Saturn’s True Colours – A Majestic View From The Heavens
While going through some correspondence I received over the holiday break, I came upon this wonderful news piece that I wanted to share. Last week, the international team behind the Cassini-Huygens mission released new images of the planet Saturn, including one that features a “natural colour view” of the planet. As you can see in the image above, this new look at Saturn reveals a colour scheme that differs greatly from the one we’re all probably familiar with when we think of what Saturn looks like.
To demonstrate, let’s compare this new image of Saturn from the Cassini space probe taken this past July against the image of this same planet taken by Voyager 2 in 1981 -
Saturn Image From Voyager 2 – August 1981
Saturn Image From Cassini – July 2008
In the image from Voyager 2, we see the more recognizable impression of Saturn – an orange-brown planet with its famous brown-coloured rings. This is the image of Saturn that most of us grew up with and is still the prevailing notion of what Saturn looks like. However, as this new image from the Cassini probe shows, this planet is not orange-brown at all; instead, it would appear to be a planet consisting of a green, beige and brown-gray colouring. I guess this means we’ll have some interesting, tall tales to tell the grand-kids – ‘You know, back in my day, our solar system had nine planets and Saturn was orangey-brown!’.
Of course, this is a great reminder to all that science by its nature is a work-in-progress rather than the final word on any issue since the reality is that science is constantly evolving as we learn new facts and discover new things. The fact that we erred on what the colour scheme is for a nearby planet is indicative of why we can’t treat our collective scientific knowledge at any point in time as the definitive answer since all that would do is hamper our drive to make new revelations like this one by the Cassini-Huygens team. While science as a discipline relies on facts and measurements, this shouldn’t be interpreted with the implication that science has the answers to everything. Instead, science is merely a tool providing us with the opportunity to peel back the layers encompassing the mysteries of our world and the cosmos around us so we might better understand our place in all this wonderment – if not appreciate what our celestial neighbours really look like.
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