Cassini Spacecraft Crosses Saturn's Ring Plane

Cassini Spacecraft Crosses Saturn's Ring Plane

Credit: Cassini Imaging Team, ISS, JPL, ESA, NASA

 If this is Saturn, where are the rings? When Saturn's "appendages" disappeared in 1612, Galileo did not understand why. Later that century, it became understood that Saturn's unusual protrusions were rings and that when the Earth crosses the ring plane, the edge-on rings will appear to disappear. This is because Saturn's rings are confined to a plane many times thinner, in proportion, than a razor blade. In modern times, the robot Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn now also crosses Saturn's ring plane. A series of plane crossing images from 2005 February was dug out of the vast online Cassini raw image archive by interested Spanish amateur Fernando Garcia Navarro..

.Read more explanation: http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap100215.html