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Cassini's Ringside Seat

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Cassini's Ringside Seat Cassini’s Ringside Seat Saturn’s rings and moons are a model for how planetary systems may be forming around nearby stars. The Cassini spacecraft has been taking a close look at the rings of late, and it turns out that gravity and granules with momentum can do some amaz- ing things. Of all the planets in our solar system, only one’s got a whole lot of bling. Yet, for most of human history, we didn’t know about Saturn’s luminous rings, even though the gigantic, gaseous planet is readily visible in the night sky. When Galileo became the first person to peer at Saturn through a telescope in 1610, he sketched a compan- ion moon on each side. A couple of years later, he became utterly perplexed when the moons vanished. When the mysterious objects returned, he saw them as elliptical arms resembling handles. In 1655, Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens, using a better telescope, figured out that the arms were actually a flat ring and that, like the edge of a sheet of paper held horizontally at eye level, it disappeared from view when Saturn’s tilt presented it to us edge-on. (The rings truly are paper-thin—a mere 10 to 20 meters thick on average, and yet so broad that they would fit neatly between Earth and 22 ENGINEERING & SCIENCE SPRING 2010 Opposite: Linda Spilker, Cassini’s project sci- entist, with one of the Deep Space Network’s 34-meter dishes at Goldstone, California. Right: The Cassini orbiter. Below: The anatomy of Saturn’s rings. The planet itself is out of view to the left. By Linda Doran its moon.) Saturn’s rotational axis is tilted by 4,800 kilometers wide, demonstrated that surface of smog-shrouded Titan. Discovered about 27 degrees, and the rings, which gir- Saturn’s rings were not a single, solid by Christiaan Huygens in 1655 and bigger dle Saturn’s equator, are tilted by the same object. Quite perceptively, Cassini theorized than the planet Mercury, Titan is the second- amount. Seasons change slowly on Saturn, that they were swarms of tiny moonlets too largest moon in the solar system and has an with its nearly 30-year orbit; but once every small to be seen from afar. Earth-like surface with highlands, lowlands, 14 to 15 years, when the sun straddles Sat- Three centuries later, spacefaring vehicles stream channels, and liquid methane–filled urn’s equator at the solar equinox, the rings carried telescopic cameras to Saturn itself. lakes. Huygens sent pictures and data back vanish from view—they’re pointed directly at Our first emissary, NASA’s Pioneer 11, re- to Cassini during the entire journey down, the sun and more or less at us. vealed in 1979 that the Cassini Division was and then continued to transmit information Seen through the 60-inch telescope at not actually empty, but was merely a zone from the surface for some 70 minutes, until Caltech’s Palomar Observatory, Saturn’s with a very low density of ring material. JPL’s the mother ship flew out of range. Mean- rings beckon like diamond-paved, circular twin Voyager spacecraft, flying past Saturn while, Cassini had settled into its four-year highways. (Every now and then, the Friends in 1980 and 1981, showed that the rings primary mission—a grand tour of a planet of Palomar Observatory get a tour that, are astonishingly complex. Astronomers and that many scientists regard as a miniature weather permitting, includes an opportunity stargazers alike marveled at images of gaps solar system in its own right. A team of to turn that telescope on the heavens.) They swept clean by tiny moons, mysterious dark navigators guides Cassini on the multiple nearly fill the telescope’s field of view, and spokes whirling within the B ring as if it were loops of its itinerary, firing rocket thrusters seem as close as the moon does in a pair a wagon wheel, and the “braided” multiple to fine-tune its orbit and using the gravita- of good binoculars. In reality, they’re more strands of the F ring. The Voyagers showed tional pull of Titan like a slingshot to adjust than a billion kilometers away. If you were to that Saturn’s rings were really thousands of the spacecraft’s path. Cassini’s travels have count those kilometers at one per second, discrete ringlets, and confirmed that they taken it on equatorial orbits in the plane of you’d still be counting three decades from are very nearly pure—99 percent—water ice. Saturn’s rings and moons, as well as on now—an entire Saturnian year later. Put an- (We’ll come back to that other 1 percent steeply inclined orbits above and below the other way, Saturn is about 10 times farther later.) The Voyagers also determined that plane in order to make observations from as away from the sun than Earth. Understand- the ring particles range from flecks the size many angles as possible. And Cassini will ing something so remote is a challenge not of dust, about a millionth of a meter across, be going strong for years to come—in Janu- only for parents with curious children—at to chunks of ice as big as two-story houses. ary 2010, NASA authorized a seven-year Palomar and elsewhere—but for scientists Most of them, however, run from pebbles to mission extension to follow Saturn through a as well. To this day, we’re not even sure snowballs. complete change of seasons. how old the rings are or exactly what they’re On June 30, 2004, a schoolbus-sized made of. spacecraft named Cassini, a joint U.S.-Eu- Our first clue came in 1675, when ropean mission built and operated by the Jet PLUNGING INTO THE DARK Giovanni Domenico Cassini, the founding Propulsion Laboratory, which Caltech man- Which brings us back to the solar equi- director of the Paris Observatory under ages for NASA, entered orbit around Saturn. nox. In August 2009, for the first time in Louis XIV, observed not one bright ring but Six months later, on December 25, Cassini history, astronomers got a close-up look at two, separated by a dark gap. The discovery released the European Space Agency’s Saturn’s rings shrouded in darkness, just of what’s now called the Cassini Division, Huygens probe, which parachuted to the as they were when Galileo couldn’t see SPRING 2010 ENGINEERING & SCIENCE 23 The gravitational pull of a tiny moon named Daphnis, only eight kilometers in diameter, sweeps stray material out of the 42-kilometer- wide Keeler Gap near the outer edge of the A ring. Cassini discovered that Daphnis’s gravity also kicks up bright, white rooster tails in the ring material. them. One of those astronomers was JPL’s Linda Spilker, Cassini’s project scientist. “At equinox, the sun is essentially edge-on to Saturn’s rings,” she says. “This is the time when the ring temperature is at its very coldest—down to 43 kelvins (–230 degrees C). In a sense, it’s like experimentally turning off the sun. The rings are heated only by Later, she worked on the Voyager mission, tions as a result of data collected during the Saturn’s thermal radiation and by sunlight and she likes to tell her daughters that their equinox. In addition to her management role reflected from Saturn.” When Cassini arrived births were literally based on the alignment coordinating Cassini’s many investigations, at Saturn, the rings averaged 90 to 110 K of the planets. The girls were born between Spilker is coinvestigator on an instrument (–183 degrees C to –163 degrees C). Dur- Voyager 2’s flybys of Saturn in 1981 and called the Composite Infrared Spectrometer, ing equinox, a 60-degree temperature drop Uranus in 1986—in other words, during the or CIRS. Humans sense infrared light as happened overnight, as it were. “cruise phase” when there wasn’t so much heat. Like a snake’s tongue, CIRS seeks out Spilker belongs to that generation of going on. sources of heat, experiencing the world at space explorers who spent July 20, 1969, in Spilker’s fascination with destinations wavelengths longer than those the human wide-eyed wonder in front of their television beyond Earth is a constant in her life. “If you eye can see. As it distinguishes variations in infrared light, CIRS can map the tem- perature and composition of Saturn’s rings because different materials emit and absorb Spilker belongs to that generation of space explorers heat in characteristic ways. who spent July 20, 1969, in wide-eyed wonder in front “I think that the outsides of Saturn’s ring particles would certainly be very fluffy and of their television sets watching Neil Armstrong set foot porous,” Spilker says. “That’s based on the on the moon. fact that they heat up and cool down very quickly, within about half an hour. They have what we call a very low thermal inertia—in fact, it’s four orders of magnitude lower than sets watching Neil Armstrong set foot on could scoop up a particle out of Saturn’s that of a solid block of ice.” Rapid heating the moon. While an undergrad majoring in rings,” she asks, “and hold it in your hand, and cooling implies a lot of surface area in physics at Cal State Fullerton, she studied what would it look like? Would you see this order to exchange so much thermal energy other space rocks at Caltech—helping her fluffy snowball? Would it have an icy core? with the surroundings so fast.
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