Cassini & # 039; s Death Dive into Saturn Reveals Weird Ring & # 039; Rain & # 039; s & Other...

Cassini & # 039; s Death Dive into Saturn Reveals Weird Ring & # 039; Rain & # 039; s & Other...

Cassini & # 039; s Death Dive into Saturn Reveals Weird Ring & # 039; Rain & # 039; s & Other Surprises







		In the distance, the terrestrial eyes, the gap between Saturn and their rings look calm, like a deep breath of empty space between a beautifully intricate structure and another. But in 11 new articles, born of the disappearance of one of NASA's most beloved planetary science missions, scientists destroy that illusion, exposing a set of unexpectedly complicated phenomena that dance through that void.

		These articles, published today in two key scientific journals, represent the first research published with data from the Cassini mission called "Grand Final", a daring set of orbits during which the spaceship coiled. between Saturn and its rings. Taken together, the papers paint a detailed picture of what is happening between the innermost rings of the planet and its upper atmosphere: striking and striking phenomena like a rain of compounds striking the equatorial region of the planet and an electric current produced simply by the winds of the planet and magnetic field.

		"We really think of it as a breach," Linda Spilker, a project scientist for NASA's Cassini mission, told Space.com about the region between Saturn and its rings. The team was optimistic about what Cassini could learn during her disappearance, but the operation ended up producing what she called "a much richer scientific return than we had imagined": she came to compare it with a new mission.

He[[Incredible photos of Saturn from NASA's Cassini Orbiter]

		The Cassini spacecraft spent a total of 13 years studying Saturn and its moons. But when it had run out of fuel, the scientists behind the mission designed a bold trajectory that would send the spacecraft through Saturn's rings earlier. burning in your environment. That destruction ensured that the potentially habitable moons in the system would not trap the Earth's germs that could have been hooked aboard the spacecraft.

		But it also allowed the scientists to extract some additional data from their instruments, and pushed the ship further than they thought possible, since neither Cassini nor its instruments were designed to accomplish such an incredible feat. The scientists gathered for the first dive, wondering if the spacecraft would survive long enough to even begin the Grand finale.

		Spilker and other Saturn scientists say that the revelations of the spaceships from the data are far from complete, even after the articles published today (October 4). "It basically looks at the huge amount of data that has come back from Cassini over the past 13 years, actually, we've just taken a look at the cream at the top of the data set," said Spilker. That work has helped scientists begin to understand the individual phenomena that take place on Saturn. "The next step that is happening even now is to take those pieces and put them together in a coherent image to see all the data sets and ask if there is a common story," Spilker said.

		But in the meantime, here's a look at what scientists have already learned about the ringed planet.





						


Artistic representation of the vision of the Cassini spacecraft when it completed the "Grand Final" of its mission in 2017.

            						    Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech 




		It's raining is pouring

		A new discovery was prompted by results from such strange instruments that the scientists on the team and beyond them at first thought there had to be an error. That instrument, called the ion and neutral mass spectrometer, or INMS, can detect the chemical composition of the material it traps.

		Scientists are particularly excited to see these results because it was known that the instrument was something. "Since the end of the mission, there has been a lot of talk about these INMS results," Bonnie Meinke, a Saturn scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute, who did not participate in any of the new investigations, told Space.com. "At first glance, it's the kind of thing you almost do not believe, and as a scientist, you have to do a little revision of the intestines," Meinke said.

		The instrument had a good track record, since it had collected critical data previously in the mission, while Cassini explored moons as Titan Y Enceladus. "Then we really had to focus on Saturn and let it be the star of that final part of the mission," Rebecca Perryman, the INMS operations leader at the Southwest Research Institute, told Space.com. "We had worked hard to make sure everything was planned initially and we really boasted that INMS could get fantastic results once we started to immerse ourselves in the atmosphere."

He[[In photos: Cassini Mission ends with Epic Dive into Saturn]

		They hoped that those results would be measures of the masses of "rain of rings, "what scientists knew as a trickle of tiny particles that fall from the innermost ring of Saturn into the upper atmosphere of the planet, some hydrogen and mostly helium, nothing great.

		But what they seem to have found it was much more material than they expected, from much more exotic compounds. The instrument detected not only hydrogen and helium, but also carbon monoxide, methane, nitrogen and the non-identifiable remains of organic molecules.

		Other instruments suggested that this downpour also include ice and silicate particles and showed that the a downpour is triggered by the interaction of these particles with the highest levels of Saturn's atmosphere. Around the entire structure of the ring, everything adds up to somewhere around 10 tons (9,000 kilograms) per second.

		"The complexity of what was happening there and the amount of material that was infaling was very surprising," Hunter Waite, the INMS principal investigator and scientist at the Southwest Research Institute, told Space.com. And the discovery not only reveals an intriguing phenomenon about a distant world: scientists say that if the finding holds, it could have much deeper implications in our own solar system and beyond.

		Waite said the unexpected diversity of compounds in the ring rain could affect scientists' estimates for the composition of the atmosphere, which in turn could mean adapting hypotheses about how Saturn and its neighbors formed and evolved. "I could have this facade," said Saturn's Waite. "[That might have] It has been a bit misleading in directing our thinking about training and evolution. "

		In addition, because there is a lot of material, the new results raise an enigma: where does all this come from? "This can not be a continuous process, or the rings would not be there," Meinke said. They would run out of material in perhaps tens of thousands of years, leaving Saturn naked. "The real story that [the paper is] to say is about the loss of Saturn's rings ... the rings can be durable because they move and rotate constantly. "



		The magnetic attraction of a planet.

		Cassini was also equipped to measure Saturn's magnetic field. Although the scientists had studied the magnetic field before, they could only do it briefly during the overflights such as those made by Pioneer Y Traveler, and the Cassini Grand Final took them deeper into that field than ever before.

		And the measurements collected during those tight loops have offered their own surprises. Scientists already knew that Saturn's magnetic field seemed to align very well with the axis on which it spins, which is a difficult feat, since, as far as can be imagined, magnetic fields are created by definition when crossing turns. .

He[[The best hits of Cassini: the best images of Saturn's spacecraft]

		But a new analysis The measurements of the grand finale show that these two phenomena align even more perfectly than scientists expected. That means that scientists have to go back to the drawing board, trying to get a magnetic field response and gravitational data. "We know there's something strange," Michele Dougherty, a physicist at Imperial College London and the paper's lead author, told Space.com.

		She and her colleagues believe that there may be something that blocks scientists' opinions about Saturn's true magnetic heart, creating the illusion of almost perfect alignment and hindering its theories. "We still do not have the answer, but any response we find will really change people's understanding of the inner structure of the planets," said Dougherty.

		Until they resolve what happens, scientists will not be able to measure accurately how long does Saturn take to rotate. "It's a bit embarrassing, we were in orbit for 13 years and we still can not say how long a day is on Saturn," Dougherty said. With no fixed characteristics on a solid surface or a magnetic field to track, they are stagnant with only an estimate of 10.7 hours.

		The search of the heart of the magnetic field was partly confused by another surprise that is hidden in the magnetic data: a new phenomenon produced by that magnetic field that interacts with bands of winds that flow at different speeds in Saturn's upper atmosphere, an electric current that spreads through a layer of atmosphere called the thermosphere.

		This is how it works: Saturn is wrapped in bands of winds, with the equator traveling faster and the north and south moving more slowly. When a magnetic field loop structure is aligned so that one end is in that equatorial band and the other is not, the equatorial wind pulls the plasma-charged particles that surround it, which in turn diverts the magnetic field line .

		The result that Cassini measured is an electrical current as strong as 20 large combined land stations. As a side effect, that current also produces heat in the atmosphere around it, which may help explain a long-standing mystery about Saturn. "One of the enigmas of Saturn's thermosphere is that it is hotter than expected," Krishan Khurana, a magnetosphere scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and lead author of the newspaper, told Space.com. "This provides a part of the answer."

		And while Saturn is the star here, the results can also explain a second mystery of the solar system. "Jupiter's atmosphere is highly turbulent, so the same phenomenon applied to Jupiter's magnetic field would create very large currents and heat the thermosphere very quickly," Khurana said. That includes the Great Red Spot, the giant storm that infamously denies the southern hemisphere of Jupiter, and that scientists have done is very toasted.

He[[Wave on Saturn: Images from NASA's Cosmic Photo Bomb by Cassini Probe]





						


Artistic representation of the Cassini spacecraft in orbit around Saturn near the end of its mission.

            						    Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech 




		The grand finale is not the end

		That's just a sample of the research published today, which in turn is just the beginning of the flood of science that will finally produce the Cassini Grand Final. A paper focused on the region of Saturn's atmosphere that produces auroral radio emissions to try to understand how those radio waves are produced.



	In another role, a team. The researchers identified a radiation belt that has long been predicted, but hitherto unknown, that extends from the planet's upper atmosphere through its innermost ring. That means it is completely different from Saturn's main magnetosphere, trapping charged particles in this stretch of space between the upper atmosphere and the inner ring. Another study This new radiation belt shows that, due to the interference of the bulky rings, this radiation belt is quite weak compared to other similar structures.



	A different instrument on board Cassini measured the density of electrons in Saturn's ionosphere, drawing two separate layers. The lower layer has larger, neutral and charged molecules around the equator, below the rings and their flood of material; The upper layer has a much smaller variety of small and charged particles.

		And that same INMS instrument that helped identify so many strange compounds in the so-called rain of rings as well. allowed scientists to calculate the approximate temperatures of the thermosphere layer of the atmosphere through which Cassini was flying. Those measurements ranged between 150 and 200 degrees Fahrenheit (67 to 97 degrees Celsius).

		Two more articles that were not ready to be published highlight topics such as the small moles embedded in Saturn's rings and the gravity measurements taken from the giant planet. And then, of course, there are many more discoveries to make as scientists continue to investigate and analyze the data from the Grand Final and the rest of Cassini's work, not to mention the observations of any successor spacecraft that inspire the discoveries of the mission.

		"I think it's a really exciting time," said Meinke, the Saturn scientist who is not affiliated with any of the new research. "After 13 years of Cassini data, the latest was really the most exciting, which left us wanting to return and really taught us even more than we thought we were going to learn."



	Email Meghan Bartels in mbartels@space.com or follow it @meghanbartels. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook Y Google+. Original article about Space.com.

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