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Great Dark Spot
Published:
December 17, 2004
Great Dark Spot
ENLARGE
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The Cassini spacecraft investigates the craters and deep valleys on Dione during a close approach in April 2007. Significant variations in the density of impact craters on the surface of Dione can...
The Crater Gradient
The immense size of Saturn is emphasized in this Cassini spacecraft portrait that features the moon Mimas shown in front of the planet. Mimas (396 kilometers, or 246 miles across) appears as only ...
Vast Saturn
Prometheus is caught here, in the act of pulling a new streamer out of the F ring's inner edge. Trailing behind (above the moon in the image) are previous dark gores that Prometheus (102 kilometers...
Sculpting the F Ring
+ Unannotated Version NASA’s Cassini spacecraft obtained this image of a feature shaped like a hot cross bun in the northern region of Titan (left) that bears a striking resemblance to a similar...
Titan's Hot Cross Bun -- Annotated
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 classic photograph of the Earth was taken on December 7, 1972. The original caption is reprinted below: View of the Earth as seen by the Apollo 17 crew traveling toward the moon. This translu...
The Blue Marble
NASA's Galileo spacecraft caught Jupiter's moon Io, the planet’s third-largest moon, undergoing a volcanic eruption.
Galileo Sees Io Erupt
Saturn's northern hemisphere is presently a serene blue, more befitting of Uranus or Neptune, as seen in this natural color image from Cassini. Light rays here travel a much longer path through th...
Saturn's Blue Cranium
This false-color composite was created with images taken during the Cassini spacecraft's closest flyby of Titan on April 16, 2005. It was created by combining two infrared images (taken at 938 a...
Cassini's View of Titan: False Color Composite
This collage of images from NASA's Cassini spacecraft shows Saturn's northern hemisphere and rings as viewed with four different spectral filters. Each filter is sensitive to different wavelengths ...
Saturnian Hexagon Collage
This stunning close-up view shows mountainous terrain that reaches about 10 kilometers (6 miles) high along the unique equatorial ridge of Iapetus. The view was acquired during Cassini's only close...
The Himalayas of Iapetus
A 3D anaglyph view of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko based on two images acquired by Rosetta’s OSIRIS narrow angle camera on 12 August 2015, capturing a spectacular jet event.
Comet Jet in 3D
NASA's Dawn spacecraft took these images of dwarf planet Ceres. The map overlaid on the right gives scientists hints about Ceres' internal structure.
Clues to Ceres' Internal Structure
An extreme false-color view of Mimas shows color variation across the moon's surface. The monochrome view, the clear filter image used for the color map, is presented here. See Multicolor Mimas. ...
Multicolor Mimas (Monochrome View)
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
Saturn's main rings, along with its moons, are much brighter than most stars. As a result, much shorter exposure times (10 milliseconds, in this case) are required to produce an image and not satur...
Not Really Starless at Saturn
Nathan Strange and Troy Goodson of the Cassini Navigation Team track the release of the probe. The confirmation signal arrived at 7.24 p.m. PST on Dec. 24, 2004.
Cassini Navigation Team members track Huygens release
These images from NASA's Dawn spacecraft show Pinaria crater on asteroid Vesta, after which Pinaria quadrangle is named. Many young fresh impact craters are visible on the slumped material.
Topography and Albedo Image of Pinaria Crater
+ View Full Res This image was obtained by Cassini's radar instrument during a flyby on May 12, 2007. The radar antenna was pointing toward Titan at an altitude of 960 kilometers 597 miles) duri...
Titan Radar Swath (T-30 Flyby - May 12, 2007)
Unusual arc-shaped, reddish streaks cut across the surface of Saturn's ice-rich moon Tethys in this enhanced-color mosaic.
Red Arcs on Tethys
This view shows Saturn's Encke Gap (325 kilometers, or 200 miles wide) whose center is 133,590 kilometers (83,010 miles) from Saturn. This division in the rings is home to the small moon called Pan...
Resonant Effects
NASA's Dawn spacecraft being moved into thermal vacuum chamber for bake-out.
Dawn Spacecraft Moved into Thermal Vacuum Chamber
Two Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images from the radar experiment on NASA's Cassini spacecraft show that, between May 2013 and August 2014, a bright feature appeared in Kraken Mare, the largest h...
Bright Feature Appears in Titan's Kraken Mare
Saturn's largest moon, Titan, appears deceptively small paired here with Dione, Saturn's fourth-largest moon, in this view from NASA's Cassini spacecraft. Titan (3,200 miles or 5,150 kilometers ac...
True Colors, Deceptive Sizes
Dreamy colors ranging from pale rose to butterscotch to sapphire give this utterly inhospitable gas planet a romantic appeal. Shadows of the rings caress the northern latitudes whose blue color is ...
Saturn's Subtle Spectrum
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NASA Hosts Science Chat on Two Upcoming Out-of-this-World Encounters
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Every Mars landing is a knuckle-whitening feat of engineering. But each attempt has its own quirks based on where a spacecraft is going and what kind of science the mission intends to gather.
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NASA has given approval for the implementation and 2021 launch of the Lucy spacecraft to the Trojan asteroids.
NASA's Mission to Jupiter's Trojans Given the Green Light for Development
