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Cassini was born in Perinaldo, [2] [3] near Imperia, at that time in the County of Nice, part of the Savoyard state. [4] [5] Cassini is known for his work on astronomy and engineering. He discovered four satellites of Saturn and noted the division of its rings; the Cassini Division was named after him.
Mark Robert Showalter (born December 5, 1957) is a senior research scientist at the SETI Institute. [1] He is the discoverer of six moons and three planetary rings. He is the Principal Investigator of NASA's Planetary Data System Rings Node, a co-investigator on the Cassini–Huygens mission to Saturn, and works closely with the New Horizons mission to Pluto.
The sun passes south to north through the ring plane when Saturn's heliocentric longitude is 173.6 degrees (e.g. 11 August 2009), about the time Saturn crosses from Leo to Virgo. 15.7 years later Saturn's longitude reaches 353.6 degrees and the sun passes to the south side of the ring plane.
He discovered Saturn's biggest moon, Titan, and was the first to explain Saturn's strange appearance as due to "a thin, flat ring, nowhere touching, and inclined to the ecliptic." [10] In 1662 Huygens developed what is now called the Huygenian eyepiece, a telescope with two lenses to diminish the amount of dispersion. [11]
View of Saturn from Cassini, taken in March 2004, shortly before the spacecraft's orbital insertion in July 2004. This article provides a timeline of the Cassini–Huygens mission (commonly called Cassini). Cassini was a collaboration between the United States' NASA, the European Space Agency ("ESA"), and the Italian Space Agency ("ASI") to send a probe to study the Saturnian system, including ...
Earth may have had a ring made up of a broken asteroid over 400 million years ago, a study finds. The Saturn-like feature could explain a climate shift at the time.
Christiaan Huygens followed on from Galileo's discoveries by discovering Saturn's moon Titan and the shape of the rings of Saturn. [14] Giovanni Domenico Cassini later discovered four more moons of Saturn and the Cassini division in Saturn's rings. [15] The Sun photographed through a telescope with special solar filter.
A study published in the journal Science suggests a hypothetical moon (called Chrysalis) came too close to Saturn's gravitational pull and was torn apart, forming the planet's iconic rings.