NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day 23 December 2022: Stunning Saturn Rings captured by NASA spacecraft

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day 23 December 2022: The Outer Solar System consists of planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. The planets in the Outer Solar System take considerably longer to complete one trip around the Sun. Jupiter, also called the Gas Giant, takes 4,333 days to complete one trip around the Sun. Saturn takes 10,759 to complete one trip around the Sun. Among all the outer planets, Saturn is a special one as it has stunning rings around it and has over 83 moons revolving around it! The planet is a massive ball made mostly of hydrogen and helium.

NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day is a stunning snapshot of Saturn’s Rings captured by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. For more than a decade, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has shared the wonders of Saturn and its family of moons.

NASA explained below the image,” This is what Saturn looks like from inside the rings. In 2017, for the first time, NASA directed the Cassini spacecraft to swoop between Saturn and its rings. During the dive, the robotic spacecraft took hundreds of images showing unprecedented detail for structures in Saturn’s atmosphere. Looking back out, however, the spacecraft was also able to capture impressive vistas. In the featured image, taken a few hours before closest approach, Saturn’s unusual northern hexagon is seen surrounding the North Pole. Saturn’s B ring is the closest visible, while the dark Cassini Division separates B from the outer A.”

A close inspection will find the two small moons that shepherd the F-ring, the farthest ring discernable. A few months after this image was taken — and after more than a decade of exploration and discovery — the Cassini spacecraft ran low on fuel and was directed to enter Saturn’s atmosphere, where it surely melted,” the agency explained further.

NASA Tech used to capture Saturn

The image was captured using the Imaging Science Subsystem aboard the Cassini spacecraft which consisted of a wide-angle and a narrow-angle digital camera. The cameras were sensitive to visible wavelengths of light and to some infrared and ultraviolet wavelengths, according to NASA. Each camera had several filters mounted on wheels to select the wavelengths to be sampled in each image.