Up close & personal :)

A false-color image mosaic shows Daphnis, one of Saturn's ring-embedded moons, and the waves it kicks up in the Keeler gap. Images collected by Cassini's close orbits in 2017 are offering new insight into the complex workings of the rings.

Up close & personal, Cassini captures the inner workings of Saturn's rings in imagery both astounding and mysterious to a fault. 

To whit.

As NASA's Cassini dove close to Saturn in its final year, the spacecraft provided intricate detail on the workings of Saturn's complex rings, new analysis shows.

Although the mission ended in 2017, science continues to flow from the data collected. A new paper published June 13 in Science describes results from four Cassini instruments taking their closest-ever observations of the main rings.

Findings include fine details of features sculpted by masses embedded within the rings. Textures and patterns, from clumpy to strawlike, pop out of the images, raising questions about the interactions that shaped them. New maps reveal how colors, chemistry and temperature change across the rings.

Like a planet under construction inside a disk of protoplanetary material, tiny moons embedded in Saturn's rings (named A through G, in order of their discovery) interact with the particles around them. In that way, the paper provides further evidence that the rings are a window into the astrophysical disk processes that shape our solar system.

This false-color image to the right shows an infrared spectral map of Saturn's A, B and C rings, captured by Cassini's VIMS. Infrared image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/CNRS/LPG-Nantes Saturn image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute/G. Ugarkovic

A mosaic showing Daphnis in the Keeler gap on the lit side of the rings, with three wave crests of the structure raised by Daphnis in the gap’s outer edge. (Middle and bottom) Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer radial scans across the lit side of the main rings, displayed as false-color images. Reddish colors signify a higher fraction of components other than water ice. The boxed region in the middle panel indicates the location of the bottom panel.

Cassini, the little probe that could. RIP.