Images of Meteors Colliding With Saturn’s Rings Captured by NASA Cassini Probe

On their web site this week, NASA released pictures taken by the Cassini spacecraft which show the first direct evidence of small meteoroids breaking into streams of rubble and crashing into Saturn’s rings. The new images are just one of a number of scientific discoveries relayed back to Earth from the mission sent out to explore Saturn and its moons.

The agency estimates the size of the meteoroids captured in the images at Saturn by Cassini to range from about one-half inch to several yards. As mentioned on the posting, NASA researchers are excited about the images saying that, “studying the impact rate of meteoroids from outside the Saturn system helps scientists understand how different planet systems in the solar system formed.”

“These new results imply the current-day impact rates for small particles at Saturn are about the same as those at Earth– two very different neighborhoods in our solar system, and this is exciting to see,” said Linda Spilker, Cassini project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif. “It took Saturn’s rings acting like a giant meteoroid detector — 100 times the surface area of the Earth — and Cassini’s long-term tour of the Saturn system to address this question.”

Using the images and other data gathered by Cassini, Jeff Cuzzi, a Cassini interdisciplinary scientist specializing in planetary rings and dust at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, believes that it lends credibility to a theory that the rings are actually younger than the planet itself.

“Saturn’s rings are unusually bright and clean, leading some to suggest that the rings are actually much younger than Saturn,” said Cuzzi. “To assess this dramatic claim, we must know more about the rate at which outside material is bombarding the rings. This latest analysis helps fill in that story with detection of impactors of a size that we weren’t previously able to detect directly.”

Additional images and complete mission coverage of Cassini are available online as the NASA web site dedicated to the Saturn probe – http://www.nasa.gov/cassini.