Spiral density wave on Saturn’s moon Janus. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)

As the Cassini mission embarks on its final dive this Friday into Saturn, it will continue taking photos all the way down (or as far as it remains operations.)

We’ve grown accustomed to seeing remarkable images for the mission and the planet, but clearly the show is not over, and perhaps far from it.

This is what NASA wrote describing the image above:

This view  shows a wave structure in Saturn’s rings known as the Janus 2:1 spiral density wave. Resulting from the same process that creates spiral galaxies, spiral density waves in Saturn’s rings are much more tightly wound. In this case, every second wave crest is actually the same spiral arm which has encircled the entire planet multiple times.

This is the only major density wave visible in Saturn’s B ring. Most of the B ring is characterized by structures that dominate the areas where density waves might otherwise occur, but this innermost portion of the B ring is different.

For reasons researchers do not entirely understand, damping of waves by larger ring structures is very weak at this location, so this wave is seen ringing for hundreds of bright wave crests, unlike density waves in Saturn’s A ring.

The image gives the illusion that the ring plane is tilted away from the camera toward upper-left, but this is not the case. Because of the mechanics of how this kind of wave propagates, the wavelength decreases with distance from the resonance. Thus, the upper-left of the image is just as close to the camera as the lower-right, while the wavelength of the density wave is simply shorter.

This wave is remarkable because Janus, the moon that generates it, is in a strange orbital configuration. Janus and Epimetheus (see PIA12602) share practically the same orbit and trade places every four years. Every time one of those orbit swaps takes place, the ring at this location responds, spawning a new crest in the wave.

The distance between any pair of crests corresponds to four years’ worth of the wave propagating downstream from the resonance, which means the wave seen here encodes many decades’ worth of the orbital history of Janus and Epimetheus.

According to this interpretation, the part of the wave at the very upper-left of this image corresponds to the positions of Janus and Epimetheus around the time of the Voyager flybys in 1980 and 1981, which is the time at which Janus and Epimetheus were first proven to be two distinct objects (they were first observed in 1966).

Epimetheus also generates waves at this location, but they are swamped by the waves from Janus, since Janus is the larger of the two moons.

 

The clouds covering the planet itself consist of ammonia ice.  Further down is also some water ice, some ammonium hydrosulfide ice, and further still is ammonia in a gas phase. Some cloud layers are more than 1000 miles thick. (NASA/JPL-Caltech.

This image is from a few months ago, but it certainly puts you there above the deep, deep clouds of Saturn.  False color was used to make the patterns more discernible.

Saturn has some remarkable features in its atmosphere. When the Voyager missions traveled to the planet in the early 1980s, it imaged a hexagon-shaped cloud formation near the north pole. Twenty-five years later, infrared images taken by Cassini revealed the storm was still spinning, powered by jet streams that push it to speeds of about 220 mph (100 meters per second). At 15,000 miles  across, the long-lasting storm could easily contain an Earth or two.

Cassini is now on its last full orbit, to be following by its partial finale.  The final 22 orbits leading to the plunge into the clouds looked like this:

Cassini’s final orbits, in blue, have taken the spacecraft closer to the planet than ever before, and into the space between the rings and the top of the cloud layers. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)

 

And here is a Jet Propulsion Lab video recapping the Cassini mission and describing its Friday rendezvous:

 

(NASA/JPL-Caltech)