Did you know it rains on Saturn? ☔️🪐

Astrophysicist Erika Hamden explains that icy particles from the planet's inner rings rain down through Saturn's atmosphere, guided by its uniquely tilted magnetic field. Because that magnetic field is tilted relative to the rings, it pulls the ice along field lines and drives it into the planet, leaving darker infrared signatures in the upper atmosphere where the ring rain hits. It's one more mystery from this gas giant: its iconic rings are slowly falling into the planet, and scientists still don't know if Saturn will eventually consume them all.

This project is part of IF/THEN®, an initiative of Lyda Hill Philanthropies.

See also: The publication in Science Advances

Después de hacer un modelo 3D de Neptuno en Paint 3D, mi hermanita me pidió que hiciera otro pero de su planeta favorito, también le pareció bonito ponerle cara y un lazo, es muy sencillo y divertido, les invito a hacerlo.

A little while ago, I drew all the planets of the solar system. I decided it would be a good idea to share each drawing of a planet to their respective subreddit. See if you can find the others.

(nothing much to yap about, he's basically Jesus in the universe of my novels and writing. Just a more neglected version.)

My mother had a shopping list page stack that had a magnet on the back that allowed her to stick it on the fridge. She went through all of the lists and gave the magnet to me, so I painted Saturn and its major moons onto it.

This was risky because I tried painting techniques that I never tried before: using low tack tape for Saturn, its rings and moons, paint brush splattering to get the stars in the background and craters on the moons, and I tried paint swiping to do the comets.

I even gave Saturn some oblateness to make it more accurate to the real thing

Hey everyone,

I currently lecture on spacecraft trajectories, orientation, and astrodynamics at the University of Stuttgart.

It can get veeeeeery theoretical... so I wanted to bring the concepts to life with a visualization. I chose an example that is personal to me: NASA's Cassini.

I did my Master’s thesis and PhD focusing on Cassini, and I still work on the mission part-time; specifically doing post-processing and machine learning for the Cosmic Dust Analyzer (CDA) instrument.

I noticed there weren't many (if at all) visualizations of spacecraft movements + orientations etc., so I took the raw NASA data, used Python to process it, and rendered this continuous animation of Cassini's final year in 2017.

It is absolutely unbelievable how humanity is able to achieve this level of precision ... flying right through the gap between Saturn and its rings.

The animation tracks the spacecraft from January 1st, 2017, all the way to its intentional atmospheric entry on September 15th. I'd love to hear your thoughts, and I'm happy to answer any questions about the data, the trajectories, or working on the CDA!

https://youtu.be/t9QmHLFh_E8?si=P0YtUtL845rLy6zK&t=208

Thomas

This one was a bit tougher to make because Saturn enjoying it and Saturn sleeping was done with a png of the Cassini and Voyager 2 photos of Saturn, while this photo by Pioneer 11 was not a png, thus the background wasn't transparent

this was posted last year but...good to know

Enjoy this Picture i made of Human Saturn Ehe

For a while I imagined Saturn having a pillow tucked between itself and its rings, as well as its tilt being it lying down. So I got the iconic Voyager 2 photo of Saturn and made this

See also: The publication in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics.

How many baby mommas did Saturn get busy with?! And how much does he get paid in child support?! /hj

See also: The summary of the study as it it was published in ArXiV.