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Jean-Pierre Lebreton
Published:
April 11, 2011
Jean-Pierre Lebreton
ENLARGE
Related
This image from NASA's Dawn spacecraft showing the northern part of Hanami Planum on Ceres honors the Japanese cherry blossom festival, or 'Hanami,' a long-standing Japanese tradition of welcoming ...
Hanami Planum on Ceres
This image of Aquilia AV-L-24, from the atlas of the giant asteroid Vesta, was created from images taken as NASA's Dawn mission flew around the object, also known as a protoplanet.
Aquilia AV-L-24
NASA's Dawn spacecraft obtained this image of asteroid Vesta with its framing camera on Aug. 28, 2011. This image of the south polar region was taken through the camera's clear filter at a distance...
Wrinkled Terrain at Vesta's South Pole
This image, one of the first obtained by NASA's Dawn spacecraft in its low altitude mapping orbit, shows a part of one of the troughs at the equator of the giant asteroid Vesta.
Trough in Dark and Bright on Vesta
An artist's conception of an impact event on asteroid Pallas.
Impact on Asteroid Pallas
This image from NASA's Dawn spacecraft is dominated by Caparronia impact crater, approximately 55 km in diameter with a mostly fresh, irregularly shaped rim. It also has a curved, linear mound runn...
Caparronia Crater Covered with Ejecta and Small, Secondary Craters
These are the highest-resolution color images of any part of Saturn's rings, to date, showing a portion of the inner-central part of the planet's B Ring.
Colorful Structure at Fine Scales
Three of Saturn's small moons straddle the rings in this image. From left to right are Pandora, Prometheus and, near the top right, Epimetheus. Pandora (81 kilometers, or 50 miles across) and Prom...
Tiny Trio
The shepherd moon, Pandora, is seen here alongside the narrow F ring that it helps maintain. Pandora is 84 kilometers (52 miles) across. Cassini obtained this view from about four degrees above ...
Pandora's Flocks
The Cassini spacecraft looks past Saturn's main rings to spy the tiny moon Atlas, which orbits between the main rings and the thin F ring. The main rings are closer to the spacecraft than Atlas is...
Atlas in the Distance
As Cassini spacecraft images often show, the Sun is not the only source of illumination in the Saturn System. The huge, reflective planet also shines upon its moons. This image was acquired by Cas...
The Light of Night
The Cassini spacecraft looks down on the north pole of Titan, showing night and day in the northern hemisphere of Saturn's largest moon.
Colorful Northern Crescent
From high above Saturn's northern hemisphere, NASA's Cassini spacecraft gazes over the planet's north pole, with its intriguing hexagon and bullseye-like central vortex.
Mimas Dwarfed
A chevron-shaped pattern and bright vortices stand out in the turbulent Saturnian atmosphere. Such features are hallmarks of the boundary between alternating east-west flowing cloud bands. The vie...
In the Boundary
This view from NASA's Dawn spacecraft shows the southwestern rim of Sintana Crater. The inside of the crater shows a hummocky surface.
Dawn LAMO Image 37
These images from NASA's Dawn spacecraft, located in asteroid Vesta's Floronia quadrangle, in Vesta's northern hemisphere, demonstrate a special analytical technique, which results in shadowed area...
Revealing Shadows 5
From afar, Saturn's rings look like a solid, homogenous disk of material. But upon closer examination from Cassini, we see that there are varied structures in the rings at almost every scale imagin...
Groovy
This image was taken on 2009-07-29 14:00 (PDT) and received on Earth 2009-07-30 17:06 (PDT).
Image of Atlas
This narrow angle field-of-view artist's rendering is drawn from the floor of Aeneas crater, showing Dione's icy surface and the irregular features inside the crater viewed from space. Saturn, Tit...
Dione's Aeneas Crater
A large crater can be seen in the southern hemisphere of Saturn's two-tone moon Iapetus. Lit terrain seen here is on the trailing hemisphere of Iapetus (914 miles, or 1,471 kilometers across), a ...
Big Crater Down South
This Synthetic Aperture Radar image of the surface of Saturn's moon Titan was obtained by the Cassini spacecraft on Sept. 7, 2005. The bright, rough region on the left side of the image seems to b...
Shoreline on Titan?
The shadow of the moon Mimas strikes the F ring at a different angle than the angle at which it is cast on the A ring, illustrating differences in the vertical heights of the rings in this image ta...
Crooked Shadow
Saturn's moons create art on the canvas of Saturn's rings with gravity as their tool.
Artists at Work
Related QuickTime Movie As the moon Enceladus eclipses its neighbor Mimas, Cassini records a scene possible only around the time of Saturn's approaching equinox. Seven images, each taken about 30...
Eclipsing Mimas
ORIGINAL CAPTION: The Cassini spacecraft, protected by an environmentally controlled protective fairing, is sitting at Pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Station, awaiting its launch scheduled for mid-Oc...
Cassini in Her Protective Shell
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