From its station nearly 1.2 billion kilometers (746 million miles) from
Earth, the stalwart Cassini spacecraft sends holiday greetings to Earth
with this lovely color portrait of Saturn and two of its moons.
The 2004 holiday season marks the close of a miraculous year that saw the
end of Cassini's long journey across the solar system and the beginning
of its adventures in orbit around Saturn. In a triumph of human
achievement, the Cassini mission has already returned thousands of images
and has begun to uncover the mysteries of the Saturn system. This color
portrait serves as reminder of the Saturnian places we have already seen
and the promise of future discovery at Titan when the European Space
Agency's Huygens probe arrives at Titan on Jan. 14, 2005.
The image shows the majestic ringed planet, with bands of colorful clouds
in its southern hemisphere. The planet's northern extremes have a cool
bluish hue, due to scattering of blue wavelengths of sunlight by the
cloud-free upper atmosphere there. Long shadows of the icy rings stretch
across the north.
A grayish, oval-shaped storm is visible in Saturn's southern hemisphere
and is easily 475 kilometers (295 miles) across - the size of some
hurricanes on Earth.
Titan (5,150 kilometers, or 3,200 miles across) is visible near lower
right with its thick, orange-colored atmosphere, and faint Mimas (398
kilometers, or 247 miles across) appears just right of the rings' outer
edge.
Images taken in the red, green and blue filters with the Cassini
spacecraft wide angle camera on Dec. 14, 2004, were combined to create
this color view at a distance of approximately 719,000 kilometers
(447,000 miles) from Saturn. The image scale is 43 kilometers (27 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 team is based at
the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission, visit
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the Cassini imaging team home page,
http://ciclops.org.