More stunning views of Saturn’s moons have been captured by the Cassini spacecraft following its latest flyby of the Ringed Planet.
The orbiter's narrow-angle camera captured a stunning image of the tiny moon Janus in front of Saturn's rings, with planet-sized Titan behind them, on 21 March. The picture was taken when the heavily cratered Janus was about 724,500 kilometres from the probe. The moon, with its 194-kilometre diameter, is dwarfed by distant Titan, at 5150 kilometres wide.
Another image from the same batch, relayed on 22 March, features the moon Mimas with Saturn in the background. Mimas is about 418 kilometres across and the new picture – taken when the moon was about 190,700 km distant – displays the moon's bombarded surface in great detail. Surface features of 1 km or larger can be picked out.
Just a few days before Cassini's cameras snapped the images, the orbiter performed a special radar experiment during the orbiter's thirteenth flyby of Titan. It sent radio waves that penetrated the moon's hazy atmosphere on their way from the spacecraft to Earth. Scientists hope to learn more about the atmosphere's structure and physical properties from this data. Voyager I employed a similar technique in 1980.
The Cassini-Huygens spacecraft entered orbit around Saturn in July 2004 after nearly seven years on its way and a risky ring-crossing manoeuvre. The Huygens probe landed, as planned, on the surface of Titan on 14 January 2005, and survived there, relaying images and data for several hours. Cassini-Huygens is an international mission involving NASA, the European Space Agency and ASI, the Italian space agency.
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