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NASA, ESA, A. Simon (Goddard Space Flight Center) and Mr. H. Wong (University of California, Berkeley)
- The Hubble Space Telescope captured another amazing image of Saturn's rings.
- The images of Saturn have come a long way since the first close-up of Pioneer 11 on the ringed planet.
- The rings of Saturn are composed mainly of dust and ice.
A new image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope has provided another beautiful view of the fifth planet in our solar system. The image was taken by the broad-field camera 3 of the telescope, according to a press release.
Since Saturn rotates on an axial inclination of 27 degrees, the rings of the planet are currently inclined towards Earth, offering us an excellent view of the rings filled with dust and ice. The last image of Saturn by Hubble was taken during the summer of the northern hemisphere of the ringed planet.
NASA Ames
Galileo discovered Saturn's rings for the first time in 1610, but we can thank the Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens for describing them in detail forty-five years later. A die first images to capture the famous rings of Saturn (and its moon, Titan) was taken in 1973, when Pioneer 11 went down to 1,768,422 miles of the planet.
Voyager 1 took even sharper images of Saturn barely seven years later, swept by the planet. Cassini and her aptly named probe, Huygens, also captured a set of stellar images during her 13-year mission, which ended in 2018.
Scientists have been speculating for years about the possible causes of ring formation, but have not yet reached a conclusion. The age of the rings of Saturn has been hotly debated in recent years and scientists say they will not last forever – perhaps a few hundred million years at most.
Learn more about the planet here:
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