G Whiz! Craft identifies source of faint Saturnian ring
By Ron Cowen
Among Saturn’s shimmering ice belts, the planet’s G ring has proved the most puzzling. The very location of this faint, narrow ring, well beyond the planet’s main ring system, has been a riddle ever since the two Voyager spacecraft spied it in 1980. The G ring lies more than 15,000 kilometers from any Saturnian moon. It’s neither flanked by bodies that might corral its particles, as the moons Pandora and Prometheus do for the F ring, nor close to an object that could shed particles to populate the ring, as Enceladus does for the E ring.
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Now, in one fell swoop, the Saturn-touring Cassini spacecraft has discovered the source of the G ring and identified the body whose gravity holds the source material together.