Cassini Reveals New Ring Quirks, Shadows for the period of Saturn Equinox

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PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA scientists are now marveling over the extent of ruffles as well as dust clouds that are revealed in the rings of Saturn through the planet's equinox last month. Scientists once thought the rings were almost completely horizontal, but new images reveal the heights of some newly exposed bumps in the rings are as elevated as the Rocky Mountains. NASA released the images Monday.

"It's like putting on 3-D glasses and watching the third dimension for the first time," alleged Bob Pappalardo, Cassini project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "This is amongst the most important events Cassini has shown us."

On Aug. 11, sunlight hit Saturn's rings accurately edge-on, performing a celestial magic trick that made them all but disappears. The spectacle occurs twice for the duration of each orbit Saturn makes around the sun, which takes around 10,759 Earth days, or about 29.7 Earth years. Earth experiences a parallel equinox phenomenon twice a year; the autumnal equinox will occur Sept. 22, when the sun will shine in a straight line over Earth's equator.

For about a week, scientists make use of the Cassini orbiter to make a view at puffy parts of Saturn's rings caught in white glare from the low-angle lighting. Scientists have well known regarding vertical clumps sticking out of the rings in a handful of places, but they could not straightforwardly measure the height as well as breadth of the undulations along with the ridges until Saturn's equinox revealed their shadows.

Linda Spilker, deputy project scientist at JPL says that "The biggest surprise was to see so many places of vertical relief over and below the otherwise paper-thin rings,”.”To understand better about what we are seeing will take much more time, but the images as well as data will help to develop a more complete understanding of how old the rings might be moreover how they are evolving."

The chunks of ice that make up the main rings widen out 140,000 kilometers (85,000 miles) from the center of Saturn, however they had been thought to be only around 10 meters (30 feet) thick in the major rings, known as A, B, C, and D.

In the new-fangled images, particles seemed to pile up in vertical formations in each of the rings. Rippling corrugations -- earlier seen by Cassini to broaden approximately 804 kilometers (500 miles) in the inmost D ring -- come into view to undulate out to a total of 17,000 kilometers (11,000 miles) all the way through the neighboring C ring to the B ring.

The heights of some of the recently discovered bumps are comparable to the elevations of the Rocky Mountains. One ridge of icy ring particles will be whipped up by the gravitational pull of Saturn's moon Daphnis as it travels throughout the plane of the rings, looms as high as about 4 kilometers (2.5 miles). It is the tallest vertical wall that has been seen within the rings.

Carolyn Porco who is a Cassini imaging team leader at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo says that "We thought the plane of the rings was no taller than two stories of a modern-day building and in its place we've come across walls more than 2 miles high". "Isn't that the mainly outrageous thing you could visualize? It truly is like something out of science fiction."

Scientists also were intrigued by dazzling streaks in two dissimilar rings that appear to be clouds of dust kicked up in collisions between small space debris and ring particles. Understanding the rate and locations of impacts will help build better models of contamination and erosion in the rings and refine estimates of their age. The collision clouds were easier to see under the low-lighting conditions of equinox than under normal lighting conditions.

At the mean time Cassini was snapping visible-light photographs of Saturn's rings, the Composite Infrared Spectrometer instrument was taking the rings' temperatures. During equinox, the rings cooled to the lowest temperature ever recorded. The A ring dropped down to a frosty 43 Kelvin (382 degrees below zero Fahrenheit). Studying ring temperatures at equinox will help scientists better understand the sizes and other characteristics of the ring particles.

The Cassini spacecraft has been observing Saturn, its moons as well as rings since it entered the planet's orbit in 2004. The spacecraft's instruments that discover a new ring and moons and it improve our understanding of Saturn's ring system.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a joint project of NASA along with the European and Italian Space Agencies. JPL manages the mission in favor of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. JPL besides designed, developed as well as assembled the Cassini orbiter down with its two onboard cameras. The imaging team is based at the Space Science Institute and the Composite Infrared Spectrometer team is based at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.