NASA’s Cassini Team Releases Stunning Natural-Color Image of Saturn

After more than 13 years at Saturn, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft bid farewell to the Saturnian system by firing the shutters of its wide-angle camera and capturing a series of images of the gas giant planet and its rings two days before the probe’s plunge into the planet’s atmosphere.

This image from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft shows Saturn and its rings. Six of Saturn’s moons make a faint appearance in this image: the ice-covered moon Enceladus can be seen at the 1 o’clock position; directly below Enceladus, just outside the F ring (the thin, farthest ring from the planet seen in this image) lies the small moon Epimetheus; following the F ring clock-wise from Epimetheus, the next moon seen is Janus; at about the 4:30 position and outward from the F ring is Mimas; inward of Mimas and still at about the 4:30 position is the F-ring-disrupting moon, Pandora; moving around to the 10 o’clock position, just inside of the F ring, is the moon Prometheus. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Space Science Institute.

“Cassini’s scientific bounty has been truly spectacular — a vast array of new results leading to new insights and surprises, from the tiniest of ring particles to the opening of new landscapes on Titan and Enceladus, to the deep interior of Saturn itself,” said Dr. Robert West, Cassini’s deputy imaging team leader at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Cassini’s camera acquired a total of 80 red, green and blue images, covering Saturn and its main rings from one end to the other, on September 13, 2017.

Dr. West and colleagues stitched 42 of those wide-angle shots together to create a natural-color view.

They had been planning this special farewell view of Saturn for years. For some, when the end finally came, it was a difficult goodbye.

“It was all too easy to get used to receiving new images from the Saturn system on a daily basis, seeing new sights, watching things change,” said Dr. Elizabeth Turtle, an imaging team associate at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.

“It was hard to say goodbye, but how lucky we were to be able to see it all through Cassini’s eyes.”

Annotated and brightened version of the above image. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Space Science Institute.

For others, Cassini’s farewell to Saturn is reminiscent of another parting from long ago.

“For 37 years, Voyager 1’s last view of Saturn has been, for me, one of the most evocative images ever taken in the exploration of the Solar System,” said Dr. Carolyn Porco, former Voyager imaging team member and Cassini’s imaging team leader at the Space Science Institute.

“In a similar vein, this ‘Farewell to Saturn’ will forevermore serve as a reminder of the dramatic conclusion to that wondrous time humankind spent in intimate study of our Sun’s most iconic planetary system.”