File:Saturn's Rings Edge-on (1995-31-320).jpg
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Saturn's_Rings_Edge-on_(1995-31-320).jpg (800 × 475 pixels, file size: 26 KB, MIME type: image/jpeg)
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DescriptionSaturn's Rings Edge-on (1995-31-320).jpg |
English: Saturn's magnificent ring system is seen tilted edge-on - for the second time this year - in this NASA Hubble Space Telescope picture taken on August 10, 1995, when the planet was 895 million miles (1,440 million kilometers) away. Hubble snapped the image as Earth sped back across Saturn's ring plane to the sunlit side of the rings. Last May 22, Earth dipped below the ring plane, giving observers a brief look at the backlit side of the rings. Ring-plane crossing events occur approximately every 15 years. Earthbound observers won't have as good a view until the year 2038. Several of Saturn's icy moons are visible as tiny starlike objects in or near the ring plane. They are from left to right, Enceladus, Tethys, Dione and Mimas. "The Hubble data shows numerous faint satellites close to the bright rings, but it will take a couple of months to precisely identify them," according to Steve Larson (University of Arizona). During the May ring plane crossing, Hubble detected two, and possibly four, new moons orbiting Saturn. These new observations also provide a better view of the faint E ring, "to help determine the size of particles and whether they will pose a collision hazard to the Cassini spacecraft," said Larson. The picture was taken with Hubble's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 in wide field mode. This image is a composite view, where a long exposure of the faint rings has been combined with a shorter exposure of Saturn's disk to bring out more detail. When viewed edge-on, the rings are so dim they almost disappear because they are very thin - probably less than a mile thick. |
Date | 11 August 1995 (upload date) |
Source | Saturn's Rings Edge-on |
Author | Credit: Phil Nicholson (Cornell University) and NASA |
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Keywords InfoField | Moons; Planets; Saturn; Solar System; Planetary Rings |
Licensing[edit]
Public domainPublic domainfalsefalse |
This file is in the public domain because it was created by NASA and ESA. NASA Hubble material (and ESA Hubble material prior to 2009) is copyright-free and may be freely used as in the public domain without fee, on the condition that only NASA, STScI, and/or ESA is credited as the source of the material. This license does not apply if ESA material created after 2008 or source material from other organizations is in use. The material was created for NASA by Space Telescope Science Institute under Contract NAS5-26555, or for ESA by the Hubble European Space Agency Information Centre. Copyright statement at hubblesite.org or 2008 copyright statement at spacetelescope.org. For material created by the European Space Agency on the spacetelescope.org site since 2009, use the {{ESA-Hubble}} tag. |
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current | 17:07, 20 April 2024 | 800 × 475 (26 KB) | OptimusPrimeBot (talk | contribs) | #Spacemedia - Upload of https://stsci-opo.org/STScI-01EVVG4BT0S02JX2KDW7HFRZ21.jpg via Commons:Spacemedia |
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