The 4-mile (6.4-kilometer) ride aboard one of the Apollo-era giant NASA crawlers from the assembly building to the launchpad took almost 11 hours. "Science is never cut and dried-you never have your final answer," Buratti said.The NASA Artemis I stack, including the SLS rocket (right) topped with the Orion spacecraft, leaves the Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center in Florida on March 17. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Instituteīut other models and methods suggest a different answer. (The Daphnis image in Figure 1 was colored using the same green filter image for all three color channels, adjusted to have a realistic appearance next to the other two moons.) A version of the montage using only monochrome images is also provided (Figure 2). Images of Atlas and Pan taken using infrared, green and ultraviolet spectral filters were combined to create enhanced-color views (Figure 1), which highlight subtle color differences across the moons' surfaces at wavelengths not visible to human eyes. Pan's equatorial band is much thinner and more sharply defined, and the central mass of Atlas (the part underneath the smooth equatorial band) appears to be smaller than that of Pan. Two differences between Atlas and Pan are obvious in this montage. This montage of views from NASA's Cassini spacecraft shows three of Saturn's small ring moons: Atlas, Daphnis and Pan at the same scale for ease of comparison. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Instituteįigure 2. The question gnawing at astronomers is to figure out how old the rings are.Ī study published in January, based on Cassini data, concluded that they were relatively young-somewhere between 100 million and one billion years old.įigure 1. "It's all in flux, science driven by disagreements," she said. The rings and moons depicted are not to scale. This graphic shows the ring moons inspected by NASA's Cassini spacecraft in super-close flybys. The study published on Thursday is only one preview of the discoveries yet to come. The data captured by Cassini's instruments are still being assessed. "I want to work for at least another decade on this stuff," Bonnie Buratti, a planetary astronomer at the US space agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, told AFP. Some 4,000 scientific articles have been published about Cassini's findings, and the well of knowledge is nowhere near dry. In its final year of operation, it inserted itself between the rings, sending data back to Earth until it went dark on September 13, 2017, 20 years after its launch. They are wedged in the gaps separating the planet's rings. They are either round, shaped like flying saucers or resemble potatoes. Pan, Daphnis, Atlas, Pandora and Epimetheus each measure between eight and 116 kilometers (five to 72 miles) in diameter. On Thursday, for the first time, astronomers and scientists are detailing their findings about the moons in the US journal Science.
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