November 2025
Extra-terrestrial Skyring: managing space debris with an artificial planetary ring
... more mass in orbit before this became viable. A ring extrapolated from the faint Jupiter ring would have a mass of around 314,600 tons and a mass based on the Saturn D ring would have a mass of around 105,000 tons...
03 September 2015
Cassini discovers potentially ‘younger’ ring portion on Saturn
... to the Cassini team that the middle of Saturn’s A ring is potentially much younger than the rest of the rings. You can read about one potential theory as to why that is here. In general, Saturn’s rings have fascinated science for years. Although...
31 December 2018
Planetary Ring Systems: properties, structure and evolution
... to planetary spacecraft: it depicts the shepherd moon Daphnis which orbits in the Keeler Gap in Saturn’s A ring. The caption reports that “The surrounding ring structure includes wavy gap edges and spiral density waves”, but to the non...
16 January 2022
Voyager: photographs from humanity’s greatest journe
... which ‘full marks!’. No-one can fail to find the images of Saturn’s ring system beautiful, but I was suddenly struck by the similarity between a high-resolution ring image and the grooves of the Voyager Golden Record (which is also...
June 2018
Space 2080 a future perspective
...even know about the existence of exoplanets. Animal bay on a futuristic spaceship. Planetary exploration The collection of data on Saturn’s rings is done with hundreds of probes inspecting their rocks. The atmosphere of Venus is modelled with the aid...
March 2016
Searching for water in the Solar System
..., when Solar System-wide travel will be common, the volatile resources available there are incommensurable - from Saturn’s rings, to Enceladus and its geysers, from Europa’s ocean, to Titan hydrocarbon lakes. There, too, it’s all about the...
