Friday, December 26, 2014
The Tallest Peaks
Images like this never cease to amaze. In this case, it's a closeup of Saturn's B ring with ridges approximately 2 1/2 kilometers high.
Vertical structures, among the tallest seen in Saturn's main rings, rise abruptly from the edge of Saturn's B ring to cast long shadows on the ring in this image taken by NASA's Cassini spacecraft two weeks before the planet's August 2009 equinox.
Part of the Cassini Division, between the B and the A rings, appears at the top of the image, showing ringlets in the inner division.
In this image, Cassini's narrow angle camera captured a 1,200-kilometer-long (750-mile-long) section arcing along the outer edge of the B ring. Here, vertical structures tower as high as 2.5 kilometers (1.6 miles) above the plane of the rings -- a significant deviation from the vertical thickness of the main A, B and C rings, which is generally only about 10 meters (about 30 feet).
Seen below is
Mike Carroll's
amazing graphic of what it would look like flying over the B ring head on. :)
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