If you enjoy news related to space exploration, then you should be aware of the comings and goings of NASA's Cassini space probe. Launched in October 1997, the equipment's mission was to study Saturn, its famous rings, its many natural satellites and everything that goes on in this planetary system, and reached the gas giant in mid-2004, after traveling around 1.5 billion. of kilometers.

And during those nearly 20 years of journey, Cassini has done its job right, discovering a lot of new things about Saturn and sending it to Earth and clicking breathtaking glimpses of the Lord of the Rings of the Solar System. For recently, the space probe - which is entering the final phase of its mission - has captured incredibly detailed images of the gas giant's rings, and NASA has just released a selection of them.

Unprecedented

According to NASA personnel, the images were captured by Cassini during a series of "dives" the spacecraft is making while orbiting Saturn's main ring system. This mission stage began in November last year, and the equipment has completed about half of the last 20 orbits it must perform before finally launching itself into the Saturnian atmosphere - and dying.

Returning to the images, although some of the features shown are already known to astronomers, the images have a wealth of detail and were captured with unprecedented resolution. According to the space agency, the images show objects only 550 meters long - or the size of some buildings here on Earth - which, on astronomical scales, is extremely small.

Little waves

The figure you can see above, for example, shows details of ring A, the outermost of the ring system, which is about 134, 500 kilometers from Saturn. Did you notice that it looks full of ripples? These formations are known as “density waves”, which are created by the gravity action of the Janus and Epimetheus moons and consist of ice particles that aggregate to form these patterns.

Details of a region of ring B

The figure you just saw shows a region of ring B, also one of the outermost of Saturn, and the image's level of detail is twice as high as any previous recorded image of that same area. The image below shows another region of Ring A - also twice as detailed - and the clearest "spots" you can see consist of cosmic rays and radioactive particles that were captured by Cassini.

Energetic particles and cosmic rays

In fact, Cassini has come closer to Saturn's rings than now, when the spacecraft arrived on the planet in 2004. However, as the ship was traveling too fast and the ring system was backlit against In the sun, the quality of the images captured at the time was not there.

Ring B part

This time, the device recorded the images of the illuminated rings directly and the backlight with longer exposures, and the result is what you saw in the images. Then, on April 26, Cassini will begin its approach to Saturn with a series of 22 orbits - until it plunges into the planet's atmosphere on September 15 and is destroyed like a meteor.

Quick curiosity

Do you know why the spacecraft is destroyed rather than left there wandering around the rings or sent to snoop on one of Saturn's moons? According to Peter Dockrill of the Science Alert portal, scientists believe that a pair of natural gas satellites from the giant gas - Titan and Enceladus - offer environments that could potentially harbor life forms.

Cassini to commit suicide in September

Therefore, astronomers do not want to risk interfering with the moons' environment or "contaminating" the possible alien organisms that might exist there with microbes that eventually caught a Cassini hump here on Earth - despite all the care taken. before the launch of the spacecraft, and as impossible as it may seem that these creatures survived the trip to Saturn.