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تسجيل مستخدم جديدSaturns Rings are Fractal
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Over the past few decades, various conjectures were advanced that Saturns rings are Cantor-like sets, although no convincing fractal analysis of actual images has ever appeared. We focus on the images sent by the Cassini spacecraft mission: slide #42 Mapping Clumps in Saturns Rings and slide #54 Scattered Sunshine. Using the box-counting method, we determine the fractal dimension of rings seen here (and in several other images from the same source) to be consistently about 1.6~1.7. This supports many conjectures put forth over several decades that Saturns rings are indeed fractal.
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In the last few years Cassini-VIMS, the Visible and Infared Mapping Spectrometer, returned to us a comprehensive view of the Saturns icy satellites and rings. After having analyzed the satellites spectral properties (Filacchione et al. (2007a)) and t
heir distribution across the satellites hemispheres (Filacchione et al. (2010)), we proceed in this paper to investigate the radial variability of icy satellites (principal and minor) and main rings average spectral properties. This analysis is done by using 2,264 disk-integrated observations of the satellites and a 12x700 pixels-wide rings radial mosaic acquired with a spatial resolution of about 125 km/pixel. The comparative analysis of these data allows us to retrieve the amount of both water ice and red contaminant materials distributed across Saturns system and the typical surface regolith grain sizes. These measurements highlight very striking differences in the population here analyzed, which vary from the almost uncontaminated and water ice-rich surfaces of Enceladus and Calypso to the metal/organic-rich and red surfaces of Iapetus leading hemisphere and Phoebe. Rings spectra appear more red than the icy satellites in the visible range but show more intense 1.5-2.0 micron band depths. The correlations among spectral slopes, band depths, visual albedo and phase permit us to cluster the saturnian population in different spectral classes which are detected not only among the principal satellites and rings but among co-orbital minor moons as well. Finally, we have applied Hapkes theory to retrieve the best spectral fits to Saturns inner regular satellites using the same methodology applied previously for Rhea data discussed in Ciarniello et al. (2011).
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