Click on the thumbnail image to listen to eerie sounds of Saturn radio transmissions
from Cassini’s radio and plasma wave science instrument which have changes in frequency
Saturn is a source of intense radio emissions, which have been monitored
by the Cassini spacecraft. The radio waves are closely related to the
auroras near the poles of the planet. These auroras are similar to Earth's
northern and southern lights. This is an audio file of radio emissions
from Saturn. An animation with a cursor moving through the color spectrogram
in sync with the audio file is available at: http://www-pw.physics.uiowa.edu/cassini/.
The Cassini spacecraft began detecting these radio emissions in April
2002, when Cassini was 374 million kilometers (234 million miles) from
the planet, using the Cassini radio and plasma wave science instrument.
The radio and plasma wave instrument has now provided the first high
resolution observations of these emissions, showing an amazing array of
variations in frequency and time. The complex radio spectrum with rising
and falling tones, is very similar to Earth's auroral radio emissions.
These structures indicate that there are numerous small radio sources
moving along magnetic field lines threading the auroral region.
Time on this recording has been compressed, so that 73 seconds corresponds
to 27 minutes. Since the frequencies of these emissions are well above
the audio frequency range, we have shifted them downward by a factor of
44.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European
Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages
the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The
Cassini orbiter was designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The radio
and plasma wave science team is based at the University of Iowa, Iowa
City.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission, visit
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the instrument team's home page,
http://www-pw.physics.uiowa.edu/cassini/.
