« The evolution of a comet... | Main | LOTR show »

Cassini "images" Saturn's magnetic field

Using the Magnetospheric Imaging Instrument NASA's Cassini spacecraft scientists have been able to produce the best observations of the magnetic field of Saturn. From these observations you are able to clearly see the plasma and radiation belts (the bit us radio astronomers are interested in). Like in the case of Jupiter it is one of the planet's moons that produce a main source of the plasma in the ring current (in the case of Jupiter this is Io) - for Saturn this comes from the gas vented by geysers on the moon Enceladus.

saturns plasma

This is an artist's concept of the Saturnian plasma it shows Saturn's embedded "ring current," an invisible ring of energetic ions trapped in the planet's magnetic field. Credit: NASA/JPL/JHUAPL

TrackBack

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://krioma.net/cgi-bin/MT-3.38/mt-tb.cgi/248

Post a comment

(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)

About

This page contains a single entry from the blog posted on December 21, 2007 6:35 PM.

The previous post in this blog was The evolution of a comet....

The next post in this blog is LOTR show.

Many more can be found on the main index page or by looking through the archives.

Get Firefox! Valid XHTML 1.0! Valid CSS! RSS Feed BlogUniverse - listed Powered by Apache Creative Commons License ringsofsaturnrock's Most Interesting Photos on Flickriver

Powered by
Movable Type 3.38