As Titan Turns

This image from NASA's Dawn spacecraft of asteroid Vesta shows Aelia crater with a larger, more degraded crater to the left. Dark and bright material crops out from Aelia's rim and slumps towards i...

NASA's Dawn spacecraft captured this image on Dec. 18, 2015 of unnamed craters near the equator of Ceres. The image is centered at approximately 4 degrees south latitude, 350 degrees east longitude.

This enhanced-color mosaic of Saturn's icy moon Tethys shows a range of features on the moon's trailing hemisphere. 

Rhea transits the banded clouds of the Ringed Planet. The edge-on rings cast curved shadows onto Saturn's northern hemisphere. More subtle than the ring shadows, the zonal jet streams of Saturn str...

A shepherd moon can do more to define ring structures than just keep the flock of particles in line, as Cassini spacecraft images such as this have shown. Prometheus (102 kilometers, or 63 miles a...

This infrared view of Saturn's southern hemisphere shows the bright, high altitude equatorial band at the top, and the now familiar dark bull's-eye that marks the planet's south pole. At the mid-la...

These images from NASA's Dawn spacecraft are located in asteroid Vesta's Floronia quadrangle, in Vesta's northern hemisphere. There are fine-scale streaks of dark and bright material originating fr...

This image, taken by NASA's Dawn spacecraft, shows the surface of dwarf planet Ceres from an altitude of 915 miles (1,470 kilometers). The image, with a resolution of 450 feet (140 meters) per pixe...

This almost surreal view of Iapetus was acquired by Cassini about 10 minutes after the spacecraft's closest approach to the icy moon during a close flyby on New Year's Eve 2004. The image shows Ia...

The Cassini spacecraft looks toward the bright linea -- geologically fresh-looking, icy canyons -- on Dione. This view looks toward the trailing hemisphere of Dione (1126 kilometers, or 700 miles ...

The Cassini spacecraft peers down through layers of haze to glimpse the lakes of Titan's northern regions.

This view from NASA's Cassini spacecraft was obtained about half a day before its first close pass by the outer edges of Saturn's main rings during its penultimate mission phase. 

These two images of Saturn show the entire south polar region, not just the little area around the core of the hurricane-like vortex.

In KSC's Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility, Charley Kohlhase (left), then Cassini's science and mission design manager, and Richard Spehalski, then program manager of the Cassini mission, displa...

The rings cannot hide the ragged, icy crescent of Rhea, here imaged in color by the Cassini spacecraft. The second-largest moon of Saturn shines brightly through gaps in the rings. Rhea (1,528 kil...

This closeup of asteroid Vesta from NASA's Dawn spacecraft shows small scale features such as grabens (linear depressions) which run parallel to and inside the troughs.

Maps of magnesium/silicon (left) and thermal neutron absorption (right) across Mercury's surface (red indicates high values, blue low) are shown. These maps, together with maps of other elemental a...

Two moons of Saturn rendezvous in the Saturnian skies above the Cassini spacecraft. Mimas (397 kilometers, or 247 miles across) is seen here just before gliding in front of Helene (32 kilometers, ...

Click here for links to the referenced movie. This movie, comprised of several detailed images taken by Cassini's radar instrument, shows bodies of liquid near Titan's north pole. These images sh...

In back-to-back fly-bys, the Cassini spacecraft will visit Dione on Dec. 12, and then Titan on Dec. 13, 2011. The image here is a close-up of one released originally on Oct. 24, 2011. The full ima...

Saturn's moon Mimas casts an elliptical shadow on the planet south of the larger, wider shadows cast by the planet's rings. Mimas and the rings are not shown here. This view looks toward the south...

Dark shadows are an ever-present part of Saturn's already twilit world, where the Sun's rays are a hundred times more feeble than at Earth. Here, the rings cast their silhouette upon the planet, w...

This image shows the rim of Ikapati Crater on Ceres, which lies in the dwarf planet's northern hemisphere. Groupings of roughly parallel, narrow, linear fractures can be seen inside and outside the...

This artist’s concept shows the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft collecting a sample from Bennu. 

This view from NASA's Dawn spacecraft taken on May 29, 2016, shows the eastern rim of Gaue Crater on Ceres.