In a celestial feat any magician would appreciate, Saturn will make its wide but thin ring system disappear from view today.
Same pheanomena occurred in 1995.
Saturn's rings, loaded with ice and mud, boulders and tiny moons, are 170,000 miles wide.
The rings shine because they reflect sunlight but every 15 years, the rings turn edge-on to the sun and reflect almost no sunlight.
Deputy project scientist for the Cassini Saturn mission at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Linda Spilker, said the rings simply vanish.
"The light reflecting off this extremely narrow band is so small," she said.
"We are not sure what we will find."
The rings remain a bit of a mystery.
Scientists are not sure when or how they formed, though likely a collision of other objects was involved.
Saturn's equator is tilted relative to its orbit around the sun by 27 degrees, similar to the 23-degree tilt of the Earth.
As Saturn circles the sun, first one hemisphere and then the other is tilted sunward.
This causes seasons on Saturn, just as Earth's tilt causes seasons on our planet.
While Earth goes around the sun once every 365 days or so, Saturn's annual orbit takes 29.7 years.
Source
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More on Ring plane crossing
Same pheanomena occurred in 1995.
Saturn's rings, loaded with ice and mud, boulders and tiny moons, are 170,000 miles wide.
The rings shine because they reflect sunlight but every 15 years, the rings turn edge-on to the sun and reflect almost no sunlight.
Deputy project scientist for the Cassini Saturn mission at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Linda Spilker, said the rings simply vanish.
"The light reflecting off this extremely narrow band is so small," she said.
"We are not sure what we will find."
The rings remain a bit of a mystery.
Scientists are not sure when or how they formed, though likely a collision of other objects was involved.
Saturn's equator is tilted relative to its orbit around the sun by 27 degrees, similar to the 23-degree tilt of the Earth.
As Saturn circles the sun, first one hemisphere and then the other is tilted sunward.
This causes seasons on Saturn, just as Earth's tilt causes seasons on our planet.
While Earth goes around the sun once every 365 days or so, Saturn's annual orbit takes 29.7 years.
Source
Read more on background
More on Ring plane crossing
