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.
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Date: 2004-07-01 11:14 pm (UTC)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.