Wrapping-up a phenomenally successful year of observing Saturn’s icy
moons, the Cassini mission is releasing a flood of new views of the moons
Enceladus, Dione, Rhea, Hyperion, and Iapetus.
The moons and their intricacies are being highlighted today at a news
briefing held today at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San
Francisco, Calif.
The image products being released include large mosaics, movies and
false-color views. They are available at http://ciclops.org,
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and
http://www.nasa.gov/cassini.
Several new images of Rhea, a moon measuring 1,528 kilometers (949 miles)
across, were taken during Cassini’s most recent close flyby on November
26. During the encounter, Cassini dipped to within 500 kilometers (310
miles) of Rhea’s surface.
Additional new images include two “zoomable” mosaics of Rhea and Hyperion
at high resolution; false-color views revealing compositional variation on
the surfaces of Hyperion, Dione and Rhea; two movies reproducing Cassini’s
exciting encounters with Iapetus and Hyperion; and dazzling new images of
the plumes of Enceladus, including a time-lapse movie.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European
Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory
(JPL), a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena,
manages the Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA’s Science Mission
Directorate, Washington.
The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed
and assembled at JPL. The imaging team consists of scientists from the
U.S., England, France, and Germany. The imaging operations center and
team leader (Dr. C. Porco) are based at the Space Science Institute in
Boulder, Colo.
