NASA’s Cassini reveals the full glory of Saturn’s rings
They’re even more spectacular in the close-up detail it delivers.
Published in
3 min readApr 18, 2016
“This then, I thought, as I looked round about me, is the representation of history. It requires a falsification of perspective. We, the survivors, see everything from above, see everything at once, and still we do not know how it was.” -W.G. Sebald
Saturn is remarkable in a number of ways; among all the planets we know of, it’s the least dense, and also the only one with a spectacularly visible set of rings.
Composed of icy, dust-like material, these rings aren’t solid, but made up of particles that pass each other, sticking together briefly and torn apart by tidal forces.
Snowballs and planetesimals coalesce, only to be torn apart by tidal forces exerted by Saturn and its passing moons.
