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Ion engines aren’t just Star Wars fodder anymore.

NASA’s Ion Engine Breaks Performance Record

A lot of fantastical space news in the past few months, I can’t believe I missed this one.

In March, NASA released images of a Saturn that show an odd hexagon formation spinning over it’s north pole. The pictures are stunning, especially the moving gif.

“This is a very strange feature, lying in a precise geometric fashion with six nearly equally straight sides,” said Kevin Baines, atmospheric expert and member of Cassini’s visual and infrared mapping spectrometer team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. “We’ve never seen anything like this on any other planet. Indeed, Saturn’s thick atmosphere where circularly-shaped waves and convective cells dominate is perhaps the last place you’d expect to see such a six-sided geometric figure, yet there it is.”

Two spacecraft, just enough apart to make a stereoscopic image of anything they are pointng at, have been used to make stereoscopic images of the Sun.

Here is the release statement.

And here is the link to the page with all the pictures. Although they are true stereoscopic, they don’t seem to be offering the pictures in anything but red/blue 3d glasses format. There are movies as well as pictures.

Some samples (click to enlarge):