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Translucent Rings
PIA 18295
Avg Rating: 9.64/10
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Although solid-looking in many images, Saturn's rings are actually translucent. In this picture, we can glimpse the shadow of the rings on the planet through (and below) the A and C rings themselves, towards the lower right hand corner.
For centuries people have studied Saturn's rings, but questions about the structure and composition of the rings remained a mystery for many years. It was only in 1857 when the physicist James Clerk Maxwell demonstrated that the rings must be composed of many small particles and not solid rings around the planet, and not until the 1970s that spectroscopic evidence definitively showed that the rings are composed mostly of water ice.
This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 17 degrees above the ringplane. The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Aug. 12, 2014 using a spectral filter which preferentially admits wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 752 nanometers.
The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.4 million miles (2.3 million kilometers) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 24 degrees. Image scale is 85 miles (136 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: December 8, 2014 (PIA 18295)
Image/Caption Information |
Alliance Member Comments
Dear Cassini team, first of all, sorry for my bad English. I have 4 questions about Saturn's ring:
1. How old is Saturn's ring? we know that it is formed probably 4 billion years ago, the same time as Saturn's formation, but the ring as we know now (the flat one), when does it formed?
2. Is Saturn's ring relatively stable (shepherd moons help stabilizing it?) or still actively changing and unpredictable?
3. Is it correct to say that Saturn's ring is the nebula for the formation of the Saturnian moons (Mimas, Enceladus)? Couple of months ago, a lump of thick material was observed in the edge of the ring. Where is that lump now? Is it still exist?
4. Among scientists and astronomers, which theory is the most favored about the ring formation? Is it from Saturn's nebula or from a destroyed Moon.
Many thanks for the beautiful updates!
another image i like a lot.
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