About ESA
The European Space Agency (ESA) is Europe’s gateway to space. Its mission is to shape the development of Europe’s space capability and ensure that investment in space continues to deliver benefits to the citizens of Europe and the world.
Highlights
Latest
Space in Member States
Find out more about space activities in our 23 Member States, and understand how ESA works together with their national agencies, institutions and organisations.
Germany
Austria
Belgium
Denmark
Spain
Estonia
Finland
France
Greece
Hungary
Ireland
Italy
Luxembourg
Norway
The Netherlands
Poland
Portugal
Czechia
Romania
United Kingdom
Slovenia
Sweden
Switzerland
Science & Exploration
Exploring our Solar System and unlocking the secrets of the Universe
Go to topicAstronauts
Latest
Enabling & Support
Making space accessible and developing the technologies for the future
Go to topicLatest
Bright arc looping around the inside edge of the G ring
This movie shows a bright arc of material flashing around the edge of Saturn's G ring, a tenuous ring outside the main ring system.
The arc is the same feature identified in images of the G ring taken in May 2005. Scientists have seen the arc a handful of times over the past year, and it always appears to be a few times brighter than the rest of the ring and very tightly confined to a narrow strip along the inside edge of the G ring.
Imaging team members believe that this feature is long-lived and may be held together by resonant interactions with the moon Mimas of the type that corral similar ring arcs around Neptune.
The movie consists of 15 frames acquired every half hour over a period of seven-and-a-half hours. The version in the lower panel is vertically stretched by a factor of five to make the arc easier to see.
The clear-filter images in this movie sequence were acquired by the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on 25 April 2006, at a distance of 2 million kilometres from Saturn. The image scale on the sky at the distance of Saturn is about 24 kilometres per pixel.
Close-up view of the mysterious F ring
The A ring in ultraviolet
Saturn's ring waves
The ring arc and a site of concentrated ring particles
