The Cassini spacecraft, which is overseen by the NASA space agency in orbit around Saturn, continues its mission. According to a report on the official website of the agency, several previously unobserved small objects were discovered in the F-ring of the gas giant.
The image below shows two space objects that Cassini first captured in the spring of 2016. The researchers designated the objects as F16QA (right image) and F16QB (left image). As it turned out, these objects, colliding with the dust of the F-ring, generate spectacular wavy structures.
Despite the fact that these objects may be loose agglomerates of tiny particles of the ring, NASA scientists suspect that solid structures are hidden inside each of them, since they may have already experienced several collisions with the ring since their discovery. The faint halo of dust around them is most likely the result of the most recent collision that happened before these images were taken.
The photo on the left was taken by the Cassini spacecraft on February 5, 2017, from a distance of 982,000 kilometers. The photo on the right was taken at a distance of 894,000 km. The scale of the images is approximately 6 kilometers per pixel.
Sources: NASA
