Yes, Saturn's Rings Are Awesome -- NASA's Cassini Showed Us Just HOW Awesome.
Yes, Saturn's Rings Are Awesome — NASA's Cassini Showed Us Just HOW Awesome.
By Meghan Bartels 10 hours ago
A simulated image based on some of the first data Cassini gathered after its arrival at Saturn in 2004.(Image: © NASA/JPL)
When the solar system decided it liked Saturn and wanted to put a ring on it, it put together the most stunning, complex puzzle ring possible, so it's no surprise scientists are still piecing together how it works.
For centuries, Saturn's rings seemed simple, if beautiful — until NASA's Cassini spacecraft arrived at the planet in 2004 and began to reveal their complexity. Now, nearly two years after the end of the mission, researchers are still publishing new studies trying to better understand the features based on the data the spacecraft gathered.
"Getting closer to the rings, getting higher resolution images and spectra, we're starting to get new views, some of the best-ever views of some of the dynamics and evolution of what's going on in Saturn's rings," Linda Spilker, Cassini project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, told Space.com.
Spilker is a co-author on a new paper that describes in detail some of the strange features Cassini studied within Saturn's rings. "What's fascinating is as we got ever closer, we just saw more and more structure in the rings," she said. What seemed from afar to be flat, boring sheets turned out to be vibrant grooved structures embellished with small features and gaps.
More:
https://www.space.com/cassini-paints-vivid-picture-saturn-rings.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
