scispace - formally typeset
Journal ArticleDOI

Encounter with Saturn: Voyager 1 imaging science results

TLDR
As Voyager 1 flew through the Saturn system it returned photographs revealing many new and surprising characteristics of this complicated community of bodies, including small inner satellites that interact gravitationally with one another and with the ring particles in ways not observed elsewhere in the solar system.
Abstract
As Voyager 1 flew through the Saturn system it returned photographs revealing many new and surprising characteristics of this complicated community of bodies. Saturn's atmosphere has numerous, low-contrast, discrete cloud features and a pattern of circulation significantly different from that of Jupiter. Titan is shrouded in a haze layer that varies in thickness and appearance. Among the icy satellites there is considerable variety in density, albedo, and surface morphology and substantial evidence for endogenic surface modification. Trends in density and crater characteristics are quite unlike those of the Galilean satellites. Small inner satellites, three of which were discovered in Voyager images, interact gravitationally with one another and with the ring particles in ways not observed elsewhere in the solar system. Saturn's broad A, B, and C rings contain hundreds of "ringlets," and in the densest portion of the B ring there are numerous nonaxisymmetric features. The narrow F ring has three components which, in at least one instance, are kinked and crisscrossed. Two rings are observed beyond the F ring, and material is seen between the C ring and the planet.

read more

Citations
More filters
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

Optical constants of organic tholins produced in a simulated Titanian atmosphere: From soft x-ray to microwave frequencies

TL;DR: In this paper, the real and imaginary parts of the complex refractive index of thin films of the dark reddish organic solids called tholins, produced by continuous D.C. discharge through a 0.9 N2/0.1 CH4 gas mixture at 0.2 mb, were determined from a combination of transmittance, specular reflectance, interferometric, Brewster angle, and ellipsometric polarization measurements.
References
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI

Scattering by nonspherical particles of size comparable to wavelength - A new semi-empirical theory and its application to tropospheric aerosols

TL;DR: In this paper, a semi-empirical theory is developed for evaluating the interaction of randomly oriented, nonspherical particles with the total intensity component of electromagnetic radiation, which is used when the particle size parameter x (ratio of particle circumference to wavelength) is less than some upper bound x sub zero (about 5).
Journal ArticleDOI

The dynamics and helium distribution in hydrogen-helium fluid planets

TL;DR: In this paper, the simple case of a homogeneous planet without first-order phase transitions is considered, and an investigation is conducted concerning a pure hydrogen planet in which a firstorder phase transition takes place from fluid molecular hydrogen to fluid metallic hydrogen.
Journal ArticleDOI

Radio science investigations of the saturn system with voyager 1: preliminary results.

TL;DR: Radio occultation measurements of Titan's equatorial atmosphere successfully probed to the surface and indicated that molecular nitrogen is the predominant atmospheric constituent, while preliminary analysis of the radio tracking data yields new values for the masses of Rhea and Titan.
Related Papers (5)