Enceladus

[mmcirvin]

Still no pictures up from yesterday's extremely close Enceladus flyby. Other space news in the past couple of weeks pushed it out of the spotlight, so I didn't get any advance information on when the downlinks were supposed to happen.

Popular interest in Cassini has been low in general over the past few orbits, as the spacecraft mostly sends back hundreds of medium-inclination pictures of the rings and Saturn itself; some of these have been beautiful, but they tend to look the same after a while. The main rationale for this part of the mission has been to periodically get the rings between Cassini and Earth for the purpose of radio occultations.

Aside from these Enceladus pictures, there will also be a pretty good flyby of Mimas in early August. Then, starting in the fall, the spacecraft will be right in the equatorial plane and the visual focus will shift back from the rings to the moons, with better pictures of several of the little irregular ice-chunk moons that haven't been very clearly imaged before, and also Tethys, Dione and Rhea.

Comments

[pentomino.livejournal.com]

I just saw the Cosmos episode where, in the update, Carl Sagan talks about how he can't wait to see Cassini's pictures from the surface of Titan.

Guess he really couldn't.

[sultmhoor.livejournal.com]

I'm still very interested in Cassini - I was also hoping for early pictures from Enceladus.. I'm on the very nice Cassini Info list (http://www.kintera.org/site/apps/ka/ct/contactcustom.asp?c=bsJKK2PNJtH&b=198474) that updates almost every day.

[sultmhoor.livejournal.com]

Though, images are already starting to come in... (http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/image-details.cfm?imageID=1604)

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Raw images are now starting to appear. There's a really close one up on the JPL Cassini front page (http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.cfm), and the raw image archive is starting to show some lovely pictures of the globe of Enceladus with huge chevron-shaped markings (http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/raw/raw-images-details.cfm?feiImageID=45549) in the south polar region.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

There are also some of Rhea showing the hemisphere with the bright rayed crater... nothing we haven't seen before, but they might be some of the best pictures of that side so far.