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Journal ArticleDOI

A new look at the saturn system: the voyager 2 images.

TLDR
Within Saturn's rings, the "birth" of a spoke has been observed, and surprising azimuthal and time variability is found in the ringlet structure of the outer B ring, leading to speculations about Saturn's internal structure and about the collisional and thermal history of the rings and satellites.
Abstract
Voyager 2 photography has complemented that of Voyager I in revealing many additional characteristics of Saturn and its satellites and rings. Saturn's atmosphere contains persistent oval cloud features reminiscent of features on Jupiter. Smaller irregular features track out a pattern of zonal winds that is symmetric about Saturn's equator and appears to extend to great depth. Winds are predominantly eastward and reach 500 meters per second at the equator. Titan has several haze layers with significantly varying optical properties and a northern polar "collar" that is dark at short wavelengths. Several satellites have been photographed at substantially improved resolution. Enceladus' surface ranges from old, densely cratered terrain to relatively young, uncratered plains crossed by grooves and faults. Tethys has a crater 400 kilometers in diameter whose floor has domed to match Tethys' surface curvature and a deep trench that extends at least 270° around Tethys' circumference. Hyperion is cratered and irregular in shape. Iapetus' bright, trailing hemisphere includes several dark-floored craters, and Phoebe has a very low albedo and rotates in the direction opposite to that of its orbital revolution with a period of 9 hours. Within Saturn's rings, the "birth" of a spoke has been observed, and surprising azimuthal and time variability is found in the ringlet structure of the outer B ring. These observations lead to speculations about Saturn's internal structure and about the collisional and thermal history of the rings and satellites.

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Journal ArticleDOI

Dusty plasmas in the solar system

TL;DR: The processes that lead to charging of dust grains in a plasma are briefly reviewed in this article, where it is shown that the radial transport of dust contained in the spokes may be responsible for the rich radial structure in Saturn's rings.
Journal ArticleDOI

Voyager 2 at neptune: imaging science results.

TL;DR: New Voyager 2 images of Neptune reveal a windy planet characterized by bright clouds of methane ice suspended in an exceptionally clear atmosphere above a lower deck of hydrogen sulfide or ammonia ices, dominated by a large anticyclonic storm system that has been named the Great Dark Spot.
Journal ArticleDOI

Enceladus' Water Vapor Plume

TL;DR: The Cassini spacecraft flew close to Saturn's small moon Enceladus three times in 2005 and observed stellar occultations on two flybys and confirmed the existence, composition, and regionally confined nature of a water vapor plume in the south polar region of Ence Gladus.
Journal ArticleDOI

Colloquium : Fundamentals of dust-plasma interactions

TL;DR: In this paper, the underlying physics of different forces that act on a charged dust grain is reviewed, including wakefield and ion focusing effects and dipole-dipole interactions between unevenly charged dust rods.
Journal ArticleDOI

Cratering Rates in the Outer Solar System

TL;DR: In this article, the number of ecliptic comets is used to determine impact cratering rates from Jupiter to Pluto, where the size-number distribution of comets smaller than 20 km is inferred from impact craters on Europa, Ganymede, and Triton.
References
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An introduction to dynamic meteorology

TL;DR: The instructor's manual to a work which introduces the fundamental principles of meteorology, explaining storm dynamics and the dynamics of climate and its global implications is described in this paper, where the authors present a detailed discussion of the relationship between meteorology and climate.
Journal ArticleDOI

Infrared observations of the saturnian system from voyager 1.

TL;DR: During the passage of Voyager 1 through the Saturn system, the infrared instrument acquired spectral and radiometric data on Saturn, the rings, and Titan and other satellites, implying a depletion of helium in the atmosphere of Saturn relative to that of Jupiter.
Journal ArticleDOI

Melting of Io by Tidal Dissipation

TL;DR: The dissipation of tidal energy in Jupiter's satellite Io is likely to have melted a major fraction of the mass, and consequences of a largely molten interior may be evident in pictures of Io's surface returned by Voyager I.
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