Category Archives: saturn

All Eyes on Enceladus

Cassini Does a Little Skeet Shooting

skeet shooting on Enceladus

Saturn’s moon Enceladus is one interesting place. Ever since Voyager 2 first showed us the puzzling surface of this ice-covered world, planetary scientists have speculated about the processes that shaped it.  The cracks and grooves were interesting enough, but there were also smooth plains and very few impact craters. These are important clues, telling us that Enceladus’s surface gets “repaved” over time. But how? That’s a story planetary scientists are piecing together.

The Cassini-Huygens mission did a very close flyby of Enceladus on August 11 and this is one of the images it returned. The trough crossing the upper part of the image is called Damascus Sulcus. A sulcus is a term planetary scientists use to describe a surface area split with parallel grooves, or ditches, and formed by some kind of geological process (like compression or stretching or pressure from below). This trough appears to be about a couple of kilometers across at its widest (based on a resolution of approximately 30 meters per pixel).

The thing to remember about the surface in this image that it’s made of ice. Wrinkled, stressed ice.  Enceladus is an active world, meaning that there’s something going on beneath the surface. It puts pressure on the ice, causing it to wrinkle and compress.  In addition, Enceladus is venting heat and plumes of water-rich material, similar to the way a geyser works here on Earth.  This moon is geologically active!

You can follow the latest Enceladus images over at the Cassini mission pages. They’ve got a few up already, and there should be more in the days to come.

An Evolutionary Ring

Prometheus Bound to the F Ring at Saturn

F-ring at  Saturn

What happens when you put a small world orbiting through an ethereal pair of dust and ice particle rings, all encircling the planet Saturn? You get intricate whirled and kinked structure in the rings, as seen in this image from the Cassini Mission’s imaging subsystem.

It’s all in the gravity of the situation. Prometheus (which is a natural satellite (moon) of Saturn off to the right of the F ring (center)) does a little dance with the F ring, getting closer and farther away over a period of just under 15 hours. As this little oddly-shaped moon gets close to the ring particles, its gravitational interaction draws out a stream of material. The stream then gets more misshapen as it orbits around Saturn, forming the graceful loops and curves we see in this image. The Cassini Mission pages have many more images of this phenomenon, which is yet another good reason to study a planetary system over long periods of time. Snapshots give us a frozen moment in time; long-term observations tell us a more detailed and exacting story of just how things change on both large and small scales in the solar system.

For more fascinating images from the Cassini Mission, visit the Cassini-Huygens mission web pages and do a little browsing. You’ll learn more about Saturn, its moons (particularly fascinating Titan), and those glittery, wonderful rings that have so captivated planetary scientists.