Sorry to tell you this, but there will be no pictures of hot, green-skinned alien women running after Capt. Kirk*. No, I’m talking about actual photos of hot planets in space. Really. This stuff is so cool and exciting, it almost should be classified as porn.
Here. Let me give you a quick look at some of the good stuff. Just a taste, you know.
Here’s a little description of the picture for you from Boston.com, the website of the Boston Globe. Just a little something to get your blood pumping.
Small, battered Epimetheus before Saturn’s A and F rings, and and smog-enshrouded Titan (5,150 km/3,200 mi wide) beyond. The color information in the colorized view is artificial: it is derived from red, green and blue images taken at nearly the same time and phase angle as the clear filter image. This color information was overlaid onto a previously released clear filter view in order to approximate the scene as it might appear to human eyes. The view was acquired on April 28, 2006, at a distance of approximately 667,000 km (415,000 mi) from Epimetheus and 1.8 million km (1.1 million mi) from Titan. The image scale is 4 km (2 mi) per pixel on Epimetheus and 11 km (7 mi) per pixel on Titan. (NASA/JPL/SSI) #
I mean it. These pictures of the Saturn system of planet, rings and moons are just plain awesome. The pictures were taken by the Earthican spacecraft, Cassini. Launched in 1997 from Cape Canaveral in Florida, the Cassini probe traveled more than 2.2 billion miles to reach Saturn and begin doing flybys of the planet and it’s moons. It arrived at Saturn in mid-2004 and completed a four-year mission there in 2008. While on the first part of its mission, it released a probe into the atmosphere Titan, Saturn’s largest moon and one of the places in our solar system with the best potential for extra-Terrestrial life. Now it’s on to even more exciting stuff.
If you want to know more about Cassini’s continuing mission, or see even more pictures, just cruise on over to the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory Cassini site. It’s just chock full of neat stuff. You won’t regret it.
– Richard
* Okay, I lied. Here’s Yvonne Craig as that green chick with the thing for Kirk. I just couldn’t resist.
