Zigzagging kinks and knots dance around Saturn in this movie of the F ring
from Cassini. From a great distance, as during Cassini's initial approach
to Saturn in mid-2004, the F ring appears as a faint, knotted strand of
material at the outer fringe of Saturn's immense ring system. From this
close vantage point, just after the spacecraft rounded the planet to
begin its second orbit, the F ring resolves into several ringlets with a
bright central core. The core of the F ring is about 50 kilometers (31
miles) wide and is located at a distance of approximately 80,100
kilometers (49,800 miles) from Saturn's cloud tops.
Scientists have only a rough idea of the lifetime of features like knots
and clumps in Saturn's rings, and studies of images, such as those
comprising this movie, will help them piece together this story.
The view here is from Cassini's southern vantage point, below the
ringplane. During the course of the movie sequence, Cassini was headed
on a trajectory that took the spacecraft away from the planet and farther
south, so that the rings appear to tilt farther upward. To help visualize
this, note that the top portion of the F ring is closer to the spacecraft,
while the bottom portion is farther away and curves around the far side of
Saturn.
The movie consists of 44 frames taken three minutes apart, so that the
span of time represented in the sequence is almost exactly two hours, or
about one-eight of a Saturn rotation. The images that comprise this movie
sequence were taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow
angle camera on Oct. 28, 2004, and at distances ranging from approximately
516,000 kilometers (321,000 miles) to 562,000 kilometers (349,000 miles).
No enhancement was performed on the images.
For more information, about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit,
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the Cassini imaging team home page,
http://ciclops.org.
