Sentences with phrase «innermost rings»

This mysterious event suddenly warped the planet's innermost rings into a ridged spiral pattern, like the grooves on a vinyl record.

At 2:00 a.m. EDT on April 26, the spacecraft became the first ever to dive between Saturn and its spectacular innermost ring.

The researchers think this material is especially raining from Saturn's D ring, the thin innermost ring.

NASA's Cassini spacecraft captured this movie, made of 21 individual images, when it dove between Saturn and the planet's innermost rings on Aug. 20, 2017.

Cassini will see Saturn's innermost rings more closely than ever before.

Cassini will probe the water - rich plume of the active geysers on the planet's intriguing moon Enceladus, and then will hop the rings and dive between the plan - et and innermost ring 22 times.

With each pass, the moon's gravity tweaked the spacecraft's trajectory to send it whizzing between Saturn's innermost ring and the top of the planet's atmosphere — a region never explored before.

The central tower's subsequent collapse piled up into the innermost ring.

The lighter, innermost ring may have been consumed by the sun, leaving behind the ring of metallic material, which had more time to cool into larger bodies that resisted the slowing effect of the gas and dust.

The innermost ring was the only one intense enough to create plasma, and as the laser beam traveled through a cloud of lithium gas, this ring formed a plasma tube about 3 inches long and two - hundredths of an inch wide.

For example, a subtle but extensive corrugation that ripples 12,000 miles (19,000 kilometers) across the innermost rings tells of a very large meteoroid impact in 1983.

In 2017 the Cassini probe will plunge between the planet and its innermost ring, which should reveal much about the rings» age and composition.

In the months before its death dive, Cassini looped between Saturn and its innermost ring.

Read more about Cassini's spectacular, new science mission as it plunges - for the first time ever - between Saturn's cloud tops and its innermost ring.

The innermost ring represents the mtDNA sequence and each color coding corresponds to a different functional region.

The probe snapped the photo on April 26, the same day it began its «Grand Finale» phase of daring dives between Saturn's cloud tops and the planet's innermost rings.

Cassini Saturn Probe Survives 1st «Grand Finale» Dive: NASA's Cassini spacecraft has survived its first plunge between Saturn's cloud tops and the giant planet's innermost rings, a region that no probe had ever explored before.

In addition, the data show that the temperature of the innermost ring imaged by the vortex is around 100 Kelvin (or minus 173 Celsius degrees), a bit warmer than our asteroid belt.

NASA Saturn Probe Will End Mission in Epic «Grand Finale»: Starting in late 2016, Cassini will zip between Saturn and its innermost ring a total of 22 times in a mission phase now known as the «Cassini Grand Finale,» which will end when the probe intentionally dives into Saturn's atmosphere in September 2017.

Since April, Cassini has been making a series of loops between Saturn and the planet's innermost rings, «dipping its toe» into Saturn's atmosphere, according to mission scientists.

We've written a lot about Cassini's Grand Finale — the last phase of its mission, which consists of 22 dives Cassini is making between Saturn's cloud tops and its innermost rings — and the spacecraft's impending death.

The vortex suppressed the star in the center, revealing light from the innermost ring of planetary material around the star (blue).

This will allow Cassini to make the first of 22 dives between Saturn and its innermost ring, the New York Times said, making it the first human spacecraft to ever pull off such a feat.

Having completed 22 daring dives through the approximately 1,200 - mile (1,931 - kilometer) gap between the planet and its innermost ring, Cassini's Grand Finale was able to do groundbreaking science in a region of space no spacecraft has ever been before.

This illustration shows NASA's Cassini spacecraft about to make one of its dives between Saturn and its innermost rings as part of the mission's Grand Finale.

This looping «Grand Finale» would let Cassini sail between Saturn's cloud tops and its innermost rings — unknown territory considered too risky to explore earlier in the mission.

On April 20 (Friday), Cassini will make its final flyby of Titan, Saturn's largest moon, using its gravity to fling itself through Saturn's ring plane (on April 26) between the innermost ring and the planet's cloudy upper atmosphere, revealing a view that we've never before seen.

Placing these new actions presents a fantastic decision because the innermost ring contains just two slots that alternate between turns, but a bigger ring provides more space yet fewer opportunities for that disc to come around.