Saturn's Rings - New Discoveries from the Cassini Mission

NASA's Cassini spacecraft, launched in 1997, has been in orbit around Saturn since 2004. During that time, it has taken over 80,000 pictures and millions of spectra of Saturn's rings. This unprecedented amount of information has led to the discovery of many new features, such as a "wobble" in the rings likely caused by a cometary impact in 1983 and a small ringlet that always orients itself towards the Sun. In addition, Cassini has enabled the continuing exploration of previously known features, such as the weird F ring with its kinks and clumps and the sparse E ring produced by the ice geysers of the moon Enceladus. The Saturn equinox in 2009, when the Sun was edge-on to the ring plane, has permitted the discovery of the three-dimensional structure of the rings, including walls of material dragged kilometers off the ring by nearby moonlets. This image-rich talk will introduce the Cassini mission and briefly overview these and other discoveries.

Speaker: Robert French, SETI