Category Archives: ring system

cassini mission, ring system, saturn

Q Was Right!

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It’s Wondrous Out There!

In Star Trek: The Next Generation, in the very first episode, the mischievous character “Q” made his first appearance and showed the Enterprise crew some important and beautiful things. That’s the way the cosmos rolls: it’s full of very interesting things to discover and explore. As Q said, it’s full of treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross; but it’s not for the timid.

Timid would be sitting on Earth, looking up at the skies, but doing nothing to learn about what’s in them. Or refusing to use one’s brain to learn about the natural processes that created the objects we see “out there”. It would be a terrible waste of human intelligence and of space.

Vertical structures rise out of and up above Saturn’s B ring. These “peaks” of ring material are about a kilometer high in places, and show us what happens when moonlets orbit in and near the ringlets that make up the B ring. Their gravitational influence causes the ring particles to lift up, splashing out of the ring plane for a brief time. Courtesy: NASA/JPL/SSI

The folks who built and manage the Cassini spacecraft aren’t timid. They had a dream to send a spacecraft to the ringed planet Saturn, and for years now, that mission has been sending back some of the coolest images of the planet, its moons, and rings that are even better than we could ever have imagined. We don’t have to imagine what it would be like to see that planet; now we know.  Now, if we WANT to know more, we should probably just go there. And, someday, humans will. Until they do, we have the Cassini (and before that, the Voyagers 1 and 2) images to look at; like this one — showing us just what it looks like to fly above Saturn’s rings.

The spacecraft was about 209,000 kilometers from Saturn when it caught this image. What amazes me are the shadows being cast by the “fountains” of ring particles being sprayed up under the gravitational influence of nearby moonlets. The rings themselves look so solid that you might think you could settle your space ship down on them. But, you’d be amazed when you got up close, because you’d be setting “through” a collection of particles, with nothing to hold on to.  In fact, those rings are really quite thin — only about 30 FEET.

I don’t know about you, but I find that pretty wondrous!

 

 

cassini, cassini mission, ring system, saturn

Smile for Cassini, Wave at Saturn

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Get Ready for a LARGE Group Picture!

How we should look to Cassini on July 18. Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech.

On July 19 from 21:27 to 21:42 UTC, 5:27 to 5:42 EDT, 2:27 to 2:42 PDT—a period of about 15 minutes) the Cassini spacecraft circling Saturn is going to take an image of Saturn with Earth in the scene.  That means we’ll ALL be in the picture, as seen from a distance of 1.44 billion kilometers!  So, wherever you are, take a few minutes to get outside and wave in the direction of Saturn. Yes, it will be during the day for some of us, but you can still find out about where to look in the sky from this useful blog entry by Jane Houston Jones.

The Cassini Solstice mission’s main goal for this image is to study the very diffuse rings of ice and dust particles that surround Saturn. The best way to do this is to look at stars as their light twinkles through the rings. The mission team members will analyze visual and infrared light data collected by the spacecraft’s instruments and cameras. The spacecraft is at just the right distance and viewing angle to make a high-resolution mosaic of the planet and rings, and in that mosaic, Earth will appear as a small blue dot in the distance.

There’s been only one other chance to image Earth from the outer solar system in such a way. In fact, there have been only two images of Earth from the outer solar system. The first and most distant was one was taken 23 years ago by NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft from a distance of 6 billion kilometers. That image became known as the “Pale Blue Dot” view, memorialized by Carl Sagan in his book of the same name.  Cassini took the other image in 2006. So, if you’re out and about on July 19th, take a few moments to wave at Saturn and be part of the largest group picture of recent times. And, no photobombing!