Scientists find turbulence in Saturn's rings

[n2doc]

David Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor

Friday, March 19, 2010



(03-19) 11:03 PDT SAN FRANCISCO -- The ringed planet Saturn, brilliant jewel of the night sky, has revealed new insights into the behavior of its rings for scientists studying signals from the Cassini spacecraft still flying through the Saturnian neighborhood after six years in orbit.

"We now have the clearest view of the rings' beautiful crystalline structure pasted onto the real night sky," said Jeffrey Cuzzi of NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, leader of the Cassini-Huygens mission. "Gazillions of icy particles are constantly colliding with each other up there as they orbit the planet ... moving as waves under the influence of moonlets we've discovered orbiting inside gaps between the rings."

The tumultuous nature of the particles in Saturn's seven main rings and the gaps between the planet's rings, where those tiny moonlets cause ring edges to wave like ripples on the shorelines of space, are being described today in the journal Science.

Saturn's rings, through even the best of telescopes, look like series of thin flat discs grooved like an old phonograph record. But that's far from the truth: From Cassini's images and data, researchers have determined that each ring is a turbulent collection of orbiting particles - 95 percent water ice glistening in sunlight and the rest some strange kind of rubble tinged in red-brown here and there.



Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/03/19/BAJ81CGP6A.DTL




http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/multimedia/pia11478.html

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/whycassini/cassini20100318.html