Cassini - Three Moons

From W00004177 and W00004174

Idub
Thanks for sharing this with us.
In the future please post this type of non Mars topic in the space exploration Forum.
I will move it there later today
FM
Richard

Thats a BEUtifull image.

I always thought that when a moon orbits a planet, it would be around the center of the planet. But if these moons orbited that way, they would crash through the rings.
so much to learn.

Aaahh. Thanks.

What did you just say mann?

Thanks for moving the thread to the right section Richard, my bad.

Hopefully there will be a lot more stereo images from Cassini.

So you can or can't help me with my car insurance?

Um3k, do you see the rings? They orbit the center of the planet. i thought all moons did also.

The moons do orbit the center of the planet.

ok then. thanks.

Then they orbit, through the inside of the ring, or outside. Crossing patterns, must get hairy at times, of course thats why we have the rings.

The rings don't extend for an infinite distance, and they don't extend right from the planet's surface.

Regardless, I'm not sure how something following a path at all orbit-like wouldn't go through the rings at some point or another if it were within the proper range.. Thus, all of Saturn's moons (of any serious size) are either orbiting inside the rings, or outside the rings.

Thanks for picking up on my train of thought Hal.
A moon crossing Through the ring, That might make for a good stereo image.

A big object passing through the rings would make a good image, stereo or not.. but there's no way a 'moon' that passed through the rings would remain a 'moon' for long. I fail to see how an object that crashed through the rings multiple times (much less once) would ever reach any moon-type orbit.

Actually, I suppose if an object were tough enough it could simply swing through the rings a few times until it lost enough momentum to end up orbiting inside the rings..

I think you guys need to brush up on your orbital mechanics or the Saturnian system or something.

How so?

The Saturnian system with rings and moons are very well ordered with all larger and smaller moons outside the rings. Only some few really tiny moons are within the ring system itself.

You really havnt read ANY textbooks on astronomy? Well im happy to tell in any case:
I think some of you guys here are fooled by the geometry of the image, the small moons that appear to be below the ringplane are in fact much closer to Cassini.

Now this is weird. One of the larger moons appears to be inside the f-ring.
FullS08/N00027163.jpg

http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/raw/raw-images-details.cfm?feiImageID=30642

There's no reason why a 'large' (whatever you want to consider large) object couldn't orbit around Saturn inside the ring. It would probably be a rarer event than Saturn capturing an object that then orbited outside the ring, but it still must be possible..

However, if a large object orbited inside the ring, it would create a gap in the ring quite a bit larger than itself.