Cassini Approaches Saturn
Video Credit & Copyright: Cassini Imaging Team, ISS, JPL, ESA, NASA, S. Van Vuuren et al.;
Music: Adagio for Strings (NY Philharmonic)
Video Credit & Copyright: Cassini Imaging Team, ISS, JPL, ESA, NASA, S. Van Vuuren et al.;
Music: Adagio for Strings (NY Philharmonic)
Explanation:
What would it look like to approach Saturn in a spaceship?
One doesn't have to just imagine -- the
Cassini spacecraft
did just this in 2004, recording thousands of images along the way, and
hundreds of thousands more since entering orbit.
Some of Cassini's early images have been digitally tweaked, cropped, and compiled into the
featured inspiring video
which is part of a larger developing
IMAX movie project named
In Saturn's Rings.
In the concluding sequence,
Saturn
looms increasingly large on approach as
cloudy Titan swoops below.
With Saturn
whirling around in the background, Cassini is next depicted flying over
Mimas, with large
Herschel Crater clearly visible.
Saturn's majestic rings then take over the show as Cassini crosses Saturn's
thin ring plane.
Dark shadows of the ring appear on
Saturn itself.
Finally, the enigmatic ice-geyser moon
Enceladus appears in the
distance and then is approached just as the video clip ends.
After more than a decade of exploration and discovery,
the Cassini spacecraft ran low on fuel in 2017 was directed to
enter Saturn's atmosphere,
where it surely melted.
