Click on the image for the movie
The Great Crossing
This life-like movie sequence captures Saturn's rings during a ring plane
crossing -- which Cassini makes twice per orbit -- from the spacecraft's
point of view. The movie begins with a view of the sunlit side of the
rings. As the spacecraft speeds from south to north, the rings appear to
tilt downward and collapse to a thin plane, and then open again to reveal
the un-illuminated side of the ring plane, where sunlight filters through
only dimly.
The striking contrast between the sunlit and unlit sides of the ring plane
can now be fully appreciated, thanks to the sense of continuity in time
and space provided by this brief clip.
The movie consists of 34 images taken over the course of 12 hours as
Cassini pierced the ring plane. Additional frames were inserted between
the original images in order to smooth the motion in the sequence -- a
scheme called interpolation.
Six moons careen through the field of view during the sequence. The first
large one is Enceladus, whose slanted motion from the upper left to center
right nicely illustrates the inclination of its orbit with respect to the
rings. The second large one, seen in the second half of the movie, is
Mimas, going from right to left.
This movie begins with a view looking toward the lit side of the rings
from about 9 degrees below the ring plane. It ends when the spacecraft is
8 degrees above the ring plane.
The clear-filter images in this movie sequence were taken with the Cassini
spacecraft wide-angle camera on Jan. 17, 2007, at a distance of
approximately 900,000 kilometers (500,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale
is 48 kilometers (30 miles) per pixel.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European
Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages
the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The
Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and
assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space
Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.cfm. The Cassini imaging team
homepage is at http://ciclops.org.
