January 18, 2005
Saturn and its moons
The Cassini spacecraft is the first to explore the Saturn system of rings and moons from orbit. Cassini entered orbit on Jun. 30, 2004 and immediately began sending back intriguing images and data.
Saturn
Cassini-Huygens is an international collaboration between three space agencies. Seventeen nations contributed to building the spacecraft. The Cassini orbiter was built and managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The Huygens probe was built by the European Space Agency. The Italian Space agency provided Cassini's high-gain communication antenna.
The European Space Agency's Huygens Probe dived into Titan's thick atmosphere in January 2005.
A composite picture produced from images taken by the European Space Agency's Huygens probe during its successful descent to land on Titan shows a full 360-degree view around Huygens.
The left side, behind the space probe shows a boundary between light and dark areas. The white streaks near this boundary could be ground "fog," as they were not immediately visible from higher altitudes. As the probe descended, it drifted over a plateau, center, and headed towards its landing site in a dark area, right. These images were taken from an altitude of about 8 kilometers and a resolution of about 20 meters per pixel.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at January 18, 2005 12:11 AM | TrackBack