Click on the thumbnail image to listen to bizarre 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 Saturn's radio
emissions. 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 instrument has now provided the first high resolution observations of
these emissions, showing that show an amazing array of variations in
frequency and time. In this example, it appears as though the three
rising tones are launched from the more slowly varying narrowband emission
near the bottom of this display. If this is the case, it represents a very
complicated interaction between waves in Saturn's radio source region, but
one which has also been observed at Earth.
Time on this recording has been compressed such that 13 seconds
corresponds to 27 seconds. Since the frequencies of these emissions are
well above the audio frequency range, we have shifted them downward by a
factor of 260.
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/.