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SCIENCE
SATURN'S MYSTERIOUS LIGHT
This is the first image of Saturn's ultraviolet aurora taken by the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) on board the Hubble Space Telescope in October 1997, when Saturn was a distance of 810 million miles (1.3 billion kilometers) from Earth. The new instrument, used as a camera, provides more than ten times the sensitivity of previous Hubble instruments in the ultraviolet. STIS images reveal exquisite detail never before seen in the spectacular auroral curtains of light that encircle Saturn's north and south poles and rise more than a thousand miles above the cloud tops.
This false-color image of Saturn shows ring shadows running across the upper portion of the planet, and sunlight illuminating the lower portion of the planet.
The upper area, in the ring shadow, would be black in visible light but glows red in infrared because Saturn is warm inside. This light shines out through the clouds, giving scientists a look at some of Saturn's interesting atmospheric structure.
This image was taken on June 30, 2006, with Cassini's visual and infrared mapping spectrometer. It was constructed from images taken at wavelengths of 0.91 microns shown in blue, 2.25 microns shown in green, and at 5.01 microns shown in red. The distance from Cassini to Saturn's center in this image is 335,000 kilometers (208,159 miles).
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter was designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer team is based at the University of Arizona where this image was produced.
This image of the northern polar region of Saturn shows both the aurora and underlying atmosphere, seen at two different wavelengths of infrared light as captured by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft.
Energetic particles, crashing into the upper atmosphere cause the aurora, shown in blue, to glow brightly at 4 microns (six times the wavelength visible to the human eye). The image shows both a bright ring, as seen from Earth, as well as an example of bright auroral emission within the polar cap that had been undetected until the advent of Cassini. This aurora, which defies past predictions of what was expected, has been observed to grow even brighter than is shown here. Silhouetted by the glow (cast here to the color red) of the hot interior of Saturn (clearly seen at a wavelength of 5 microns, or seven times the wavelength visible to the human eye) are the clouds and haze that underlie this auroral region. For a similar view of the region beneath the aurora see http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA09185 .
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