Saturn: Exploring the Mystery of the Ringed Planet - Hardcover

Mortillaro, Nicole

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1554076498 ISBN 13: 9781554076499

Publisher: Firefly Books, 2010

Synopsis

New views of Saturn -- provided by the Cassini-Huygens probe -- bring an extraordinary planet and its rings and moons into a whole new realm.

Saturn is one of the five planets that star watchers can see with the naked eye. In 1997 the satellite Cassini-Huygens was launched with the sole purpose of studying Saturn and its moons and rings. Cassini is still in orbit, and in 2009 it witnessed Saturn's equinox firsthand, providing an entirely new perspective of the planet and a basis for amazing discoveries.

Cassini has generated enormous scientific interest with its accomplishments so far, including:

• Landing on Saturn's moon Titan -- scientists now believe Titan possesses many parallels to Earth, including lakes, rivers, channels, dunes, rain, snow, clouds, mountains and possibly volcanoes
  
• Recording images of a storm raging across Saturn that has lightning 10,000 times more powerful than any lightning on Earth
  
• Discovering there may be as many as 10 million tiny moonlets in Saturn's rings
  
• Finding that a newly discovered moon embedded in the planet's G ring may actually be responsible for that ring; before this discovery, scientists believed it was the only ring without an associated moon

Featuring extraordinary photos selected from NASA resources on almost every page, Saturn examines the planet and its place in our universe with a special emphasis on the most recent discoveries of the Cassini probe. These are the closest and most detailed views of Saturn ever.

About this title

About the Author

Nicole Mortillaro is a passionate amateur astronomer and children's book editor. She lives near Toronto, Ontario.

Reviews

This slim album’s suite of photographs highlights the beauty of Saturn and its moons. Sourced mostly from the Cassini-Huygens dual-purpose spacecraft, the imagery showcases the famous rings in detail enhanced by an infrequently occurring equinox, whose edge-on lighting effect coincided with Cassini’s orbital operations at Saturn. Captions explain tiny moons and boulders that one sees through Cassini’s cameras, and while zoom-out frames display the whole Saturnian system, Mortillaro’s minitext delivers a basic description of the scene. In a section devoted to Saturn’s moon, Titan, a prime objective of the Cassini-Huygens mission, Mortillaro introduces viewers to photographs of its dynamic methane-dominated atmosphere and its lakes as well as the ground where the Huygens probe landed. Likewise with a gallery of Saturn’s lesser moons, Mortillaro’s texts briefly note what is of scientific interest, such as geologic activity on ice-coated Enceladus. Admittedly an eye-catcher, Mortillaro’s visually exuberant work may whet desire for more scientific information than she provides; it can be found in Titan Unveiled, by Ralph Lorenz and Jacqueline Mitton (2008). --Gilbert Taylor

Edition details

• Publisher: Firefly Books
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1554076498
• ISBN 13: 9781554076499
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 96