NASA records eerie sounds from mysterious ‘void’ between Saturn and its rings
A NASA spacecraft has captured a recording of eerie sounds from a strange ‘void’ between Saturn and its rings.
What’s surprised the scientists is how quiet it is – with the spacecraft detecting barely any dust as it travelled through the gap between Saturn and its rings.
Scientists used the craft’s sensors to measure dust in the area – then converted the data of dust particles hitting the sensors into a crackling, whooshing sound.
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‘It was a bit disorienting – we weren’t hearing what we expected to hear,’ said William Kurth, leader of the RPWS team at the University of Iowa, Iowa City.
‘I’ve listened to our data from the first dive several times and I can probably count on my hands the number of dust particle impacts I hear.’
Cassini came within about 1,900 miles of Saturn’s cloud tops (where the air pressure is 1 bar – comparable to the atmospheric pressure of Earth at sea level) and within about 200 miles of the innermost visible edge of the rings.
The gap between the rings and the top of Saturn’s atmosphere is about 1,500 miles wide – and the spaceship zipped through at 77,000mph relative to the planet.
While mission managers were confident Cassini would pass through the gap successfully, they took extra precautions with this first dive, as the region had never been explored.
‘No spacecraft has ever been this close to Saturn before. We could only rely on predictions, based on our experience with Saturn’s other rings, of what we thought this gap between the rings and Saturn would be like,’ said Cassini Project Manager Earl Maize of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
