Saturn is famous for its beautiful rings, but these rings have a strange feature: “spokes” which appear intermittently. These spots in the rings can be light or dark and can look like blobs or like lines stretching radially outward from the planet, and they appear in a regular cycle related to the planet’s equinox. Now, the Hubble Space Telescope has the opportunity to study these oddities of the rings in more detail and researchers hope they can learn more about what causes these features.
Saturn’s next autumnal equinox is coming up on May 2025, so researchers are using Hubble to observe the planet and its rings at this key time. “Thanks to Hubble’s OPAL program, which is building an archive of data on the outer solar system planets, we will have longer dedicated time to study Saturn’s spokes this season than ever before,” said Amy Simon, head of the Hubble Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy program, in a statement.
“Despite years of excellent observations by the Cassini mission, the precise beginning and duration of the spoke season is still unpredictable, rather like predicting the first storm during hurricane season,” Simon explained.
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