THE first true colour image of Saturn reveals that the ringed planet is not the silver orb visible from Earth but a deep shade of blue.
Instead, the image - released yesterday by the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado - shows that Saturn's northern hemisphere is a soft azure, striped by the shadows of the planet's rings.
The blue hue is a moody backdrop for Saturn's icy moon Mimas.
"It's pretty cool, and it also happens to be a neat picture," commented Chris Tinney, a Sydney-based astronomer with the Anglo-Australian Observatory.
According to Dr Tinney, a precise understanding of the blue view will come once the Cassini mission's imaging scientists analyse the picture in detail.
So far, the team - located at the Boulder Institute's Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for Operations - suspects the colour is linked to the apparently cloud-free nature of the upper atmosphere of the northern latitudes.
The new blue view was snapped by the Cassini spacecraft's narrow-angle camera on January 18, at a distance of roughly 1.4 million km from Saturn.
The images were taken using a combination of infrared, green and ultraviolet filters.
The imaging experts then adjusted the colours to match what the scene would look like in natural colour.
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The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed and built at the jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a co-operative project of the US space agency NASA and the European and Italian space agencies.
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