Written by Derek Kessler on
Monday, 17 December 2007
Data gathered by the Voyager probes in the 1970s seemed to indicate that Saturn's rings were about 100 million years old and born from the debris of a destroyed meteor or small moon. Newer observations contest that assumption and point to the rings being as old as the solar system itself and having formed at athe same time as Saturn.
The currently orbiting Cassini probe has been studying Saturn, its moons, and its rings for the past three years has gathered data that suggests that the rings may date back as far as 4.5 billion years. Observations also indicate that the material in the rings is constantly breaking up and regrouping, which to the Voyager fly-by missions would have been hard to observe (and thus resulted in a lower age estimate).
Saturn's rings were first observed by Galileo Galilei in 1610 and have been the subject of scrutiny by astronomers ever since. It wasn't until 1655 that Christiaan Huygens discovered that the irregularities Galileo observered were in a large ring, and twenty years later Giovanni Domenico Cassini determined that it was actually several concentric rings. The main orbiting probe was named after Cassini, and a probe dropped into the thick atmosphere of the moon Titan was named after Huygens.
The Cassini mission is funded by NASA, ESA, and the Italian space agency. It was launched in 1997 and reached Saturn in 2004.
Data gathered by the Voyager probes in the 1970s seemed to indicate that Saturn's rings were about 100 million years old and born from the debris of a destroyed meteor or small moon. Newer observations contest that assumption and point to the rings being as old as the solar system itself and having formed at athe same time as Saturn.
