What did Cassini see in Saturn's rings?
Channel: YRJ Documentaries
Date: 2021-03-04

Hint: Some very strange things - here's what Cassini saw near Saturn.
In the early hours of the 15th October 1997, Cassini blasted off from Florida aboard a mighty Titan IV rocket, beginning a 7-year long journey through the solar system. As a way to propel Cassini, the spacecraft performed gravitational assisted flybys of Venus, Earth and Jupiter.
These flybys provided the space probe with enough momentum to travel all the way out to the asteroid belt, and on towards Saturn.
En route, Cassini captured a handful of stunning photos as it performed flybys of the moon, Jupiter, and Jupiter’s moons Ganymede and IO. Among these images, the most detailed colours portrait of Jupiter was produced, in which the smallest visible features are just 37 miles across. These images allowed researchers to make major scientific discoveries about
Jupiter’s faint rings, as well as it’s atmospheric circulation and the so called ‘Giant Red Spot’.
In the time Cassini had between its planetary destinations, tests were conducted using radio waves transmitted from the space probe. Radio scientists measured a frequency shift in these radio transmissions, as some of the radio waves passed close to the Sun. These
findings all but confirmed Albert Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, as a massive object such as the Sun would cause space-time to curve. This would consequently cause Cassini’s transmitted beam of radio waves to travel farther, and ultimately shift the frequency.

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