![]() The images were acquired with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on April 23, 2008, at a distance of approximately 1.2 million kilometers (740,000 miles) from Saturn. Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to create this natural color view. This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about less than a degree below the ring plane. In this natural color image, the blues and grays of Saturn's northern hemisphere, so striking in early Cassini images, are diminishing in intensity with the slow change of seasons on Saturn, and are almost imperceptibly being replaced by pale shades of the colors commonly seen by Cassini in the planet's southern hemisphere. The intrepid craft has returned more than 150,000 images since arriving in orbit in mid-2004. The high energy levels of these storm systems typically make them hazardous due to associated heavy precipitation, lightning, high wind speeds and possible tornadoes.New hues are creeping into Saturn's northern cloud bands as winter gives way to spring there.ĭuring its first four years of exploration, Cassini has made the Saturn system a familiar place to us Earthlings. The image, taken while the International Space Station was located over western Africa near the Senegal-Mali border, shows a fully formed anvil cloud with numerous smaller cumulonimbus towers rising near it. The photo was taken from a viewpoint that was at an angle from the vertical, rather than looking straight down towards the Earth’s surface. The cloud tops flatten and spread into an anvil shape, as illustrated by this astronaut photograph. The tropopause halts further upward motion of the cloud mass. ![]() Beyond the tropopause, the air no longer gets colder as altitude increases. The tropopause is characterized by a strong temperature inversion. If enough moisture is present to condense and heat the cloud mass through several convective cycles, a tower can rise to altitudes of approximately 10 kilometers at high latitudes and to 20 kilometers in the tropics before encountering a region of the atmosphere known as the tropopause-the boundary between the troposphere and the stratosphere. This leads to the characteristic vertical “towers” associated with cumulonimbus clouds, an excellent example of which is visible in this astronaut photograph. This type of convection is common in tropical latitudes year-round and during the summer season at higher latitudes.Īs water in the rising air mass condenses and changes from a gas to a liquid state, it releases energy to its surroundings, further heating the surrounding air and leading to more convection and rising of the cloud mass to higher altitudes. ![]() The air mass itself also expands and cools as it rises due to decreasing atmospheric pressure, a process known as adiabatic cooling. Surface air is warmed by the sun-heated ground surface and rises if sufficient atmospheric moisture is present, water droplets will condense as the air mass encounters cooler air at higher altitudes. Perhaps the most impressive of cloud formations, cumulonimbus (from the Latin for “pile” and “rain cloud”) clouds form due to vigorous convection (rising and overturning) of warm, moist and unstable air. This picture adds to our collection of photos of planet Earth from afar, giving a unique perspective to our place in the cosmos. When Curiosity took the photo, Earth was about 99 million miles (160 million kilometers) from Mars. A human observer with normal vision, if standing on Mars, could easily see Earth and the moon as two distinct bright evening ‘stars’. The image has been processed to remove cosmic-ray effects. Researchers used the left-eye camera of Curiosity's Mast Camera (Mastcam) to capture this scene about 80 minutes after sunset on the 529th Martian day, or sol, of the rover's work on Mars (January 31, 2014). It studies the geology of its surroundings and has found evidence of a past environment well-suited to support microbial life. ![]() Curiosity, which landed on the red planet on August 6, 2013, is the largest and most advanced rover ever sent to Mars. Earth is the bright point of light a little left of the image’s center and our moon can be seen just below Earth. This photo from NASA’s Curiosity rover shows the Earth as seen from the surface of Mars, shining brighter than any star in the Martian night sky. ![]()
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