NASA displayed a bouquet of surreal images of planet Saturn and its largest Moon Titan. The ethereal series of images was captured and put together by NASA's Cassini spacecraft.
According to Discovery news, Cassini took the images - two each of red, green and blue spectral filters - on May 6 after it made a journey of 483,000 miles from Titan. The images, which were eventually displayed to public and press worldwide, had a combined package of six images that looked spectacularly vibrant in different color tones.
"Upon Cassini's arrival at Saturn around eight years ago, Saturn's northern winter hemisphere was an azure blue," NASA said.
"Now that winter is encroaching upon the planet's southern hemisphere and summer on the north, the colour scheme is reversing: blue is tinting the southern hemisphere and is fading from the north," the space agency added.
Out of the four images, the other three depict the newly discovered south polar vortex in Titan's atmosphere, as reported by Cassini scientists.
"Cassini has been in orbit now for the last eight years, and despite the fact that we can't know exactly what the next five years will show us, we can be certain that whatever it is will be wondrous," said Carolyn Porco, imaging team lead based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado.
The spacecraft launched in 1997 went into orbit around Saturn on July 1, 2004. Cassini is in its second mission extension which is known as the Solstice Mission. One of the main goals of its mission is to analyze seasonal changes in the Saturn system.
"It is so fantastic to experience, through the instruments of Cassini, seasonal changes in the Saturn system. Some of the changes we see in the data are completely unexpected, while some occur like clockwork on a seasonal timescale. It's an exciting time to be at Saturn," said Amanda Hendrix, deputy project scientist, based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
