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He discovered Saturn's biggest moon, Titan, and was the first to explain Saturn's strange appearance as due to "a thin, flat ring, nowhere touching, and inclined to the ecliptic." [10] In 1662 Huygens developed what is now called the Huygenian eyepiece, a telescope with two lenses to diminish the amount of dispersion. [11]
Mark Robert Showalter (born December 5, 1957) is a senior research scientist at the SETI Institute. [1] He is the discoverer of six moons and three planetary rings. He is the Principal Investigator of NASA's Planetary Data System Rings Node, a co-investigator on the Cassini–Huygens mission to Saturn, and works closely with the New Horizons mission to Pluto.
A failed photopolarimeter prevented Voyager 1 from observing Saturn's rings at the planned resolution; nevertheless, images from the spacecraft provided unprecedented detail of the ring system and revealed the existence of the G ring. [28] Voyager 2 ' s closest approach occurred in August 1981 at a distance of 41,000 km (25,000 mi). [27]
Christiaan Huygens followed on from Galileo's discoveries by discovering Saturn's moon Titan and the shape of the rings of Saturn. [14] Giovanni Domenico Cassini later discovered four more moons of Saturn and the Cassini division in Saturn's rings. [15] The Sun photographed through a telescope with special solar filter.
Fainter planetary rings can form as a result of meteoroid impacts with moons orbiting around the planet or, in the case of Saturn's E-ring, the ejecta of cryovolcanic material. [6] [7] Ring systems may form around centaurs when they are tidally disrupted in a close encounter (within 0.4 to 0.8 times the Roche limit) with a giant
Cassini–Huygens (/ k ə ˈ s iː n i ˈ h ɔɪ ɡ ən z / kə-SEE-nee HOY-gənz), commonly called Cassini, was a space-research mission by NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), and the Italian Space Agency (ASI) to send a space probe to study the planet Saturn and its system, including its rings and natural satellites.
Saturn’s rings are seen as viewed by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, which obtained the images that comprise this mosaic at a distance of approximately 450,000 miles from Saturn April 25, 2007.
View of Saturn from Cassini, taken in March 2004, shortly before the spacecraft's orbital insertion in July 2004. This article provides a timeline of the Cassini–Huygens mission (commonly called Cassini). Cassini was a collaboration between the United States' NASA, the European Space Agency ("ESA"), and the Italian Space Agency ("ASI") to send a probe to study the Saturnian system, including ...