Spectacular Saturn
Images from the Cassini-Huygens Mission

July 1, 2009 - February 19, 2010
National Academies' Keck Center
500 Fifth St., N.W., First Floor Gallery

Viewable by appointment only. Call 202-334-2415 or email cpnas@nas.edu

Free. Photo ID required.

Saturn is the most distant planet we can see without a telescope. To observers on Earth, it seems to hover serenely, a jewel in the night sky some 1.4 billion kilometers (890 million miles) away. Up close, however, the view is anything but tranquil. Since 2004 the spacecraft Cassini has orbited Saturn, revealing a dynamic world of wind and lightning, rippling rings and a menagerie of moons.

The moon Titan, Saturn’s largest, holds surprises of its own. Cassini released the Huygens probe, which touched down gently on Titan’s surface in 2005—the first spacecraft ever to land on a moon other than our own. Unique among moons in our solar system, Titan has a dense atmosphere, weather systems and a landscape eerily like Earth’s. But Titan’s surface is frigid: -180ºC (-290ºF).

Cassini continues to record new vistas from the Saturn system. Thanks to the work of thousands of people at NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency, we too have the chance to see this extraordinary planet, its rings and its moons at close range.

The presentation of Spectacular Saturn: Images from the Cassini-Huygens Mission was supported by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

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