The picture above from Pioneer 11 shows Saturn and its moon Titan. When this image was taken in September, 1979, Pioneer was 2,846,000 km from Saturn. This picture was amazing then. Subsequent missions have provided vastly better images.
Pioneer 11 was launched in 1973 to study the asteroid belt, the environment around Jupiter and Saturn, solar winds, and cosmic rays. It’s one of five spacecraft on trajectories that will take them out of the Solar System. Pioneer 11 will pass near the star Lambda Aquila in around four million years.
Image Credit: NASA
Saturn’s two largest moons meet in the sky in a rare apparent embrace. Smog-enshrouded Titan (5,150 km across) glows to the left of Rhea (1,528 km across).
The Cassini spacecraft took this picture of Saturn’s Moon Titan looking at the side that always faces away from the planet because the moon’s orbit is tidal locked (like Earth’s Moon’s) Titan is the only moon in the Solar System with a dense atmosphere (visible in this picture), liquid on its surface, and a cycle of evaporation and liquid rain.
In this picture the Sun’s light is glinting off of a hydrocarbon sea on Saturn’s moon Titan. The infrared image was taken in 2014, and the reflect sunlight was so bright is saturated the camera on the Cassini spacecraft.
Hubble snapped this image back in 2005. It shows Saturn’s moon Titian and the moon’s shadow on the planet’s cloud tops.
Analysis of data taken by the Cassini spacecraft appears to show giant dust storms on Saturn’s moon Titan. Titian is the second largest moon in the Solar System (Jupiter’s moon Ganymede is slightly bigger.); it’s even lager than the planets Mercury and Pluto (Pluto is still a planet in the Hogewash! universe.). Titan is the only other body in the Solar System beside Earth that has stable surface liquid, hydrocarbons rather than water. If the dust storms are really occurring, it would join Earth and Mars as the only known bodies in the Solar System with dust storms.
Back in 2009, the Cassini spacecraft took this picture of Saturn’s moons Titan and Rhea. The two large moons are very different. Rhea is airless, cratered, and rocky. Titan has a lakes of liquid hydrocarbons and a nitrogen-rich atmosphere even denser that Earth’s.
That’s not a gap in Saturn’s rings. It’s the planet’s shadow. During most of Saturn’s year, the planet’s shadow extends well beyond the edge of the rings. However, with summer solstice fast approaching, the Sun is higher in Saturn’s sky and most of Saturn’s A ring is completely shadow-free.
The images above were taken by the Radar instrument aboard the Cassini spacecraft. They show the evolution of a changing feature in the large hydrocarbon sea named Ligeia Mare on Saturn’s moon Titan. The small images in the column at left show the same region of Ligeia Mare as seen by Cassini‘s radar during flybys in (from top to bottom) 2007, 2013, 2014 and 2015.