10 Years Changed Our View Of Saturn Moons

After NASA's twin Voyager spacecraft made their brief visits to Saturn in the early 1980s, scientists were hungry for more. The Voyagers had offered them only a brief glimpse of a family of new worlds - Saturn's icy moons - and the researchers were eager to spend more time among those bodies. The successor to the Voyagers at Saturn, the Cassini spacecraft has been at Saturn for more than 10 years, and compared to the flyby Voyager mission has given us a greater understanding of what these moons contain. You can see the difference clearly in the new maps released by NASA; look under the jump and swipe back and forth to see the difference.

So what do these maps yield? Radiation-burned hemispheres in Dione, Tethys, and Rhea. Icy deposits building up on Enceladus from eruptions, which you can see in yellow and magenta, as well as fractures in blue. Dust from Saturn's E-ring covering several of the moons, except for Iapetus and Tethys.

The new maps are the best global, color maps of these moons to date, and the first to show natural brightness variations and high-resolution color together. Colors in the maps represent a broader range than human vision, extending slightly into infrared and ultraviolet wavelengths. Differences in color across the moons' surfaces that are subtle in natural-color views become much easier to study in these enhanced colors.

Enceladus itself displays a variety of colorful features. Some of the gas and dust being vented into space from large fractures near the moon's south pole returns to the surface and paints Enceladus with a fresh coating. The yellow and magenta tones in Cassini's color map are thought to be due to differences in the thickness of these deposits. Many of the most recently formed fractures on Enceladus, those near the south pole in particular, have a stronger ultraviolet signature, which appears bluish in these maps. Their color may be due to large-grained ice exposed on the surface, not unlike blue ice seen in some places in Earth's Arctic.

The new maps were produced by Paul Schenk, a participating scientist with the Cassini imaging team based at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston.

Could these new maps be used by future explorers seeking life in some of these moons?

The maps are available at: saturn.jpl.nasa.gov

Credit: saturn.jpl.nasa.gov, universetoday.com