This natural color composite photo of Saturn was taken by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. (NASA)
A baby Adélie penguin nuzzles up to its mother inside one of three bird colonies on Ross Island near Antarctica. (Penguinscience.com)
This is Robonaut 2-R2, the first dexterous humanoid robot in space, in an image taken inside the International Space Station. NASA astronaut Kevin Ford’s reflection can be seen on R2′s helmet visor. (NASA)
Lava from a lava pond, below the peak, flows on the north side of Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano. (USGS)
Photo illustration of the magnificent spiral galaxy M106, assembled using data from the Hubble Space Telescope. (NASA)
This photograph, taken through a microscope, is of a brown fat cell (brown adipocyte) taken from a muscle stem cell. (Alessandra Pasut, Ottawa Hospital Research Institute)
Technicians prepare NASA’s Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM) satellite for its scheduled launch on Monday, Feb. 11 at 1800 UTC. (NASA)
Sockeye salmon migrate from salt water to fresh water in British Columbia’s Fraser River, changing from their silvery ocean colors to red in fresh water. (Tom Quinn, University of Washington)
The Orion nebula is showcased in this sweeping image from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). (NASA)
An Atlas V rocket carrying NASA’s Tracking and Data Relay Satellite-K (TDRS-K) streaks past a building at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. (NASA)
NASA’s Cassini spacecraft recently snapped this spectacular view of Saturn, taken while the spacecraft was in Saturn’s shadow. The cameras were turned toward Saturn and the Sun so that the planet and rings are backlit. (NASA)
This sabal causiarum, commonly known as the Puerto Rican hat palm, was planted in 1932 at the Montgomery Botanical Center in Coral Gables Florida. (P. Barry Tomlinson, National Tropical Botanical Garden, Miami/American Journal of Botany)
This linear accelerator produces x-ray pulses that capture images of atoms and molecules in motion and is for an astrophysics experiment at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory’s Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS),. (Jose R. Crespo Lopez-Urrutia/Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics)
Lava flows down central Ecuador’s Tungurahua volcano in this photo taken at a slow shutter speed. (AP)
A map of the moon’s gravity field, as measured by NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL). Areas colored in red have a high degree of local gravity, the blue blotches show lower local gravity, and other colors indicate varying degrees of local gravity in between red and blue. (NASA)
Scientists use this device, a diamond anvil cell (DAC), in experiments to recreate the pressure that exists deep inside planets. (Roy Kaltschmidt, Berkeley Lab)
This striking image of the planetary nebula NGC-5198, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. (NASA)
These six huge fans provide wind for the wind tunnel at NASA’s National Full-scale Aerodynamics Complex in California. (NASA)
This endangered hawksbill is one of seven species of the world’s sea turtle. Its shell is made up of overlapping plates which are thicker than those of other sea turtles. This heavy-duty shell protects them from being battered. (NOAA)
In a photo captured from the International Space Station, a mammoth plume of smoke emanates from the erupting Ulawan volcano, located on the island of New Britain, Papua New Guinea. (NASA)
A NASA space probe studying Saturn recently treated scientists to a bit of a surprise – rather odd little objects piercing in and out the planet’s F Ring, leaving a glittering trail of mini-jets behind.
The objects appear to travel in packs, producing multiple mini-jets which look like the barb of a harpoon.
Scientists already knew somewhat large objects can create channels, ripples and snowballs, or clumps of icy material, within the F ring. What they didn’t know was what happened to these objects after they were created. Scientists thought some of these “snowballs” were broken up into smaller pieces by collisions or tidal forces as they orbited in the F ring around Saturn.
These images, from NASA's Cassini spacecraft, show trails which were dragged out from Saturn's F ring by objects that are about one kilometer in diameter. (Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI/QMUL ) (Click image for larger view)
Finding the mystery objects suggests scientists now have proof some of the smaller chunks of those collisions survived and, because they were set into varying orbits, these little objects went on to break through the F ring on their own.
To make their findings, scientists carefully went through about 20,000 images produced during the seven years the Cassini space probe has been at Saturn. So far, about 500 of these weird little objects have been found.
“I think the F ring is Saturn’s weirdest ring, and these latest Cassini results go to show how the F ring is even more dynamic than we ever thought,” said Carl Murray, a Cassini imaging team member.
The F ring, Saturn’s outermost main ring, has a circumference of 881,000 kilometers and is considered the most active ring in the Solar System, since its features tend to change over a period of hours.
Saturn’s rings are mostly made of ice with an average thickness of about 10 meters. The pieces of ice that make up the main rings spread out some 140,000 kilometers from the center of the planet.
The Cassini space probe’s next notable encounter will be a flyby past Saturn’s moon, Enceladus, on May 2.
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