Latest Exploration of Saturn Stories

The Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum has bestowed its highest group honor, the Trophy for Current Achievement, on NASA's Cassini mission to Saturn. The annual award recognizes outstanding achievements in the fields of aerospace science and technology. The trophy was presented Wednesday during an evening ceremony at the museum in Washington. Established in 1985, the award has been presented to seven NASA planetary mission teams. "This joint mission has produced an...

WASHINGTON, March 22, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum has bestowed its highest group honor, the Trophy for Current Achievement, on NASA's Cassini mission to Saturn. The annual award recognizes outstanding achievements in the fields of aerospace science and technology. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO) The trophy was presented Wednesday during an evening ceremony at the museum in Washington. Established in...

Images from NASA's Cassini spacecraft have, for the first time, enabled scientists to correlate the spraying of jets of water vapor from fissures on Saturn's moon Enceladus with the way Saturn's gravity stretches and stresses the fissures. The result is among the Cassini findings presented today at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference at The Woodlands, Texas. "This new work gives scientists insight into the mechanics of these picturesque jets at Enceladus and shows that Saturn really...

This raw, unprocessed image of Saturn's second largest moon, Rhea, was taken on March 10, 2012, by NASA's Cassini spacecraft. This was a relatively distant flyby with a close-approach distance of 26,000 miles (42,000 kilometers), well suited for global geologic mapping. During the flyby, Cassini captured distinctive views of the moon's cratered surface, creating a 30-frame mosaic of Rhea's leading hemisphere and the side of the moon that faces away from Saturn. The observations included...

A set of recent papers, many of which draw on data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft, reveal new details in the emerging picture of how Saturn's moon Titan shifts with the seasons and even throughout the day. The papers, published in the journal Planetary and Space Science in a special issue titled "Titan through Time", show how this largest moon of Saturn is a cousin - though a very peculiar cousin - of Earth. "As a whole, these papers give us some new pieces in the jigsaw puzzle that is...

No team of reindeer, but radio signals flying clear across the solar system from NASA's Cassini spacecraft have delivered a holiday package of glorious images. The pictures, from Cassini's imaging team, show Saturn's largest, most colorful ornament, Titan, and other icy baubles in orbit around this splendid planet. The release includes images of satellite conjunctions in which one moon passes in front of or behind another. Cassini scientists regularly make these observations to study the...

NASA's Cassini spacecraft successfully completed its closest-ever pass over Saturn's moon Dione on Monday, Dec. 12, slaloming its way through the Saturn system on its way to tomorrow's close flyby of Titan. Cassini is expected to glide about 2,200 miles (3,600 kilometers) over the Titan surface on Dec. 13. In the selection of the raw images obtained during the Cassini Dione flyby, Dione is sometimes joined by other moons. Mimas appears just beyond the dark side of Dione in one view. In...

[ Watch the Video ] The moon Enceladus, one of the jewels of the Saturn system, sparkles peculiarly bright in new images obtained by NASA's Cassini spacecraft. The images of the moon, the first ever taken of Enceladus with Cassini's synthetic aperture radar, reveal new details of some of the grooves in the moon's south polar region and unexpected textures in the ice. These images, obtained on Nov. 6, 2011, are the highest-resolution images of this region obtained so far. The area on...

Saturn's moon Enceladus shows its icy face and famous plumes in raw, unprocessed images captured by NASA's Cassini spacecraft during its successful flyby on Nov. 6, 2011. During this Enceladus encounter, the 16th of Cassini's mission, the spacecraft passed the moon at distance of about 300 miles (500 kilometers) at 10:11 p.m. PDT on Nov. 5 (04:49 UTC on Nov. 6). To see the raw images, go to http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/photos/raw/ and click on "Search Images." The Cassini-Huygens...

NASA's Cassini mission will take advantage of the position of two of the three stars in Orion's belt when the spacecraft flies by Saturn's moon Enceladus on Wed., Oct. 19. As the hot, bright stars pass behind the moon's icy jets, Cassini's ultraviolet imaging spectrograph will acquire a two-dimensional view of these dramatic plumes of water vapor and icy material erupting from the moon's southern polar region. This flyby is the mission's first-ever opportunity to probe the jets with two stars...