It's been an adventure just getting out to Saturn, ... Saturn is such an alluring photographic target. It's a joy, really, to be able to take our images and composite them in an artful way, which is one of my cardinal working goals. It's about poetry and beauty and science all mixed together. |
It's not clear that Cassini has the means to determine if the ice crystals themselves contain microbes. It may require a device with much greater compositional precision than we have, so that may have to be left for a future mission. |
Nothing will ever be what the Voyager mission was, |
Once the water comes out it freezes, and that produces copious amounts of ice particles. |
Once you have liquid water, you have the potential for living organisms. |
Remember, Voyager was just a flyby, Cassini is in orbit. We have the opportunity for monitoring them and their behavior, their comings and goings, how they evolve, when they appear and disappear. |
Saturn is the most photogenic planet in the solar system. |
Since we hadn't ever seen the rings in this kind of detail, we were looking for phenomena we'd never seen before. |
So we think we have a Yellowstone-type liquid geyser tens of meters deep. We're fairly confident because we have exhausted all the other models. |
So, water closer to the surface and more time spent conducting scientific investigations....sounds like a winner to me. |
These are among the things we hope to learn. [The spokes] are obviously related to a host of processes…and may point to some important effects in understanding the magnetic field and the planet's magnetosphere, and how these systems interact with the rings and atmosphere. |
They flew through what turned out to be a plume. |
This has been a heart-stopper, and surely one of our most thrilling results. |
We acquired this spectacular, one-of-a-kind set of images immediately after getting into orbit for the express purpose of seeing fine details in the rings that we had not seen previously. |
We are at this very moment looking to see what the best times are for retargeting, ... Hopefully, we haven't seen the last of them. |