(PhysOrg.com) -- While orbiting Saturn for the last six years,
NASA's Cassini spacecraft has kept a close eye on the collisions
and disturbances in the gas giant's rings. While orbiting Saturn
for the last six years, NASA's Cassini spacecraft has kept a
close eye on the collisions and disturbances in the gas giant's
rings. They provide the only nearby natural laboratory for
scientists to see the processes that must have occurred in our
early solar system, as planets and moons coalesced out of disks
of debris. New images from Cassini show icy particles in
Saturn's F ring clumping into giant snowballs as the moon
Prometheus makes multiple swings by the ring. The gravitational
pull of the moon sloshes ring material around, creating wake
channels that trigger the formation of objects as large as 20
kilometers (12 miles) in diameter. "Scientists have never seen
objects actually form before," said Carl Murray, a Cassini
imaging team member based at Queen Mary, University of London.
"We now have direct evidence of t