Image:Iapetus by Saturnlight.jpg

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Image
File history
File links

Iapetus_by_Saturnlight.jpg‎ (23KB, MIME type: image/jpeg)

Iapetus, a moon of Saturn, with its dark side illuminated by reflected light from Saturn

This file is in the public domain because it was created by NASA. NASA copyright policy states that "NASA material is not protected by copyright unless noted". (NASA copyright policy page or JPL Image Use Policy).

Warnings:

NASA logos (which include the current "meatball" logo, the old "worm" logo, and the seal) are copyrighted.
Materials from the Hubble Space Telescope may be copyrighted if they do not explicitly come from the STScI. [1]
All materials created by the SOHO probe are copyrighted and require permission for commercial non-educational use. [2]
Images featured on the Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) web site may be copyrighted. [3]

Original caption released with image:

New details on Iapetus are illuminated by reflected light from Saturn in this revealing Cassini image. Never-before-seen features on the Saturn-facing part of Iapetus' bright trailing hemisphere are visible for the first time, including many dark spots, and a sharper view of a dark, circular structure that was first seen at very low resolution by NASA's Voyager 1 in 1980. Iapetus' diameter is 1,436 kilometers (892 miles).

The image shows mainly the night side of Iapetus; part of the far brighter sunlit side appears at the right and is overexposed due to the long integration time of 180 seconds. Despite this long exposure time, almost no blurring due to the spacecraft's motion is apparent. This technique for imaging the night side of Iapetus will be used again during a flyby on January 1, 2005, when Cassini will pass 13 times closer to the icy moon.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow angle camera on October 22, 2004, at a distance of 1.6 million kilometers (994,000 miles) from Iapetus, and from a Sun-Iapetus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 161 degrees. The view is centered on 0.4 degrees north latitude, 317 degrees west longitude on Iapetus. The image scale is 9.4 kilometers (5.8 miles) per pixel.

File history

Legend: (cur) = this is the current file, (del) = delete this old version, (rev) = revert to this old version.
Click on date to download the file or see the image uploaded on that date.