Saturn: a new view

Natural History, June, 2008

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IT'S DIFFICULT TO OVERSTATE the clarity and quality of the more than 50 spectacular photographs in the exhibition Saturn: Images from the Cassini-Huygens Mission now on view in the American Museum of Natural History's IMAX Corridor on the first floor. They are the clearest views yet recorded of the ringed planet. Sent back over half a billion miles to Earth, the up-close photographs illuminate the complex structure of Saturn's famous rings; atmospheric phenomena such as violent storms, streaming clouds, and aurorae; and the gas giant's numerous moons--the count of which has more than tripled, from 18 to 60, since Cassini-Huygens began its exploration.

An international collaboration of NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Italian Space Agency involving more than 200 scientists in 19 countries, the mission that yielded these images is full of firsts. Launched on October 15, 1997, Cassini-Huygens is the largest interplanetary spacecraft ever built. It is also the first spacecraft to explore Saturn from orbit. The Huygens probe--which separated from the Cassini orbiter on Christmas Day, 2004, and three weeks later parachuted to the surface of Titan, Saturn's largest moon--is the first to land on a world in the outer reaches of our solar system. The pictures from Titan are the first ever taken on a moon other than our own. Bigger than Mercury and Pluto, Titan is of special interest because it is one of the few moons in our solar system with its own atmosphere and the only object in our solar system other than Earth with flowing liquid on its surface, in Titan's case, liquid methane instead of water.

The photographs are divided into four sections: Saturn the planet; Saturn's rings; Saturn's geologically active moons, including Titan and Enceladus; and Saturn's other moons. Also on display is a one-quarter scale model of the Cassini-Huygens space craft, which takes it name from the Italian-French astronomer Giovanni Cassini and the Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens, both of whom made significant discoveries about Saturn and its rings in the 17th century. Cassini first observed the gap between Saturn's main rings (now called the "Cassini Division") and correctly hypothesized that the rings themselves were made up of small particles. It was Huygens who verified that Saturn had detached rings and explained the phenomenon of their occasional "disappearance": we can't see them when they face Earth edge-on.

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The exhibition, which runs through March 29, 2009, is curated by Denton Ebel, Associate Curator, Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, and co-curated by Mordecai-Mark Mac Low, Curator, Department of Astrophysics, and Joseph Burns, Professor of Astronomy at Cornell University.