In a project funded by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) researchers, Neil McBride, Simon Green and John Zarnecki will use data collected by the Cassini spacecraft to analyze the dusty rings of Saturn.
Cassini is one of the largest ever spacecraft to be launched on a mission to another planet. This NASA spacecraft reached Saturn in July 2004, carrying with it another smaller spacecraft: the European Space Agency Huygens probe. Huygens separated with Cassini on Christmas day 2004, and on January 14th 2005, descended to the surface of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan. While the Huygens landing was a wonderful success, Cassini’s work was far from over. Cassini will spend the next few years exploring Saturn and its many moons, and of course, Saturn’s famous rings. Indeed the rings are Saturn’s most recognisable feature, easily visible with a small telescope, and yet they are incredibly thin and are not solid bands of material, we see the rings because they are made of tiny highly reflective icy particles. On board Cassini is an instrument called the Cosmic Dust Analyser (CDA), the focus of this project. When the ring particles impact the CDA, we can determine information about the composition of the particles. The rings are highly structured, and CDA will tell us about the nature and composition of particles from many different regions. For example, tiny particles in the outer ‘dusty rings’ appear to come from water-rich cryogenic geysers on the satellite Enceladus.
