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About LinkBacksCassini took a quite interesting ring picture. To me it looks like something is sweeping up material from the ring, but what do you guys think ?
October 30th, 2004, 03:43 PM
Cassini took a quite interesting ring picture. To me it looks like something is sweeping up material from the ring, but what do you guys think ?
Wow, if I didn't know this was space I would think someone was looking out from the inside of a food can
Very very strange indeed.
In the bottom right part there is a point of light that may be either a star or a little moon. If it's a moon I guess that's also causing the stream of material coming from the ring. If the material in the stream is very fine it may be also of a magnetic nature. In that case it might have something to do with the spokes that the Voyager spacecraft observed.Originally Posted by (In)Sanity
What exactly is the source of this ring? I just happen to look at this post again and I have to say I don't understand the photo.
It's a close up of the F ring, the faint outer ring:
Does anyone have a clue what these rings are made up of? If this is a snapshot photo and not time lapse, then it would almost appear they are made up of either very fine particles or a gas, perhaps even a combination.
The streams in the F ring are from Saturn's moon Prometheus which orbits very close to the ring at times, and tends to pull streams of it with its gravity.
The majority of the rings are made up of water ice particles and rocky, ice covered particles, ranging from a few centimeters to several kilometers in size.
However I found this once about the F-Ring
The F-ring, is a complex structure made up of several smaller rings along which "knots" are visible. Scientists speculate that the knots may be clumps of ring material, or mini moons. The strange braided appearance visible in the Voyager 1 images (right) is not seen in the Voyager 2 images perhaps because Voyager 2 imaged regions where the component rings are roughly parallel.
So do these look so smooth because of a time lapse effect or is it because they are just so large that the massive particles making them up are not large enough to distinguish?
I would say it would be the fact they are so small in relation, Saturn is the second largest body in our solar system (not including the sun) and by comparison, even a particle a few kilometers in size is very small.
The photos still appear to have a degree of blurring to them, might be a limitation of the probe that took these pictures.
Interesting none the less.
Looking back at the pics DEChengst put up I would agree with you, the F ring is a lot more broken up in the first pic there than it appears in the second one.
NASA has released an enhanced version of the raw image and it indeed shows Prometheus pulling material from the F ring:
Thieving Moon
As it completed its first orbit of Saturn, Cassini zoomed in on the rings to catch this wondrous view of the shepherd moon Prometheus (102 kilometers, or 63 miles across) working its influence on the multi-stranded and kinked F ring. The F ring resolves into five separate strands in this closeup view. Potato-shaped Prometheus is seen here, connected to the ringlets by a faint strand of material. Imaging scientists are not sure exactly how Prometheus is interacting with the F ring here, but they have speculated that the moon might be gravitationally pulling material away from the ring. The ringlets are disturbed in several other places. In some, discontinuities or "kinks" in the ringlets are seen; in others, gaps in the diffuse inner strands are seen. All these features appear to be due to the influence of Prometheus.
The image was taken in visible light with the narrow angle camera on Oct. 29, 2004, at a distance of about 782,000 kilometers (486,000 miles) from Prometheus and at a Sun-Prometheus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 147 degrees. The image scale is 4.7 kilometers (2.9 miles) per pixel. The image has been magnified by a factor of two, and contrast was enhanced, to aid visibility.
Wow! Is that really what "outer space" looks like?
This morning Cassini flew past Dione and snapped some nice pictures. I combined these pictures into a panorama and compensated for the data dropouts that were in the raw images:
Cassini flew by Iapetus on new years eve. I created two mosaics from the rawimages:
Today was a big the for the Cassini-Huygens mission as Huygens landed on Titan. Up till now ESA has released three pictures:
Finally this test picture gives an idea about the amount of detail that can be seen on fully processed images combined into a mosaic:
So what have they found out after landing?
THere is a whole lot of methane on Titan. It rains methane and has several methane rivers. Unless I read the news wrong.
Rhea:
This mission and the Mars Rover has probably helped NASA from a PR standpoint. Both missions have been very successful and last longer than they were suppose to last. Will Deep Impact be as successful? Only time will tell
Enceladus:
Enceladus:
coooooooooolllllll
i love space
Did you use stiching software? I'm trying that with digital photo's, so far not very succesfull :wink: The cool thing is that you can make photo's with extreme high resolution by just stiching 16 pictures of the same object together.
This cassini-huygens mission is pretty cool. I wonder what those big cracks in the surface of Titan and Enceladus (that's a moon right? :wink: )are.
I use the panoramatools with a GUI frontend and autopano to created them.
Recent geologic activity. On Titan there are also hydrocarbon rivers and channelsI wonder what those big cracks in the surface of Titan and Enceladus.
Yep. Both Titan and Enceladus are moons of Saturn.(that's a moon right? :wink: )are.
NASA released a HUGE color mosaic of Saturn yesterday:
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpeg/PIA06193.jpg
Some more mosaics I did:
Enceladus:
Rhea:
While browsing around, I found this and remembered your thread, DEChengst. Don't you just love the marvels that space exploration brings us? The pictures that are rendered for our viewing pleasure give us awe at the majesty of nature in all its' forms.
Cassini Spacecraft Crosses Saturn's Ring Plane
Credit: Cassini Imaging Team, SSI, JPL, ESA, NASA
If this is Saturn, where are the rings? When Saturn's "appendages" disappeared in 1612, Galileo did not understand why. Later that century, it became understood that Saturn's unusual protrusions were rings and that when the Earth crosses the ring plane, the edge-on rings will appear to disappear. This is because Saturn's rings are confined to a plane many times thinner, in proportion, than a razor blade. In modern times, the robot Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn now also crosses Saturn's ring plane. A series of plane crossing images from late February was dug out of the vast online Cassini raw image archive by interested Spanish amateur Fernando Garcia Navarro. Pictured above, digitally cropped and set in representative colors, is the striking result. Saturn's thin ring plane appears in blue, bands and clouds in Saturn's upper atmosphere appear in gold, and dark shadows of the rings curve across the top of the gas giant planet. Moons appear as bumps in the rings.
Source here
Yep. Space exploration is a great thing. The best thing is that with the internet you can view the pictures just hours after they have been recieved by the DSN. There are even forums that have some NASA and JPL insiders. Compare that to the Voyager days. You had to wait one or two months for your favorite magazine to publish a few selected pics. There was no way you could edit those pics or ask questions to the experts themselves
Animated F ring flyby on the fourth of May:
http://paranoid.dechengst.nl/saturn/F-ring.gif
Those are some cool images. Enceladus has/had some interesting flows it looks like. Isnt it too cold for any liquid to flow? :?
Awesome images. :-D
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