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The planet's orbital period is 29.5 years, so Saturn has nearly made one complete trip around the sun since the flybys of the two Voyager spacecraft in 1980 and 1981, allowing Cassini to closely match Voyager's viewing geometry. This movie shows the sunlit side of the rings at low solar phase, or spacecraft-rings-sun, angles.
The planet's orbital period is 29.5 years, so Saturn has nearly made one complete trip around the sun since the flybys of the two Voyager spacecraft in 1980 and 1981, allowing Cassini to closely match Voyager's viewing geometry. Each of these five movies shows the sunlit side of the rings at low solar phase, or spacecraft-rings-sun, angles.
NASA's Cassini spacecraft sent back images looking over the shoulder of Saturn's rings. See more on Saturn's rings: No telescope on this planet would ever have been able to see this.
The latter include the D Ring, extending inward to Saturn's cloud tops, the G and E Rings and others beyond the main ring system. These diffuse rings are characterised as "dusty" because of the small size of their particles (often about a μm); their chemical composition is, like the main rings, almost entirely water ice. The narrow F Ring ...
The planet's orbital period is 29.5 years, so Saturn has nearly made one complete trip around the sun since the flybys of the two Voyager spacecraft in 1980 and 1981, allowing Cassini to closely match Voyager's viewing geometry. This movie shows the sunlit side of the rings at low solar phase, or spacecraft-rings-sun, angles.
Fainter planetary rings can form as a result of meteoroid impacts with moons orbiting around the planet or, in the case of Saturn's E-ring, the ejecta of cryovolcanic material. [6] [7] Ring systems may form around centaurs when they are tidally disrupted in a close encounter (within 0.4 to 0.8 times the Roche limit) with a giant
The Hubble Space Telescope captured a newly revealed image of the mysterious, ghostly shadows on Saturn’s rings — the latest sighting of the so-called “spokes” that continue to baffle ...
The fully processed composite photograph of Saturn taken by Cassini on July 19, 2013 Earth can be seen as a blue dot underneath the rings of Saturn. The photomosaic from NASA's "Wave at Saturn" campaign. The collage includes some 1,600 photos taken by members of the public on The Day the Earth Smiled.