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Spirals in the D Ring
PIA 18321
Avg Rating: 9.03/10
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Although the D ring of Saturn is so thin that it's barely noticeable compared to the rest of the ring system, it still displays structures seen in other Saturnian rings. Here the spiral structures in the D ring are on display.
The D ring spirals, discovered in Cassini images, are believed to be due to a warp in the ring created in the early 1980s. The precise mechanism remains the subject of scientific debate. Over the course of the Cassini mission, scientists have been able to observe the spiral winding ever more tightly as it evolves. For more about the spiral, see PIA 12820 and PIA 08325.
(The bright specks and faint vertical streaks are merely image artifacts. The processes typically employed to remove these artifacts would also have degraded the exquisite details of the D ring which are visible here.)
This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 22 degrees above the ringplane. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on July 6, 2013.
The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 350,000 miles (563,000 kilometers) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 131 degrees. Image scale is 2.1 miles (3.4 kilometers) per pixel.
The Cassini Solstice Mission is a joint United States and European endeavor. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter was designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team consists of scientists from the US, England, France, and Germany. The imaging operations center and team lead (Dr. C. Porco) are based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.
For more information about the Cassini Solstice Mission visit http://ciclops.org, http://www.nasa.gov/cassini and http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
Released: June 29, 2015 (PIA 18321)
Image/Caption Information |
Alliance Member Comments
Hey, man, can we spin that platter and hear what's in those grooves?
i really love this site. i am never disappointed when i come here. i am very glad it's here, especially since the NASA page has become almost totally opaque to me. i am visually disabled and Dyslexic. to use a computer for any length of time i need a black background and medium grey letters. no problem with my settings here, but on the NASA page, nothing i need to navigate shows up. so big thanks to the CICLOPS team for keeping an accessible web page.
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