File:Saturn ring spokes animation.gif

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Original file (827 × 827 pixels, file size: 10.6 MB, MIME type: image/gif, looped, 70 frames, 11 s)

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Description

Dark spokes dance around Saturn's B ring in this series of movies comprised of images taken with Cassini's wide-angle camera.

This animation is a concatenation of spoke movies acquired by NASA's Cassini spacecraft in the second half of 2008 on Aug. 21, Sept. 19, Sept. 26, Oct. 11, and Nov. 25.

As Saturn nears equinox in August 2009 and the sun angle on the ring plane decreases, spokes become common sights in Cassini images, just as they were in Voyager images (See PIA02275). The planet's orbital period is 29.5 years, so Saturn has nearly made one complete trip around the sun since the flybys of the two Voyager spacecraft in 1980 and 1981, allowing Cassini to closely match Voyager's viewing geometry.

Each of these five movies shows the sunlit side of the rings at low solar phase, or spacecraft-rings-sun, angles. The spokes appear dark against Saturn's B ring at low phase angles because the particles within them scatter light more efficiently in the forward direction (away from Cassini) than the surrounding larger ring particles. In the opposite viewing geometry, at high phase angles, spokes appear bright relative to surrounding ring particles (See PIA07807).

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.

The original NASA QuickTime movie was manipulated by exporting frames to TIFF images. Selected frames were then converted into a GIF animation.

NOTE: this animation does not seem to work in Firefox or Camino; however, the Theora OGG versions and the half-size GIF version linked below should work for these browsers.
Date Sept. 26, 2008 and Nov. 25, 2008
Source http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA11144
Author NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
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Public domain This file is in the public domain in the United States because it was solely created by NASA. NASA copyright policy states that "NASA material is not protected by copyright unless noted". (See Template:PD-USGov, NASA copyright policy page or JPL Image Use Policy.)
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Date/TimeThumbnailDimensionsUserComment
current18:49, 7 August 2013Thumbnail for version as of 18:49, 7 August 2013827 × 827 (10.6 MB)McZusatz (talk | contribs)re-export with GIMP (uploaded using chunked upload script)
07:21, 5 January 2009Thumbnail for version as of 07:21, 5 January 2009827 × 827 (11.07 MB)WolfmanSF (talk | contribs){{Information |Description=Dark spokes dance around Saturn's B ring in this series of movies comprised of images taken with Cassini's wide-angle camera. This animation is a concatenation of spoke movies acquired by NASA's Cassini spacecraft in the second

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