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Cassini spacecraft shows odd behavior in Saturn's rings
by Ishita Sood - March 19, 2010 - comments
The picture taken by Cassini spacecraft shows the rings rearranging themselves with the help of high speed collisions. The rings are composed of 95 percent water.
New pictures from the Cassini spacecraft show peculiar movements in Saturn’s rings. Scientists, who studied the signals from the spacecraft, concluded that its rings rearranged themselves with the help of high speed collisions. Not only this, they are 95 percent composed of water.
“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.
“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,” he added.
The new discovery has been illustrated in the journal Science.
Cassini discovers oxygen on Saturn
Cassini’s images also show the color of the rings, which is red and brown.
“That color may be some kind of organic materials but to me it looks like just plain rust - iron oxide. How it got there we don't yet know,” said Cuzzi.
Cassini, which has been orbiting Saturn for six years, also detected several rings which were composed of rubble and “microscopic dust.”
However, when were they formed still remains a mystery.
According to scientists, they appear to change constantly, “over decades, years, or even weeks.”
Another startling discovery was the presence of oxygen in the planet’s atmosphere.
“Most people thought the ring atmosphere would be water molecules—H2O—and their breakdown products H [hydrogen] and OH [hydroxyl],” said Cuzzi.
The oxygen discovery can help answer questions on the color of the rings and also help to know how planetary discs behave.
Encke gap
Each of Saturn's rings has been labeled by a letter depicting the time period when it was discovered. Saturn’s A and F rings, which have a 200 miles wide space, are home to the Encke gap. The gap holds many ringlets including an object named Pan, which disrupts rings and causes a wave along their edges.
Another gap called the Keeler gap is present just between the Encke gap. Saturn has about 13 such gaps.
“The edges of the thickest of Saturn's rings, A and B, for example kind of flop back and forth, sometimes pointing one way and sometimes another, sloshing around like water in a tank,” said Cuzzi.
“These cannonballs are whizzing through the F ring and colliding with things. What are these things? Where did they come from? This doesn't strike us as a particularly stable situation,” he added.
The Cassini spacecraft will also measure Saturn’s rings’ mass in 2017.