strong reading – Several planets in the solar system have rings, one of them is Saturn with a very magnificent and bright ring.
In familiar images, Saturn’s rings appear solid, flat, and almost as wide as the distance between the Earth and the Moon.
So why didn’t spacecraft land on Saturn’s rings to study Saturn and its moons?
1. Is it possible to land on the rings of Saturn?
Reported from NASA, Saturn’s rings look strong, but in fact this ring is a collection of debris that, under the influence of gravity, “forces” to form a dense ring.
Saturn’s rings are made up of billions of tiny pieces of rock and ice. Astronomers believe these lumps of dust were once larger comets or meteoroids that were crushed by Saturn’s massive gravity before hitting the planet.
Most of the rocks and chunks of ice in Saturn’s rings are the size of a grain of dust, but some are almost the size of a house.
Saturn and several of its moons hold all of this debris in a powerful gravitational grip. Moons of Saturn such as Pan, Atlas and Pandora are called shepherd moons because they are the ones that collect particles into Saturn’s rings.
According to Dr. Mark Rayman, one of the NASA scientists, we could be bold and ask the spacecraft to try to land on a large chunk inside Saturn’s rings. However, if other pieces scatter around, it will be extremely dangerous.
So Doctor. Rayman said it was best not to try to land on Saturn’s rings and continue to study them from a safe distance. The reason is that scientists can learn a lot by studying rings from a distance.
Saturn’s rings are very bright
Saturn’s ring system is the only one large enough to be seen through the eyepiece of an ordinary amateur telescope.
launch BBC Sky at Night MagazineSaturn’s rings are striking in that they are made up of countless highly reflective particles, while the other components of the ring system are narrower and less reflective.
In addition, Uranus and Neptune are so far from Earth that their narrow rings are only a few arc seconds away in the night sky.