Want to stay on top of all the space news? Follow @universetoday
on Twitter A University of Colorado at Boulder-built instrument
riding on the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft is being used to
distinguish objects in Saturn’s rings smaller than a football
field, making them twice as sharp as any previous ring
observations. Joshua Colwell of CU-Boulder’s Laboratory for
Atmospheric and Space Physics said the observations were made
with the Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrograph, or UVIS, when Cassini
was about 4.2 million miles, or 6.75 million kilometers, from
Saturn in July. Saturn orbits the Sun roughly 1 billion miles
from Earth. Colwell and his colleagues used a technique known as
stellar occultation to image the ring particles, pointing the
instrument through the rings toward a star, Xi Ceti. The
fluctuations of starlight passing through the rings provide
information on the structure and dynamics of the particles
within them, said Colwell, a UVIS science team member. He
likened the Saturn system to a mammoth phonograp