Just released by NASA ’s Cassini Imaging Team , the picture above shows Uranus as a flyspeck gloomy eyeball polish far beyond the brilliant foggy stripe of Saturn ’s F ring .
When you hear the words “ pale blue window pane ” you probably are reminded of the renowned inverted comma by Carl Sagan inspired by an image of Earth as a soberingly tiny speck , as imaged by Voyager 1 on February 14th , 1990 , from beyond the orbit of Pluto . But there ’s another pale blue world in our Solar System : the ice giant Uranus , and its image was captured much more recently by the Cassini space vehicle from its place in area around Saturn on April 11th , 2014 .
Uranus ’ coloration is a result of methane luxuriously in its frigid atmosphere . accord to the verbal description on the CICLOPS land site , “ methane on Uranus — and its sapphire - colored sib , Neptune — steep ruby wavelength of incoming sunlight , but tolerate patrician wavelengths to fly the coop back into space , resulting in the predominantly bluish coloration seen here . ”
This was also the first time Uranus had been envision by the Cassini ballistic capsule , which has been in orbit around Saturn since 2004 .
This image adds one more satellite to the list of Earth captured on Camera by Cassini , which made headlines last free fall when a splendiferous mosaic was free that have a backlit Saturn in eclipse environ by its lucent rings , the specks of several of its moons , and the distant dots of Venus , Mars , and the Earth and Moon . Made from 141 disjoined exposure , the mosaic was captured on July 19th , 2013 — known by many space aficionados as “ the solar day the Earth smiled ” as it was the first fourth dimension the world ’s population was alert beforehand that its characterization would be taken from over 900 million miles aside .
Saturn — with its terrestrial spacecraft in tow — was about 28.6 AU away from Uranus when the image was acquired . That ’s about 4.28 billion kilometer ( 2.66 billion mile ) . From that aloofness the glow of the 51,118 - kilometer ( 31,763 - mile ) -wide Uranus is concentrate to a simple few picture element ( which required digital brightening by about 4.5x , as well . )
Read more on the Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for Operations ( CICLOPS ) pagehereand in a newsworthiness release from NASA ’s JPLhere .
persona mention : NASA / JPL - Caltech / SSI . Source : Carolyn Porco , CICLOPS Director .
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