
Flickering Aldebaran #1
The Cassini spacecraft is closing in fast on its first target of observation in the Saturn system: the small, mysterious moon Phoebe, only 220 kilometers (137 miles) across. The three images ...
Closing in on Phoebe
A single crescent moon is a familiar sight in Earth's sky, but with Saturn's many moons, you can see three or even more.
Triple Crescents
This image of Saturn's moon Titan from the Synthetic Aperture Radar instrument on the Cassini spacecraft shows the southwestern area of a feature called Xanadu (bottom right of the image). The area...
Radar Images the Margin of Xanadu
Sunlight truly has come to Saturn's north pole. The whole northern region is bathed in sunlight in this view from late 2016, feeble though the light may be at Saturn's distant domain in the solar s...
Basking in Light
During its close flyby of Saturn's moon Mimas on Aug. 2, 2005, Cassini caught a glimpse of Mimas against the broad expanse of Saturn's rings. The Keeler Gap in the outer A ring, in which Cassini ...
Mimas Against the Rings
This montage of images of the Saturnian System was prepared from an assemblage of images taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft during its Saturn encounter in November 1980. This artist's arrangement ...
The Saturn System
These images from NASA's Dawn spacecraft are located in asteroid Vesta's Numisia quadrangle, in Vesta's southern hemisphere.
Apparent Brightness and Topography Images of Drusilla Crater
This giant mosaic reveals Saturn's icy moon Rhea in her full, crater-scarred glory. This view consists of 21 clear-filter images and is centered at 0.4 degrees south latitude, 171 degrees west lon...
Rhea: Full Moon
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