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Bent Rings
PIA 20491
Avg Rating: 9.12/10
Full Size 1020x1020:
JPEG 101 KB
PNG 235 KB
TIFF 350 KB
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Saturn's A and F rings appear bizarrely warped where they intersect the planet's limb, whose atmosphere acts here like a very big lens.
In its upper regions, Saturn’s atmosphere absorbs some of the light reflected by the rings as it passes through. But absorption is not the only thing that happens to that light. As it passes from space to the atmosphere and back out into space towards Cassini’s cameras, its path is refracted, or bent. The result is that the ring's image appears warped.
This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 18 degrees above the ring plane. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on June 9, 2016.
The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.1 million miles (1.8 million kilometers) from the rings and at a Sun-rings-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 112 degrees. Image scale is 7 miles (11 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: July 25, 2016 (PIA 20491)
Image/Caption Information |
Alliance Member Comments
that has got to be one helluva deep atmosphere. how thick is that layer we see bent rings through?
and congratulation to the Ciclops team on another A.P.O.D. 1 August 2016.
the old robot still has the magic!
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