Low inclination
Feb. 22nd, 2005 02:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvinTwo remarkable shots of Titan, Epimetheus, and the rings.
Peculiar conjunctions like these are a fairly common sight near the ring plane, where most of the major moons orbit. The recent shots in the raw archive are worth browsing at some length. Cassini will be at low inclination for the rest of this orbit, for the next couple of weeks (then there is an even closer flyby of Enceladus than last week's, and a flyby of Tethys). At some point, probably at the end of March when the next Titan flyby happens, I think it goes to a somewhat higher inclination for a while, moving to an orbit where it can study occultations of the Sun by the rings.
It will, however, be orbiting exactly in the ring plane from this fall through mid-2006, studying Saturn's magnetotail; during that time there will be no particularly pretty ring pictures, but probably lots of eerie-looking pictures of multi-crescent-moon conjunctions with the bright hairline of the ring system running through the middle. It will become graphically clear just how thin the rings are.
Peculiar conjunctions like these are a fairly common sight near the ring plane, where most of the major moons orbit. The recent shots in the raw archive are worth browsing at some length. Cassini will be at low inclination for the rest of this orbit, for the next couple of weeks (then there is an even closer flyby of Enceladus than last week's, and a flyby of Tethys). At some point, probably at the end of March when the next Titan flyby happens, I think it goes to a somewhat higher inclination for a while, moving to an orbit where it can study occultations of the Sun by the rings.
It will, however, be orbiting exactly in the ring plane from this fall through mid-2006, studying Saturn's magnetotail; during that time there will be no particularly pretty ring pictures, but probably lots of eerie-looking pictures of multi-crescent-moon conjunctions with the bright hairline of the ring system running through the middle. It will become graphically clear just how thin the rings are.
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Date: 2005-02-22 05:51 am (UTC)One thing that others of these pictures make clear, but that surprised me a little, is that Janus and Epimetheus's weird swapping co-orbits are actually slightly more inclined than those of the ring-shepherd moons Pandora, Prometheus, Pan and Atlas. It's only a small fraction of a degree, but they're close enough to the rings that it is noticeable and makes the perspective of some of these pictures hard to interpret. Mimas is at about a degree and a half; then of the other major moons within the orbit of Iapetus, only Tethys is as inclined as much as a degree.