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Cassini sent radio signals through Saturn’s rings toward Earth. Changes in those signals reveal structure across the rings.
Explore six archived observations here, compare exact samples, and keep a record of what you notice.
MIT PRIMES 2026
New Methods toward High-Resolution Reconstruction of Saturn’s Rings
Dell Li · Maiya Qiu · Yutong Zhao
Mentored by Dr. Ryan Maguire
What am I looking at?
These are Cassini RSS diffraction-limited ring profiles from NASA’s Planetary Data System. The three measured variables are normal optical depth, normalized signal power, and phase shift.
Wide views are reduced overviews. Narrow windows load the exact converted source records and verify their hashes. Optical depth is not a direct measure of ring mass; a pattern alone does not establish its physical cause. Missing and negative values are preserved.
Project research presents methods and reported results from the team’s working manuscript. The explorer displays archived observations; the method benchmarks are separate synthetic and scalar-model experiments. The full manuscript and scientific solver are not hosted here.
Background: an artistic rendering of Saturn.