Dazzling Display of Promethean Force on Saturn’s F Ring

By Ben on July 20, 2010 at 12:06 pm | In Blog Posts | No Comments

more cool ring structures.
–Ben
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July 20, 2010

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

Today, the Cassini Imaging Team is proud to release some outstanding new image mosaics and computer simulations of everyone’s favorite ring, Saturn’s F ring: the narrow, dynamic, and extraordinarily complex set of strands of ring material caught between the orbits of its shepherd moons, Prometheus and Pandora, a few thousand kilometers beyond the outer edge of Saturn’s main rings.

These new results, published last week in the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters, confirm what some of us veteran imaging scientists from the days of the Voyager mission long suspected: The F ring is the site of continual moonlet formation and, in most cases, eventual disruption. But what we didn’t know then was the exact mechanism by which this could happen.

Now we do, and the culprit is Prometheus and the particular sequence of steps that transpire in its repetitive disturbance of the F ring that creates clumps of ring debris.

And like so many of our most interesting results on Saturn’s rings, the tell-tale clues came in the form of shadows cast by these small, newly formed objects onto the faint, diffuse component of the F ring.

Go to …

http://www.ciclops.org/view/6367/Fan_in_the_F_Ring

… and see for yourself what Prometheus inflicts on the F ring. And be amazed at the complexity that is made possible by the simple force of gravity.

Enjoy!

Carolyn Porco
Cassini Imaging Team Leader
Director, CICLOPS
Space Science Institute
Boulder, CO

http://ciclops.org

http://twitter.com/carolynporco

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Carolyn-Porco/116163229386