APOD: 2024 June 23 Б The Colors of Saturn from Cassini
23.06.2024

What creates Saturn's colors? The featured picture of Saturn only slightly exaggerates what a human would see if hovering close to the giant ringed world. The image was taken in 2005 by the robot Cassini spacecraft that orbited Saturn from 2004 to 2017.

APOD: 2024 August 25 Б Fresh Tiger Stripes on Saturns Enceladus
25.08.2024

Do underground oceans vent through canyons on Saturn's moon Enceladus? Long features dubbed tiger stripes are known to be spewing ice from the moon's icy interior into space, creating a cloud of fine ice particles over the moon's South Pole and creating Saturn's mysterious E-ring.

Ringed Ice Giant Neptune
6.09.2024

Ringed ice giant Neptune lies near the center of this sharp near-infrared image from the James Webb Space Telescope. The dim and distant world is the farthest planet from the Sun, about 30 times farther away than planet Earth.

APOD: 2023 May 23 Б Jupiters Swirls from Juno
23.05.2023

Big storms are different on Jupiter. On Earth, huge hurricanes and colossal cyclones are centered on regions of low pressure, but on Jupiter, it is the high-pressure, anti-cyclone storms that are the largest. On Earth, large storms can last weeks, but on Jupiter they can last years.

APOD: 2025 June 10 Б Enceladus in True Color
10.06.2025

Do oceans under the ice of Saturn's moon Enceladus contain life? A reason to think so involves long features -- some dubbed tiger stripes -- that are known to be spewing ice from the moon's icy interior into space.

Mars: The View from HiRISE
10.04.2006

HiRISE - the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment - rides on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO)spacecraft just arrived in Mars orbit on March 10. This sharp view of the martian surface from the HiRISE camera includes image data with a full resolution of about 2.5 meters per pixel - recorded from a range of 2,500 kilometers.

Ancient Craters of Southern Rhea
13.05.2008

Saturn's ragged moon Rhea has one of the oldest surfaces known. Estimated as changing little in the past billion years, Rhea shows craters so old they no longer appear round their edges have become compromised by more recent cratering.

Io s Surface: Under Construction
17.08.2008

Like the downtown area of your favorite city, the roads you drive to work on, and any self-respecting web site ... Io's surface is constantly under construction. This moon of Jupiter holds the distinction of being the Solar System's most volcanically active body -- its bizarre looking surface continuously formed and reformed by lava flows.

An Unusually Smooth Surface on Saturns Calypso
17.02.2010

Why is this moon of Saturn so smooth? This past weekend, humanity's Saturn-orbiting Cassini spacecraft passed as close to Saturn's small moon Calypso as it ever has, and imaged the small moon in unprecedented detail. Pictured above is an early return, raw, unprocessed image of the 20-km long irregularly shaped moon.

Saturn: Shadows of a Seasonal Sundial
12.10.2011

Saturn's rings form one of the larger sundials known. This sundial, however, determines only the season of Saturn, not the time of day. In 2009, during Saturn's last equinox, Saturn's thin rings threw almost no shadows onto Saturn, since the ring plane pointed directly toward the Sun.