FRANCE: A wonderful close-up photo of Saturn’s fabulous rings has been taken by the NASA Cassini spacecraft that’s been orbiting the ringed world for 10 years.
NASA said the beautiful photo taken in red light with the spacecraft’s wide-angle camera on January 8 shows marvelous details of the ring system. This close-up photo of the rings was taken from a distance of 911,000 kilometers from the planet and looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from 15 degrees above the ringplane.
The rings are named alphabetically in order of their discovery. The order of the main rings outward from Saturn is D, C, B, A, F, G and E. There are also several other faint unnamed rings consisting of very fine icy particles.
In this photo, Prometheus is seen orbiting just outside the A ring in the lower left quadrant while the F ring can be faintly seen to the left of Prometheus.
The dark gaps near the left edge of the A ring (the broad, outermost ring) are caused by the moons (Pan and Daphnis) embedded in the gaps. The wider Cassini division (the dark area between the B ring and A ring here) is created by a resonance with the medium-sized moon Mimas (which orbits well outside the rings).
Prometheus is seen orbiting just outside the A ring in the lower left quadrant of this image; the F ring can be faintly seen to the left of Prometheus.
The rings, which consist of clumps of water ice, rocks and dust, cover over 282,000 kilometers but are only 10 meters thick.
The paucity of solid material in the rings means that if these structures were compressed into a single body, it would be no more than 100 km across.
Scientists aren’t certain as to how old Saturn’s rings are. Latest data says the rings now appear to be young and perhaps only hundreds of millions of years old.
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