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Emily Lakdawalla • Jun 13, 2007

Funny little Atlas

Here's an image I put together from three raw images taken through red, green, and blue filters.

Atlas

NASA / JPL / SSI / Color composite by Emily Lakdawalla

Atlas
Cassini flew to within 40,000 kilometers of Atlas on June 12, 2007 to capture this view of the unusually-shaped moon. The view is toward Atlas' south pole.

I checked through the data that has already been released to the Planetary Data System by the imaging team, and found only one other set of red, green, and blue images of Atlas that were taken from close enough to show good detail on the surface. To my surprise, as far as I can tell, this set of images has not been turned in to a formal image release by the imaging team, so I did my best to put them together. The image was taken on June 8, 2005 from a distance of approximately 162,000 kilometers.

Atlas

NASA / JPL / SSI / Color composite by Emily Lakdawalla

Atlas
Three images through red, green, and blue filters have been combined to create this color view, which is also enlarged by a factor of two. The view of Atlas shows a saucer shape, 46 by 20 kilometers in size. Atlas' equator appears to have swept up fine ring dust, obscuring any impact craters and bulging its equator. Image data is from the official Cassini data release on the Planetary Data System.

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