ESA : Saturn’s B-ring close-up .- De cerca anillo B de Saturno

http://www.esa.int/spaceinimages/Images/2017/03/Saturn_s_B-ring_close-up
http://www.esa.int/esl/ESA_in_your_country/Spain/Primer_plano_del_anillo_B_de_Saturno                            

 

Saturn’s B-ring close-up

Primer plano del anillo B de Saturno

21 marzo 2017

Esta imagen muestra el altísimo nivel de detalle con que la sonda internacional Cassini está estudiando los anillos de escombros helados que rodean Saturno, al efectuar una serie de órbitas cercanas dedicadas en exclusiva a su observación.

Aquí vemos una región del anillo B de Saturno con el doble de detalle que lo visto hasta ahora, revelándonos toda la riqueza de su estructura. 

Los anillos de Saturno están compuestos en su mayor parte por hielo de agua de muy distinto tamaño, desde partículas similares a una mota de polvo hasta rocas de decenas de metros de diámetro. Algunos de los patrones vistos en los primeros planos de los anillos fotografiados por Cassini se deben a interacciones gravitatorias con las numerosas lunas de Saturno, pero muchas de sus características carecen de explicación. 

Se espera que Cassini proporcione en los próximos meses toda una biblioteca de imágenes con nuevos detalles de los anillos, que permitirán a los científicos saber más sobre estos misteriosos patrones. 

Las órbitas rozando los anillos comenzaron el pasado noviembre y se extenderán hasta finales de abril, cuando empiece la gran fase final de la misión. En las 22 órbitas finales, Cassini atravesará progresivamente la brecha entre los anillos y Saturno, antes de sumergirse en la atmósfera del planeta a mediados de septiembre para concluir su increíble odisea de 13 años en el sistema saturniano. 

Esta imagen fue capturada en luz visible por la cámara de gran angular de Cassini el 18 de diciembre de 2016, a una distancia de unos 51.000 km de los anillos, apuntando hacia el lado no iluminado. La escala de la imagen es de unos 360 m/píxel.

Para poder conservar todos los detalles de la imagen, esta no se ha procesado para eliminar las pequeñas manchas brillantes causadas por los rayos cósmicos y la radiación de partículas cargadas en las proximidades del planeta. 

Cassini-Huygens es una misión conjunta de la NASA, la ESA y la ASI, la agencia espacial italiana. Esta imagen fue publicada por primera vez el 30 de enero de 2017.

 

 

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Details

• Title Saturn’s B-ring close-up
• Released 20/03/2017 10:00 am
• Copyright NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute a vuelo
• Description
  This image shows the incredible detail at which the international Cassini spacecraft is observing Saturn’s rings of icy debris as part of its dedicated close ‘ring grazing’ orbits.
  This image focuses on a region in Saturn’s B ring, which is seen in twice as much detail as ever before, revealing a wealth of rich structure.
  Saturn’s rings are composed mainly of water ice and range from tiny dust-size specks to boulders tens of metres across. Some of the patterns seen in Cassini’s close images of the rings are generated by gravitational interactions with Saturn’s many moons, but many details remain unexplained.
  Cassini is expected to return a library of new detailed images of the rings in the coming months, which will help planetary scientists learn more about the mysterious patterns.
  The spacecraft’s ring-grazing orbits began last November, and will continue until late April, when the mission enters its ‘grand finale’ phase. During 22 finale orbits Cassini will repeatedly dive through the gap between the rings and Saturn before plunging into the planet’s atmosphere in mid-September to conclude its incredible 13-year odyssey in the Saturn system.
  The image was taken in visible light with Cassini’s wide-angle camera on 18 December 2016, at a distance of about 51 000 km from the rings, and looks towards the unilluminated side of the rings. Image scale is about 360 m per pixel.
  In order to preserve the finest details, this image has not been processed to remove the many small bright blemishes, which are created by cosmic rays and charged particle radiation near the planet.
  The Cassini–Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, ESA and ASI, the Italian space agency
  The image was first featured in a release published on 30 January 2017.
• Id 374840

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ESA
Guillermo Gonzalo Sánchez Achutegui
ayabaca@gmail.com
ayabaca@hotmail.com
ayabaca@yahoo.com
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NASA : The Dew Drop of Saturn .- La gota de rocío de Saturno

Hola mis amigos:  A VUELO DE UN QUINDE EL BLOG., El agua en el mundo de encelado aparece    aqí para sentarse encima de los anillos de Saturno como una gota de rocío sobre una hoja. A pesar de que aparece como una pequeña gota antes de que el poder del gigante de Saturno, Encelado nosotros que incluso pequeños mundos mantenga misterios recuerda y se pregunta para ser explorado.

Según la mayoría de las predicciones antes de la llegada de Cassini a Saturno, una luna del tamaño de Encelado (313 millas, 504 kilómetros de diámetro) se habrían espera que sea un mundo muerto, congelado. Pero Encelado muestra una notable actividad geológica, como se evidencia por la columna de humo que emana de sus regiones polares del sur y su mundial, bajo la superficie del océano. (Para una mirada más cercana a chorros individuales que contribuyen a la columna de humo, ver PIA11688; para más información sobre el océano subsuperficial ver PIA19656.) El penacho, que fue descubierto en las imágenes de Cassini, se compone principalmente de vapor de agua y contener partículas de polvo arrastradas.

More information..........

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/details.php?id=PIA18368

      

The water-world Enceladus appears here to sit atop Saturn's rings like a drop of dew upon a leaf. Even though it appears like a tiny drop before the might of the giant Saturn, Enceladus reminds us that even small worlds hold mysteries and wonders to be explored.

By most predictions prior to Cassini's arrival at Saturn, a moon the size of Enceladus (313 miles, 504 kilometers across) would have been expected to be a dead, frozen world. But Enceladus displays remarkable geologic activity, as evidenced by the plume emanating from its southern polar regions and its global, subsurface ocean. (For a closer look at individual jets that contribute to the plume, see PIA11688; for more on the subsurface ocean see PIA19656.) The plume, which was discovered in Cassini images, is comprised mostly of water vapor and contain entrained dust particles.

This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 0.3 degrees below the ring plane. The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on May 25, 2015 using a spectral filter which preferentially admits wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 728 nanometers.

The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 930,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Saturn. Image scale is 54 miles (87 kilometers) per pixel.

The Cassini mission is a cooperative project of NASA, ESA (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. 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, Colorado.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit

 http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov

 and http://www.nasa.gov/cassini.

The Cassini imaging team homepage is at 

http://ciclops.org.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute

Last Updated: May 2, 2016

Editor: Tony Greicius

Tags:  Cassini, Enceladus, Image of the Day, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Moons, Saturn, Solar System,

 NASA

Guillermo Gonzalo Sánchez Achutegui

ayabaca@gmail.com

ayabaca@hotmail.com

ayabaca@yahoo.com 

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NASA : Cassini Spacecraft Reveals 101 Geysers and more on Icy Saturn Moon

This artist's rendering shows a cross-section of the ice shell immediately beneath one of Enceladus' geyser-active fractures, illustrating the physical and thermal structure and the processes ongoing below and at the surface.

Image Credit: 

NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute

 

Scientists using mission data from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft have identified 101 distinct geysers erupting on Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus.  Their analysis suggests it is possible for liquid water to reach from the moon’s underground sea all the way to its surface.

These findings, and clues to what powers the geyser eruptions, are presented in two articles published in the current online edition of the Astronomical Journal.

Over a period of almost seven years, Cassini’s cameras surveyed the south polar terrain of the small moon, a unique geological basin renowned for its four prominent "tiger stripe” fractures and the geysers of tiny icy particles and water vapor first sighted there nearly 10 years ago. The result of the survey is a map of 101 geysers, each erupting from one of the tiger stripe fractures, and the discovery that individual geysers are coincident with small hot spots. These relationships pointed the way to the geysers’ origin.

After the first sighting of the geysers in 2005, scientists suspected repeated flexing of Enceladus by Saturn’s tides as the moon orbits the planet had something to do with their behavior. One suggestion included the back-and-forth rubbing of opposing walls of the fractures generating frictional heat that turned ice into geyser-forming vapor and liquid.

Alternate views held that the opening and closing of the fractures allowed water vapor from below to reach the surface. Before this new study, it was not clear which process was the dominating influence. Nor was it certain whether excess heat emitted by Enceladus was everywhere correlated with geyser activity.

To determine the surface locations of the geysers, researchers employed the same process of triangulation used historically to survey geological features on Earth, such as mountains. When the researchers compared the geysers’ locations with low-resolution maps of thermal emission, it became apparent the greatest geyser activity coincided with the greatest thermal radiation. Comparisons between the geysers and tidal stresses revealed similar connections. However, these correlations alone were insufficient to answer the question, “What produces what?”

The answer to this mystery came from comparison of the survey results with high-resolution data collected in 2010 by Cassini’s heat-sensing instruments. Individual geysers were found to coincide with small-scale hot spots, only a few dozen feet (or tens of meters) across, which were too small to be produced by frictional heating, but the right size to be the result of condensation of vapor on the near-surface walls of the fractures. This immediately implicated the hot spots as the signature of the geysering process.

“Once we had these results in hand we knew right away heat was not causing the geysers, but vice versa,” said Carolyn Porco, leader of the Cassini imaging team from the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, and lead author of the first paper. “It also told us the geysers are not a near-surface phenomenon, but have much deeper roots.”

Thanks to recent analysis of Cassini gravity data, the researchers concluded the only plausible source of the material forming the geysers is the sea now known to exist beneath the ice shell. They also found that narrow pathways through the ice shell can remain open from the sea all the way to the surface, if filled with liquid water. 

In the companion paper, the authors report the brightness of the plume formed by all the geysers, as seen with Cassini’s high resolution cameras, changes periodically as Enceladus orbits Saturn.  Armed with the conclusion the opening and closing of the fractures modulates the venting, the authors compared the observations with the expected venting schedule due to tides.

They found the simplest model of tidal flexing provides a good match for the brightness variations Cassini observes, but it does not predict the time when the plume begins to brighten. Some other important effect is present and the authors considered several in the course of their work.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team consists of scientists from the United States, England, France and Germany. The imaging team is based at the Space Science Institute.

Additional details, images and an animation are available at:

http://www.ciclops.org/view_event/202

More information about Cassini is available at:

http://www.nasa.gov/cassini

and

http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov

NASA

Guillermo Gonzalo Sánchez Achutegui

ayabaca@gmail.com

ayabaca@Hotmail.com

ayabaca@yahoo.com

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NASA: NASA Cassini Spacecraft Provides New View of Saturn and Earth

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft took this natural-color portrait on July 19, 2013, which is the first image to show Saturn, its moons and rings, plus Earth, Venus and Mars, all together. (Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI)

 

NASA has released a natural color image of Saturn from space, the first in which Saturn, its moons and rings, and Earth, Venus and Mars, all are visible.

The new panoramic mosaic of the majestic Saturn system taken by NASA's Cassini spacecraft, which shows the view as it would be seen by human eyes, was unveiled at the Newseum in Washington on Tuesday.

Cassini's imaging team processed 141 wide-angle images to create the panorama. The image sweeps 404,880 miles (651,591 kilometers) across Saturn and its inner ring system, including all of Saturn's rings out to the E ring, which is Saturn's second outermost ring. For perspective, the distance between Earth and our moon would fit comfortably inside the span of the E ring.

"In this one magnificent view, Cassini has delivered to us a universe of marvels," said Carolyn Porco, Cassini's imaging team lead at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo. "And it did so on a day people all over the world, in unison, smiled in celebration at the sheer joy of being alive on a pale blue dot."

The mosaic is part of Cassini's "Wave at Saturn" campaign, where on July 19, people for the first time had advance notice a spacecraft was taking their picture from planetary distances. NASA invited the public to celebrate by finding Saturn in their part of the sky, waving at the ringed planet and sharing pictures over the Internet.

An annotated version of the Saturn system mosaic labels points of interest. Earth is a bright blue dot to the lower right of Saturn. Venus is a bright dot to Saturn’s upper left. Mars also appears, as a faint red dot, above and to the left of Venus. Seven Saturnian moons are visible, including Enceladus on the left side of the image. Zooming in to the image reveals the moon and the icy plume emanating from its south pole, supplying fine, powder-sized icy particles that make up the E ring.

The E ring shines like a halo around Saturn and the inner rings. Because it is so tenuous, it is best seen with light shining from behind it, when the tiny particles are outlined with light because of the phenomenon of diffraction. Scientists who focus on Saturn's rings look for patterns in optical bonanzas like these. They use computers to increase dramatically the contrast of the images and change the color balance, for example, to see evidence for material tracing out the full orbits of the tiny moons Anthe and Methone for the first time.

“This mosaic provides a remarkable amount of high-quality data on Saturn’s diffuse rings, revealing all sorts of intriguing structures we are currently trying to understand," said Matt Hedman, a Cassini participating scientist at the University of Idaho in Moscow. "The E ring in particular shows patterns that likely reflect disturbances from such diverse sources as sunlight and Enceladus’ gravity.”

Cassini does not attempt many images of Earth because the sun is so close to our planet that an unobstructed view would damage the spacecraft's sensitive detectors. Cassini team members looked for an opportunity when the sun would slip behind Saturn from Cassini's point of view. A good opportunity came on July 19, when Cassini was able to capture a picture of Earth and its moon, and this multi-image backlit panorama of the Saturn system.

"With a long, intricate dance around the Saturn system, Cassini aims to study the Saturn system from as many angles as possible," said Linda Spilker, Cassini project scientist based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif. "Beyond showing us the beauty of the Ringed Planet, data like these also improve our understanding of the history of the faint rings around Saturn and the way disks around planets form -- clues to how our own solar system formed around the sun."

Launched in 1997, Cassini has explored the Saturn system for more than nine years. NASA plans to continue the mission through 2017, with the anticipation of many more images of Saturn, its rings and moons, as well as other scientific data.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. JPL manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. JPL designed, developed and assembled the Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras. The imaging team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.

 To view the image, visit:

http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/pia17172

More information about Cassini is available at:

http://www.nasa.gov/cassini

A new version of the collage of photos shared by the public, with the Saturn system as backdrop, is available at:

http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/pia17679

 

NASA

Guillermo Gonzalo Sánchez Achutegui

ayabaca@gmail.com

ayabaca@hotmail.com

ayabaca@yahoo.com

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