Tag Archives: Saturn’s rings

Persistent Saturnian Auroras 

saturnauroras_hubble_700
Image Credit: J. Clarke (Boston U.) & Z. Levay (STScI), ESA, NASA
 

 Are Saturn’s auroras like Earth’s? To help answer this question, the Hubble Space Telescope and the Cassini spacecraft monitored Saturn’s South Pole simultaneously as Cassini closed in on the gas giant in January 2004. Hubble snapped images in ultraviolet light, while Cassini recorded radio emissions and monitored the solar wind. Like on Earth, Saturn’s auroras make total or partial rings around magnetic poles. Unlike on Earth, however, Saturn’s auroras persist for days, as opposed to only minutes on Earth. Although surely created by charged particles entering the atmosphere, Saturn’s auroras also appear to be more closely modulated by the solar wind than either Earth’s or Jupiter’s auroras. The above sequence shows three Hubble images of Saturn each taken two days apart.

APOD NASA 22-Jun-14

Related posts:

  1. Time-Lapse Auroras Over Norway
  2. Cassini Spacecraft Crosses Saturn’s Ring Plane
  3. A Solar Eclipse from the Moon
  4. Orion and Aurora over Iceland

Saturn in Blue and Gold

saturnbluegold_cassini_960
Image Credit: Cassini Imaging Team, SSI, JPL, ESA, NASA

 Why is Saturn partly blue? The above picture of Saturn approximates what a human would see if hovering close to the giant ringed world. The above picture was taken in 2006 March by the robot Cassini spacecraft now orbiting Saturn. Here Saturn’s majestic rings appear directly only as a thin vertical line. The rings show their complex structure in the dark shadows they create on the image left. Saturn’s fountain moonE nceladus, only about 500 kilometers across, is seen as the bump in the plane of the rings. The northern hemisphere of Saturn can appear partly blue for the same reason that Earth’s skies can appear blue — molecules in the cloudless portions of both planet’s atmospheres are better at scattering blue light than red. When looking deep into Saturn’s clouds, however, the natural gold hue of Saturn’s clouds becomes dominant. It is not known whysouthern Saturn does not show the same blue hue – one hypothesis holds that clouds are higher there. It is also not known why Saturn’s clouds are colored gold.

NASA APOD 13-Apr-14

Related posts:

  1. Cassini Spacecraft Crosses Saturn’s Ring Plane
  2. Saturn
  3. Fresh Tiger Stripes on Saturn’s Enceladus
  4. Mars Red and Spica Blue

Cassini Spacecraft Crosses Saturn’s Ring Plane

saturnplane_cassini_1004

Image Credit: Cassini Imaging Team, ISS, JPL, ESA, NASA

If this is Saturn, where are the rings? When Saturn’s “appendages” disappeared in 1612, Galileo did not understand why. Later that century, it became understood that Saturn’s unusual protrusions were rings and that when the Earth crosses the ring plane, the edge-on rings will appear to disappear. This is because Saturn’s rings are confined to a plane many times thinner, in proportion, than a razor blade. In modern times, therobot Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn now also crosses Saturn’s ring plane. A series of plane crossing images from 2005 February was dug out of the vast online Cassini raw image archive by interested Spanish amateur Fernando Garcia Navarro. Pictured above, digitally cropped and set in representative colors, is the striking result. Saturn’s thin ring plane appears in blue, bands and clouds in Saturn’s upper atmosphere appear in gold. Details of Saturn’s rings can be seen in the high dark shadows across the top of this image, taken back in 2005. Moons appear as bumps in the rings.

NASA APOD 23-feb-2014

Related posts:

  1. Saturn in Blue and Gold
  2. Polar Ring Galaxy NGC 2685
  3. Saturn
  4. Two Rings for Asteroid Chariklo