TheCassini spacecraftmay have burned up in Saturn ’s ambiance years ago , but its data is still being examine . researcher have now completed a catalog of data from 41 solar occultations of Saturn ’s rings ( when the ring are in front of the Sun ) . The atom in the ring occlude part of sunlight , and this provides a whole set of information .
The size of the particles that make up the rings , the compactness of the ring , and the feature film within these striking structure can be judge through these watching . The of the essence measuring is telephone optical profundity . During anoccultation , the light of the ground source ( in this case the Sun ) is scattered or absorbed by the particles in the ring . The amount of lighting is a lineal mensuration of ocular depth .
sleep with the angle between the rings and Cassini provides a three - dimensional knowledge of the rings , and with that , properties can be worked out . Not just that – researcher see this data as essential to be able to know how the rings came to be .
A backlit Saturn, as the planet occults the Sun. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI
Last month , a unlike squad of researcherssuggested thatthe ring were the result of an icy moonlight getting destroyed – an explanation that was capable to explain another mystery story of Saturn as well , concern to a connection with Neptune . This data could help examine that hypothesis further .
Cassini has tape astral occultations as well as solar occultations . Both set are logical with each other , and they provide important insights into the properties of the rings .
“ Given the wavelength of the light coming from the Sun , these observations gave us perceptivity into the smallest subatomic particle sizes with Saturn ’s rings , ” Jarmak sound out . “ UVIS can find rubble particle at the micron story , helping us sympathise the origin , collisional body process and death of the doughnut subatomic particle within the system . ”
The dataset is published in thejournal Icarus .
