NASA Video: Cassini Spacecraft Observes New Objects in Rings of Saturn

In a press release today, NASA announced that its scientists working with images from Cassini spacecraft have discovered, “strange, half-mile-sized objects punching through one of Saturn’s rings and leaving glittering trails behind them.” The researchers have named the trails “mini-jets.” (see video below)

After reading through some 20,000 images taken by Cassini in the last seven years, the scientists have found 500 examples of these mini-jets. According to the information released, the penetration occurred in the outermost of Saturn’s main rings, called the F ring.

“Beyond just showing us the strange beauty of the F ring, Cassini’s studies of this ring help us understand the activity that occurs when solar systems evolve out of dusty disks that are similar to, but obviously much grander than, the disk we see around Saturn,” said Linda Spilker, Cassini project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif.

Scientists have known relatively large objects can create channels, ripples and snowballs, or clumps of icy material, in the F ring. However, scientists did not know what happened to these snowballs after they were created. Some were broken up by collisions or tidal forces in their orbit around Saturn. Scientists now have evidence some of the smaller ones survived, and their differing orbits mean they go on to strike through the F ring on their own.

“I think the F ring is Saturn’s weirdest ring, and these latest Cassini results go to show how the F ring is even more dynamic than we ever thought,” said Carl Murray, a Cassini imaging team member based at Queen Mary University of London, U.K. “These findings show us that the F ring region is like a bustling zoo of objects from a half-mile (0.8-kilometer) in size to moons like Prometheus a hundred miles (160.9 kilometers) in size, creating a spectacular show.”

Watch Video of the “mini-jets” observed by the Cassini Probe in Saturn’s Rings

Source: NASA