NASA’s Saturn Orbiter Sends Stunning Photos
TEHRAN (Tasnim) - NASA’s Cassini-Huygens orbiter which is approaching its final phase after around 20 years of operation, sent back a number of glorious photos of Saturn’s northern pole to Earth on Wednesday.
Cassini-Huygens has been on mission for nearly two decades and it’s still delivering glimpses of Saturn that leave us in awe.
A series of fresh photos sent by the orbiter show the massive swirling storm at Saturn’s north pole, which has formed a hexagonal shape, though scientists don’t know precisely why. NASA notes that each side of the hexagon is roughly as wide as the entirety of Earth.
The photos were taken at a distance of 400,000 miles from the surface of the planet, and originally have a resolution of just 256 by 256 pixels -space camera technology just wasn’t all that great back in 1997, when the orbiter was launched.
Regardless of resolution, Cassini’s camera is capable of capturing photos through several different filters, each of which is particularly sensitive to certain wavelengths. The resulting photos show the layers of cloud cover that make up the gas giant’s exterior.
Cassini captured the photos just before diving through Saturn’s outer ring, which it will do over a dozen more times as the final act in its mission. These “Ring-Grazing Orbits” will number 20 in total, and will hopefully produce many more images of the planet and its rings that NASA has never had a chance to glimpse.
“This is it, the beginning of the end of our historic exploration of Saturn,” Cassini imaging team lead Carolyn Porco said. “Let these images -and those to come- remind you that we’ve lived a bold and daring adventure around the solar system’s most magnificent planet.”
