Beautiful Saturn
the above image was return by nasa's cassini spacecraft, which has been climbing to higher and higher inclinations over the past months in order to see the planet from above. i'm going to quote the below from the cassini website, since it was written so nice and poetically:
"surely one of the most gorgeous sights the solar system has to offer, saturn sits enveloped by the full splendor of its stately rings.
taking in the rings in their entirety was the focus of this particular imaging sequence. therefore, the camera exposure times were just right to capture the dark-side of its rings, but longer than that required to properly expose the globe of sunlit saturn. consequently, the sunlit half of the planet is overexposed.
between the blinding light of day and the dark of night, there is a strip of twilight on the globe where colorful details in the atmosphere can be seen. bright clouds dot the bluish-grey northern polar region here. in the south, the planet's night side glows golden in reflected light from the rings' sunlit face."
more images here, and a movie here. (image credit: nasa)
posted by Zosia A. C. Krusberg at
10:26 PM
5 Comments:
I wonder how thick of rings the Earth would need to stop global warming. It really should work perfectly, you only need to block a few percent of the solar insolation to make a big change in the Earth's temperature and rings can scatter light really well.
Plus, ring building shouldn't be that hard, we just need to put a whole bunch of white relatively low-density stuff in an orbit somewhere between 1.25 and 2.44 Earth radii up and tidal forces will create the rings for us. Even better, it will be pretty for the Martians when they look at us with a telescope.
Of course, this assumes that global warming is a bad thing. It might not hurt to thin out the humans a little bit and supply some evolutionary pressure.
haha. i back your analysis. but it would be quite lovely to get some nice-looking rings around earth. :)
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Isn't that proposal somewhat similar to the idea of putting a giantic mirror in space that everyone was laughing at about a month and a half ago? It didn't seem completely retarded to me...but maybe I'm not the type of person who should be judging such things. I just found it funny to see life imitating futurama.
There have actually been quite a few ideas floating around lately ranging from reflective balloons to white floating rafts. The thing that I find really interesting is just how fine of a balance the planet has. Well, just how fine of a balance is required to keep things just the way they are now. The planet has a lot of leeway to adjust and keep life going. It's really just a question of whether Florida, Bangladesh, and the Netherlands are important or not.
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