Where In The Universe #55

Are you ready for another Where In The Universe Challenge? Take a look and see if you can name where in the Universe this image is from. Give yourself extra points if you can name the spacecraft responsible for the image. As usual, we’ll provide the image today, but won’t reveal the answer until tomorrow. This gives you a chance to mull over the image and provide your answer/guess in the comment section. Please, no links or extensive explanations of what you think this is — give everyone the chance to guess.

UPDATE: The answer has now been posted below. Don’t peek before you make your guess.

What you are seeing here is the dark side of Saturn’s moon Titan, with sunlight filtering through the moon’s hazy atmosphere. And obviously, the Cassini spacecraft is responsible for this image.

An airless satellite would appear in this viewing geometry only as a lit crescent. But Titan’s thick atmosphere scatters light around all edges of the planet to create a ring of light.

This view looks toward the Saturn-facing side of Titan. North on Titan is up and rotated 45 degrees to the left. The images were acquired at a distance of approximately 1.8 million kilometers (1.1 million miles) from Titan and at a Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 157 degrees. Image scale is 11 kilometers (7 miles) per pixel.

Nice job, everyone! Check back next week for another WITU challenge!

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy has been with Universe Today since 2004, and has published over 6,000 articles on space exploration, astronomy, science and technology. She is the author of two books: "Eight Years to the Moon: the History of the Apollo Missions," (2019) which shares the stories of 60 engineers and scientists who worked behind the scenes to make landing on the Moon possible; and "Incredible Stories from Space: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Missions Changing Our View of the Cosmos" (2016) tells the stories of those who work on NASA's robotic missions to explore the Solar System and beyond. Follow Nancy on Twitter at https://twitter.com/Nancy_A and and Instagram at and https://www.instagram.com/nancyatkinson_ut/

Share
Published by
Nancy Atkinson

Recent Posts

Congressional Hearing Fuels Fresh Debate About UFOs

An 11-page document that's attributed to a Pentagon whistleblower has provided new cases in the…

2 hours ago

New Study Examines How Extraterrestrial Civilizations Could Become “Stellarvores.”

One of the most challenging aspects of astrobiology and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI)…

3 hours ago

A Screw-Driven Robot Could Autonomously Mine Rocky Worlds

Navigating the harsh terrain of other rocky worlds has consistently been challenging. The Free Spirit…

6 hours ago

How Life Could Live Under the Ice on Mars

Mars has been a fascination to us for centuries. Early observations falsely gave impressions of…

6 hours ago

NASA’s JPL Lays Off Another 325 People

NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab has announced a second round of layoffs for 2024, this time…

8 hours ago

Lessons From Ancient Earth’s Atmosphere: From Hostile to Hospitable

Will we ever understand how life got started on Earth? We've learned much about Earth's…

10 hours ago