posted 04-17-2008 02:32 PM            

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Saturn Images Showcased in New York City

A selection of the best images from Saturn, its rings and moons will appear in an exhibition opening on April 26 at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.

The show, called "Saturn: Images from the Cassini-Huygens Mission," will run through March 29, 2009. It features dramatic, up-close-and-personal images in small individual views and super-large mosaics. Roughly 50 images taken by the Cassini-Huygens mission in visible light, infrared and radar have been hand-picked by a team of Cassini scientists.

"The images show the Saturn system as we had never seen it before. They perfectly blend exploration, science and beauty," said Joe Burns, the exhibit's guest co-curator and a Cassini imaging scientist at Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y. "We are excited to have the opportunity to show these breathtaking photographs to the broader public in one of the world's greatest science museums." Burns, along with colleagues at Cornell University and on the Cassini project, has been collaborating with museum curators for the past year on the image selection, scientific captions and exhibit design.

The Cassini spacecraft has been in orbit around Saturn for nearly four years. It is the first orbiter to study Saturn in detail. The piggybacked Huygens probe, provided by the European Space Agency, plunged through the atmosphere of Saturn's largest moon, Titan, in 2005. Huygens was the first probe to land on the surface of a moon other than our own. The orbiter and probe have shown birdseye and ground-level views of Titan, an Earth-like world featuring river valley networks and lakes filled with hydrocarbons. Cassini has discovered water-ice geysers spewing from Enceladus, a smaller moon of Saturn, and has detected five new moons and observed a very dynamic ring system.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The Cassini orbiter was designed, developed and assembled at JPL.

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