Saturn's rings very close up

[mmcirvin]

This is one of those pure awe-at-the-bounty-of-Nature moments.

There are some detailed explanations here.

Comments

[reverendluke.livejournal.com]

That is the coolest thing... I have ever seen. I may have spent entirely too much of my time reading more about Cassini on space.com, and waiting for more pictures to make it online when I should have been working today. Oh well, it's not MY fault that work conflicted with an important space probe related event.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

These results aren't, for the most part, scientifically surprising: the Voyagers actually managed to get some similar-looking pictures (http://www.solarviews.com/cap/sat/aring2.htm) of regular density waves caused by Mimas over 20 years ago. But these are of incomparably finer resolution. I like the fractal-looking structure of some of them, waves nested within waves on finer and finer levels of detail.

Also, there does seem to be a mystery appearing in some of the new pictures: a grainy, clumpy structure (http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gs2.cgi?path=../multimedia/images/rings/images/PIA06096.jpg&type=image) that seems to be real and wasn't really expected. To me those pictures look sort of like a Poincaré diagram of a chaotic dynamical system, with bands of regularity and bands of noise.

[chicken-cem.livejournal.com]

Wow. Those are amazing. Imaging technology has really improved over the last several years/decades.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

It certainly has. The Voyagers had a vidicon-tube-based system like an old TV camera. I think Cassini's closest approach to Saturn was also closer than Voyager's, and the JPL people mentioned something about less camera shake.

What amazes me is to hear about the system that the 1976 Viking Mars landers used: it was electromechanical, pretty similar to the mechanism of a flatbed scanner. They had a photodiode that could detect one channel of one pixel at a time (behind a color wheel), and there was a mirror that could focus light on it from a particular direction and could scan up and down, and the whole assembly was in a turret that rotated left and right. (There were two of them, for stereo pictures.)

What was even more convoluted, as I think I mentioned some time ago, was the system used by the Soviet probe that took the first picture of the far side of the moon: it snapped a picture on film, developed the film internally in a little automated developing machine, then scanned the negative slowly with a CRT beam while detecting some sort of photoelectric signal, which was what got sent back.

[chicken-cem.livejournal.com]

Not only is all of that very convoluted, it is also quite prone to mechanical failure, having more moving parts that could break than your typical modern, more digital-based equipment.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...The VIMS instrument on Cassini (http://wwwvims.lpl.arizona.edu/howitworx/Howitworks.html) actually uses a similar mechanical scanning method, because it takes a spectrum at every pixel. But the images it produces are pretty low-resolution.