NASA offers best look ever at Saturn’s rings, resolving detail as small as 0.3 miles
posted Wednesday, February 1, 2017 at 3:00 PM EDT
Just last week NASA offered us an incredibly high-resolution view of Earth using their new weather satellites. NASA has set their sights further away with the NASA Cassini spacecraft. The spacecraft has captured the highest resolution photos of Saturn's rings to date.
Cassini is in its "ring-grazing" orbital phase, allowing it to capture closeup shots of Saturn's rings with double the detail of previous images. The "images resolve details as small as 0.3 miles (550 meters), which is on the scale of Earth's tallest buildings," says NASA.
Cassini has been investigating Saturn since 2004 after being launched in 1997. Cassini had a very long initial journey, as Saturn is roughly 746 million miles (1.2 billion kilometers) from Earth.
If you're interested in learning more about the imaging equipment on Cassini, check out this article. Because Cassini was launched in the late 90s, the sophistication of its imaging equipment will perhaps surprise you. What makes the camera equipment impressive is not its sensor (which is a roughly 1-megapixel CCD sensor), but rather its ability to detect light at a wide variety of wavelengths.
(Seen via PetaPixel)