The New Weird & Violent Saturn: Gigantic Polar Vortex & Rings as High as the Rocky Mountains

www.dailygalaxy.com...

Quote from source:
The image of a classical serene zen-like Saturn is an illusion: new findings by NASA's Cassini spacecraft show a gas giant with extraordinary patterns of charged particles and violent roller derbies for rings.

NASA's Cassini spacecraft has been shadowing the gas giant long enough to see that the rings are a rough and tumble roller derby. It has also revealed that the planet itself roils with strange weather and shifting patterns of charged particles.

"This rambunctious system gives us a new feel for how an early solar system might have behaved," said Linda Spilker, a planetary scientist and the new Cassini project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "This kind of deep, rich data can only be collected by an orbiting spacecraft, and we look forward to the next seven years around Saturn bringing even more surprises."

During equinox, the period when sunlight hits the rings exactly edge-on, Cassini witnessed rings that are normally flat - about tens of meters (yards) thick - being flipped up as high as the Rocky Mountains.

The spacecraft has also shown that the rings are composed mostly of water ice, with a mysterious reddish contaminant that could be rust or small organic molecules similar to those found in red vegetables on Earth.

"It has been amazing to see the rings come to life before our very eyes, changing even as we watch, being colorful and taking on a tangible, 3-D nature," Jeff Cuzzi, Cassini's interdisciplinary scientist for rings and dust who is based at NASA Ames Research Center said. "The rings were still a nearly unstructured object in even the best telescopes when I was a grad student, but Cassini has brought us an intimate familiarity with them."

Awesome to read this kind of informations and I look forward to see what else Cassini can bring forward regarding Saturn.

I had to show the picture because I thought it was so cool.

Any thoughts?

Pred...

Great story. Thanks for posting it.


I wonder if its worth it to NASA to attempt to collect a sample of those rings.

reply to post by garritynet


You would think so. I would think we would want some sort of samples from the rings especially if they contain water and could perhaps have organic compounds in them. If I was rich I would have probes everywhere collecting everything.

Pred...

reply to post by garritynet

Cassini is sampling the rings.
The E ring consists mostly of water ice with some miscellaneous other stuff. Which corresponds to spectrographic analysis from Earth.
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