# Tag Info

13

For a Hohmann transfer to Saturn, I get 15.7 km/s for both burns. The transfer time is also a simple formula. I obtain roughly 6 years. Compare to the lunar ice. It is roughly 2.8 km/s to get to, and the trip time would be a few days, even from Low Earth Orbit. As suggested by the other answer, you could compare to Earth's surface. If we're using some ...

6

It has been photographed before. See this image, from NASA/ Galileo. The difference with the Juno image is it was taken from inside of the orbit of the ring, while the Galileo was taken from further away from Jupiter than the ring. In fact, it was Voyager 1 that first detected the ring system when it did a flyby of Jupiter. And it has been photographed by ...

6

No, you can't fly through the rings you can see without hitting lots and lots of dust-sized ice particles at high velocity. Your vehicle will not fare well. The ring material is not sparse in that sense. There is a wide distribution of particle sizes from boulders to dust. There's a lot more dust-sized, so that's what you need to worry about. (I wouldn'...

6

I'm going to interpret "surface" to mean Saturn's upper atmosphere. It was recently discovered that ring particles are raining down on Saturn. It’s raining on Saturn. Each second, the planet’s rings shed perhaps thousands of pounds of water ice, organic molecules, and other tiny particles into the gas giant’s clouds. This is caused by particles ...

5

In terms of what is up there number looks like a couple of thousand tonnes. Taking the figure of 7500tonnes, working from radius of LEO at 6770 km gives a ring length of 42537 km. That would give enough mass for 176kgs per km or 176g per meter which is a reasonably sized rod depending on how much metal and how much fiberglass etc makes up the overall mass. ...

4

There are two factors at work here: The rings of Saturn are made of much more reflective material (water ice) than those of Jupiter, Uranus or Neptune. They simply have much more matter in them. This wikipedia article and this one suggest a mass for Saturn's rings ($1-3\times 10^{19}$kg) which is at least 1000 times greater than that of Jupiter's rings (10^... 4 This image shows that the rear side of Saturn rings is dark. These images show the variation of the rings' brightness: the closer Saturn is to Earth, the brighter its rings appear. The rings of Saturn consist of 99% of water and the remainder are various impurities. The water is in the form of water ice. Since ice is a crystalline structure, it reflects and ... 4 The rings became flat over time as the trillions of particles in them collided over and over, slowly causing their vectors (direction of motion) to average out until they were all aligned in the same direction. See this short video from Minute Physics. A flat disk rotating in one direction is the only arrangement of these particles that is stable. The ... 4 This is a simulation program set up to run outside all sensible and appropriate bounds - to go at that speed the iterations just don't work. The mathematics is not realistic here. So what you are seeing is some fun graphics, no more no less. 3 Would the orbital motion of the ISS allow the line to trail behind it? Ignoring the "line" part and just thinking about the end of it, you have an object that is drifting backward with respect to the station. This means it's orbiting more slowly and must therefore be in a higher orbit. So you have to get the end of the line into this (slightly) different ... 2 Here are some effective ring parameters. To simplify I'm just using the monopole term GM and not including the "extra gravity" near the planet from the oblateness which is okay since I'm rounding. (see this answer to Equation for orbital period around oblate bodies, based on J2?) ring a T ω a_z/1km Δv/day ... 2 According to Wikipedia, Saturn's rings are 99.9% water ice. It also takes a lot of\Delta V\$ to reach. From Low Earth Orbit (LEO), trans Saturn insertion is more than 7 km/s. Earth to Saturn Hohmann trip time is around 6 years. Another problem is lack of solar energy. at ~9.6 A.U. from the Sun, the sunlight in that neighborhood is about 1/90 as strong as ...

2

I can't see how Saturn would ever beat Ceres as a source of water for inner solar system applications. You need a railgun or something to get things off Ceres and some way of cutting chunks of ice out of the ground, but the escape velocity is pretty low. Then you can use a low thrust tug in vacuum to put lumps of ice (no need to put a ship round them) on a ...

2

It occurs to me that the answer to this question depends on what you want to get for your money. If you are only interested in the ice itself, in a source of water for use on Earth on in LEO, then other options are preferable. However, if you wish to get greater returns on your investment in the form of ancillary benefits which themselves have value, both ...

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