Strange New Objects Seen In Saturn's Rings

Every 15 Earth years, Saturn has its equinox — the time during which its rotational axis is perpendicular to the rays from the sun, so that the sun is always directly "overhead" of Saturn's equator. This is significant because Saturn's rings orbit over the equator, so during the equinox, light from the sun hits them edge-on. This means that any objects wider than the rings, or orbiting above or below them, cast long shadows and are much easier to see. For the first time, we're able to get detailed images of these objects, thanks to Cassini. A moonlet, perhaps 1,300 feet in diameter, has been discovered in the B-ring, and the Bad Astronomy blog points out another object that seems to be bursting through the F-ring. Quoting: "The upward-angled structure is definitely real, as witnessed by the shadow it's casting on the ring material to the lower left. And what's with the bright patch right where this object seems to have slammed into the rings? Did it shatter millions of icy particles, revealing their shinier interior material, making them brighter? Clearly, something awesome and amazing happened here.

Comments

Re:radial distance?

[spacemandave]

According to Ciclops it's 480 km inward of the outer edge of the B ring, which puts it at a radial distance of 117,100 km

Re:That's no moon

[Deuxsonic]

It was changed to Jupiter for the movie because Stanley Kubrick couldn't find a good image of Saturn (this was 1968, so a lot of the great images we have today didn't exist.) The book retains the original planet of Saturn, yet strangely it gets changed to Jupiter in the later books (I guess to be canon with the movie?)

Re:That's no moon

[FlyingSquidStudios]

Douglas Trumbull, the man who created the effects for 2001, told Kubrick that Saturn was too hard to depict realistically. As for why the setting was different in the other novels, in an author's note in 2061, Clarke claimed that each novel took place in a different parallel universe. My personal reason is that Clarke's original novels are all terrific, but his sequels are all terrible. Especially those god-awful Rama books he co-wrote with Gentry Lee. And yet, I couldn't stop reading them. I hate myself.