Related papers: Overview of Saturn lightning observations

Saturn's ionosphere is produced when the otherwise neutral atmosphere is exposed to a flow of energetic charged particles or solar radiation. At low latitudes the latter should result in a weak planet-wide glow in infrared (IR),…

An extremely bright storm system observed in Uranus' atmosphere by amateur observers in September 2014 triggered an international campaign to observe this feature with many telescopes across the world. Observations of the storm system in…

During the Grand Finale stage of the Cassini mission, organic-rich ring material was discovered to be flowing into Saturn's equatorial upper atmosphere at a surprisingly large rate. Through a series of photochemical models, we have examined…

The first observations of Saturn's visible-wavelength aurora were made by the Cassini camera. The aurora was observed between 2006 and 2013 in the northern and southern hemispheres. The color of the aurora changes from pink at a few hundred…

In its 16 years of scientific measurements, the Spitzer Space Telescope performed a number of ground-breaking infrared measurements of Solar System objects. In this second of two papers, we describe results from Spitzer observations of…

Seismology of the gas giants holds the potential to resolve long-standing questions about their internal structure and rotation state. We construct a family of Saturn interior models constrained by the gravity field and compute their…

We investigate the role of secondary electron and ion emission from impact of gas molecules on the Cassini Langmuir Probe (RPWS-LP, or LP) measurements in the ionosphere of Saturn. We add a model of the emission currents, based on…

Saturn was observed by Chandra ACIS-S on 20 and 26-27 January 2004 for one full Saturn rotation (10.7 hr) at each epoch. We report here the first observation of an X-ray flare from Saturn's non-auroral (low-latitude) disk, which is seen in…

The era of outer planet orbiters (Galileo, Juno and Cassini) is advancing our understanding of how the radiation belts of Jupiter and Saturn are structured, form and evolve well beyond what had been possible during the age of flyby missions…

We have analyzed the highest-quality images to be obtained by Cassini of Saturn's main rings after the Saturn Orbit Insertion (SOI) and before the Ring Grazing Orbits (RGO) and Grand Finale (GF). These images are comparable to those of SOI…

The Composite InfraRed Spectrometer (CIRS) on board Cassini revealed an equatorial oscillation of stratospheric temperature, reminiscent of the Earth's Quasi-Biennial Oscillation (QBO), as well as anomalously high temperatures under…

We report on spectroscopic observations of Saturn's stratosphere in July 2011 with the Texas Echelon Cross Echelle Spectrograph (TEXES) mounted on the NASA InfraRed Telescope Facility (IRTF). The observations, targeting several lines of the…

Over the past few decades, various conjectures were advanced that Saturn's 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…

Saturn's northern summertime hemisphere was mapped by JWST/MIRI (4.9-27.9 $\mu$m) in November 2022, tracing the seasonal evolution of temperatures, aerosols, and chemical species in the five years since the end of the Cassini mission. The…

Remote sensing observations meet some limitations when used to study the bulk atmospheric composition of the giant planets of our solar system. A remarkable example of the superiority of in situ probe measurements is illustrated by the…

Saturn's diffuse E ring consists of many tiny (micron and sub-micron) grains of water ice distributed between the orbits of Mimas and Titan. Various gravitational and non-gravitational forces perturb these particles' orbits, causing the…

We used 0.85 - 5.1 micron 2006 observations by Cassini's Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS) to constrain the unusual vertical structure and compositions of cloud layers in Saturn's south polar region, the site of a powerful…

Saturn's C ring contains multiple structures that appear to be density waves driven by time-variable anomalies in the planet's gravitational field. Semi-empirical extensions of density wave theory enable the observed wave properties to be…

Certain regions of Saturn's rings exhibit periodic opacity variations with characteristic radial wavelengths of up to a few hundred meters that have been attributed to viscous overstabilities. The Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer…

The Cassini mission unveiled the intense and diverse activity in Saturn's atmosphere: banded jets, waves, vortices, equatorial oscillations. To set the path towards a better understanding of those phenomena, we performed high-resolution…