Spaceflight Now



Spaceflight Now +



Premium video content for our Spaceflight Now Plus subscribers.

Expedition 11 in review
The Expedition 11 mission of commander Sergei Krikalev and flight engineer John Phillips aboard the International Space Station is winding down, and this narrated retrospective looks back at the key events of the half-year voyage in orbit.

 Play video

Pluto spacecraft
The Pluto New Horizons spacecraft, destined to become the first robotic probe to visit Pluto and its moon Charon, arrives at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in advance of its January blastoff.

 Play video

Life on the station
NASA astronauts Bill McArthur and John Phillips chat with Associated Press space reporter Marcia Dunn about life aboard the International Space Station in this live space-to-Earth interview from the Destiny laboratory module on October 5.

 Dial-up | Broadband

West Coast Delta 4
In preparation for the West Coast launch of Boeing's next-generation Delta 4 rocket, the two-stage vehicle is rolled out of its horizontal hangar and driven to the Space Launch Complex-6 pad for erection. The nose cone for the NRO payload is then brought to the pad.

 Play video

West Coast shuttle
Boeing's Delta 4 rocket pad at Vandenberg Air Force Base was renovated in recent years, transforming Space Launch Complex-6 from the West Coast space shuttle launch site into a facility for the next-generation unmanned booster. This collection of footage shows the 1985 launch pad test using NASA's orbiter Enterprise.

 Full coverage

Become a subscriber
More video



Saturnian meteorology
CASSINI PHOTO RELEASE
Posted: October 10, 2005


Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Download larger image version here

 
There is much to examine in detailed close-ups like this one of Saturn's atmosphere. Scientists are particularly interested in the bright, and in some places turbulent-looking, thin boundary between the large-scale features in the upper half of the image. The characteristic features of this thin boundary might be suggestive of a place where convection is occurring. Convection in Saturn's atmosphere occurs when sufficiently warm air at deeper levels rises to levels where it becomes less dense than the surrounding air.

Coverage on Saturn extends here from 18 degrees south to 50 degrees south latitude. Contrast in the image was enhanced to aid the visibility of atmospheric features.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera at a distance of approximately 487,000 kilometers (302,000 miles) from Saturn using a filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 752 nanometers. The image scale is 25 kilometers (16 miles) per pixel.

Cassini pans across a landscape shaped by eons of impacts, revealing the dark-floored craters at high resolution. The trip to Hyperion ends as the movie pans away from the battered moon's darkened limb.

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 and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.