Mystery of Saturn's rings "solved"

Mystery of Saturn's rings "solved"

news.bbc.co.uk

Scientists have made a significant step forward in understanding the dynamics of Saturn's magnificent and mysterious system of rings.
The behaviour of one ring in particular - the G ring - has baffled experts.

Its dust particles should ebb away because there are no nearby moons to hold them in place or replenish them.

But the Cassini probe has shed new light on the faint, narrow ring; showing that it interacts with a much more distant Saturnian satellite.

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Anyone else reading this article think it's a bit of a leap? "We can't explain it, but we've found a remote object a very long way away so we've decided to pin the whole mystery onto it".

I've noticed recently that a lot of scientific method has a fairly large portion of arrogance attached to it. Cassini doesn't really give us much more of a clue about the planet than a largeish telescope might, but because we've actually managed to get the thing out into the solar system (the biggest difficulty being getting it out of Earth's atmosphere) we tend to boast its guesswork as being fact.

Older reporting of space exploration (eg watch any episode of "The Sky At Night" in the UK) tends to be a lot more speculative but no less rewarding for it. It's almost as if NASA has to claim it has the answer to everything, as if that is its role. I'm not sure it is. I think its role should be to find more questions, not more answers.

news.bbc.co.uk
(visit the link for the full news article)