Articles

Emily Lakdawalla

Wow, this is a cool paper. Here's the gist: the Cassini RADAR team has spotted some river channels on Titan that shine so brightly in radar images, there must be something special going on to explain that brightness.

Emily Lakdawalla

A lot of readers have expressed interest in the origin of Saturn's north polar hexagon. The hexagon is a long-lived pattern in the clouds surrounding Saturn's north pole, which has been observed since the Voyagers passed by in 1980 and 1981.

Emily Lakdawalla

Here's a new lovely color composition of Titan and Dione captured by Cassini. This one was taken on April 20, 2010; a set of 15 raw images taken of the two moons just showed up on the Cassini raw images website.

Emily Lakdawalla

A big thanks to Bob Nemiroff, editor of NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day website, for picking my composition of a set of Cassini photos of Dione and Titan for today's offering.

Emily Lakdawalla

Usually I like Mondays, but today I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed. When I get overwhelmed, I look at pictures from Cassini.

Emily Lakdawalla

It's axiomatic that as soon as I post about pretty Cassini pictures, another set of pretty photos will appear on the raw images website.

Emily Lakdawalla

Cassini has it almost too easy. Point at anything in the Saturn system and you're guaranteed of a shot that looks, at least, pretty.

Emily Lakdawalla

The Cassini Saturn orbiter just completed its second very close flyby of Saturn's mid-sized iceball moon Dione, and the images from that encounter have been streaming onto the Cassini raw images website this morning.

Emily Lakdawalla

Here's a lovely picture whose components came down from Cassini a few days ago.

Emily Lakdawalla

This new map of Saturn's moon Mimas -- representing data captured by the CIRS thermal infrared spectrometer during Cassini's February 13, 2010 flyby -- is just baffling.

Emily Lakdawalla

It's been a little while since I posted any Cassini pictures just because they were pretty, so here's a few recent ones, produced by amateurs from the images available on the Cassini raw images website.

Emily Lakdawalla

It's the second time I've posted with this provocative title. This time, it's in response to a new paper published last week in Science.

Emily Lakdawalla

Yes, it's yet another post on Helene! I keep on finding new stuff to post. This time it is a really cool montage assembled by Ian Regan.

Emily Lakdawalla

I posted already some neat images from Cassini's flyby of Helene last week, and commented on how most of the images from that encounter missed Helene entirely or only caught the moon at one edge of the camera field of view. Here's an example of one of those images.

Emily Lakdawalla

I was much anticipating Cassini's encounter with Helene on Wednesday.

Emily Lakdawalla

The Cassini mission released a pile of images today from the super-close flyby of Enceladus that happened on November 21.

Emily Lakdawalla

I visited the Cassini raw images site today and was pleased to see another couple of sets of images have been captured on Iapetus.

Emily Lakdawalla

My enormously long page describing the details of Cassini's tour -- each and every Cassini orbit of Saturn -- is now updated to include the entire Solstice Mission, which doubles its length.

Emily Lakdawalla

On Saturday, Cassini flew within 9,500 kilometers of Mimas, the innermost of the medium-sized icy moons of Saturn.

Emily Lakdawalla

Cassini got pretty close to Calypso yesterday, on the way in to Mimas. Calypso is one of the smaller moonlets of Saturn.