Behind the Rings
The rings cannot hide the ragged, icy crescent of Rhea, here imaged in color by the Cassini spacecraft. The second-largest moon of Saturn shines brightly through gaps in the rings.
Rhea (1,528 kilometers, or 949 miles across) lies beyond the dim, unlit side of the rings. A diffuse clump of material lies in the F ring, on the side nearest to Cassini.
Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to create this natural color view, which approximates the scene as it might appear to human eyes. The view was acquired with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on July 1, 2006 at a distance of approximately 1.2 million kilometers (700,000 miles) from Rhea and at a Sun-Rhea-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 118 degrees. Image scale is 7 kilometers (4 miles) per pixel.
Image & caption: NASA / JPL / Space Science Institute
2 Responses to “Behind the Rings”
Leave a Reply
rss
entries
comments
Search
faves
Sir, shall we say that the saturn rings are not transperant, it is clear in this image that the behind item cannot be seen clearly in this picture.
q.1. saturn rings are nothing but the permanent clouds in the ring position over saturn?
q.2. another planet struck with the saturn after crossing the roche limit and turn into the small granual like debris and moving around the saturn?
q.3 what material rings are made of? or they are the part of the saturn as originally formed along with saturn?
sunil
Right, the rings really aren’t transparent.
The current thoughts on Saturn’s rings are that they formed more recently (relatively speaking, compared to the planets or the rest of the solar system), within the span of the last few hundred million years. They’re mostly composed of water ice but also contain bits of rock — these materials seem to range in size from as small as a grain of sand to large chunks the size of a house. It’s very possible that the rings are the result of an asteroid or comet having broken up before it reached Saturn — or, that there was a collision between another object and one of Saturn’s moons. Saturn’s faintest, outermost ring, the E-ring, looks like it’s been formed and maintained by active cryovolcanism (imagine an ice volcano) on the moon Enceladus, spewing out little bits of icy material. The general consensus is that planetary rings dissipate over very long time spans, so perhaps far in the future, Saturn’s may fade away.
The ring plane is a very complex and dynamic system, and we have a great deal more to study. This is one of the primary objectives of the Cassini spacecraft, and hopefully our understanding will greatly improve from its observations in coming years.