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Blanket Protection
Published:
December 16, 2004
Blanket Protection
ENLARGE
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This image shows three slices of a class of meteorites that fell to Earth that NASA's Dawn mission has confirmed as originating from the giant asteroid Vesta.
Meteorites from Vesta
This dramatic view of the crescents of Neptune and Triton was acquired by Voyager 2 approximately 3 days, 6 and one-half hours after its closest approach to Neptune (north is to the right).
Crescents of Neptune and Triton
This view from NASA's Dawn spacecraft taken on May 30, 2016, at a distance of about 240 miles (385 kilometers) above the surface, shows the center of Gaue Crater (52 miles or 84 kilometers wide) on...
Dawn LAMO Image 166
The Cassini spacecraft surveys Saturn's outstretched ring system in the infrared from a vantage point high above the planet's northern latitudes. Nearly the full expanse of the main rings is visibl...
Blue Expanse
Saturn's north pole is littered with storms, as we see in this color view of the pole. A bit of the north polar hexagon is also visible at the upper-right. Cassini scientists are looking forward...
Stormy Pole
A dynamical interplay between Saturn's largest moon, Titan, and its rings is captured in this view from NASA's Cassini spacecraft.
The Synchronicity of Rhythms
This image depicts Saturn's moon Titan as seen by the visual and infrared mapping spectrometer after closest approach on a July 22, 2006, flyby. The image was generated using the 5 micron waveleng...
Clouds Over Titan (Annotated)
Golden hues continue to creep northward on Saturn, subduing the blues and grays the Cassini spacecraft witnessed upon arrival in mid-2004. This view was acquired from about 27 degrees above the ri...
Chasing Away the Blues
This composite infrared image, derived from data collected by the Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper (JIRAM) instrument aboard NASA’s Juno mission to Jupiter during a Feb. 2, 2017, pass over the planet...
Cyclones Encircle Jupiter's North Pole
The bright whorls and small-scale specks of convective clouds drift through a region just north of Saturn's bright equatorial band. Observers have seen major storms develop in this region in the pa...
Rotating Flow
Atmospheric Detail in Infrared July 13, 2004 Full-Res: PIA05415 Cassini captured intriguing cloud structures on Saturn as it near...
Atmospheric Detail in Infrared
As Cassini scientists work to understand the newly-exposed surface of Saturn's largest moon, Titan, they have found an interesting arrowhead-shaped feature, shown in the center of this synthetic ap...
Follow the Arrow
Cassini's flyby of Jupiter is quite distant, with a closest approach of about 136 Jupiter radii (or almost 10 million kilometers). This image shows the spacecraft with Jupiter in the far distance....
Jupiter Flyby
This set of composite images was constructed from the best Cassini radar data and visual and infrared mapping spectrometer data obtained from all the Titan flybys up to the most recent flyby on Oct...
Infrared and Radar Views of Titan
Saturn's potato-shaped moon Prometheus is rendered in three dimensions in this close-up from Cassini.
3D Prometheus
The Sun's rays strike the terrains near the terminator on Tethys at low angles, throwing features there into sharp relief. The cluster of peaks at the center of the crater Odysseus (450 kilometers,...
Rough Sphere of Tethys
Sunlight illuminates the deep cut of Ithaca Chasma on Saturn's moon Tethys. Ithaca Chasma runs roughly north-south for more than 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) on Tethys. See Steep Scarps for a clos...
Chasma Crescent
This is a NASA Hubble Space Telescope color image of Ceres, the largest object in the asteroid belt.
Color View of Ceres
Three large and impressive vortices, including two that appear to be interacting, are captured here as they swirl through Saturn's active southern latitudes. This view shows latitudes slightly to ...
Storms Roll Past
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 unusual view of Saturn's moon Hyperion (266 kilometers, or 165 miles across) shows just how strangely shaped this tumbling little moon is. Hyperion is the largest of Saturn's irregularly shape...
Strange Hyperion
Heavily-shadowed craters in the northernmost latitudes of Ceres are seen in this view from NASA's Dawn spacecraft, taken on Jan. 25, 2016.
Dawn LAMO Image 41
This false-color mosaic of Saturn shows deep-level clouds silhouetted against Saturn's glowing interior. The image was made with data from Cassini's visual and infrared mapping spectrometer, which ...
Saturn's Silhouetted Clouds
A pair of Saturn's small, icy satellites accompany the planet's rings in this Cassini spacecraft snapshot. Janus (179 kilometers, or 111 miles across) is farthest from Cassini here and occupies th...
Chunks of Ice
This movie is based on data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft and shows a flyover of an area of Saturn's moon Titan known as Sotra Facula.
Flyover of Sotra Facula, Titan
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