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NASA's Cassini spacecraft captures 'Earhart' propeller in Saturn's A ring

The US space agency NASA has released a beautiful image of 'Earhart' propeller in Saturn's A ring.

NASA's Cassini spacecraft captures 'Earhart' propeller in Saturn's A ring Photo Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute

New Delhi: The US space agency NASA has released a beautiful image of 'Earhart' propeller in Saturn's A ring.

The image was captured by NASA's Cassini spacecraft on March 22, 2017, at a distance of 69,183 miles (111,340 kilometers) from the propeller feature.

According to NASA, propellers are disturbances in the ring caused by a central moonlet. The moonlet itself would be a few pixels wide in this view, but it is difficult to distinguish from (and may be obscured by) the disturbed ring material that surrounds it.

Earhart is situated very close to the 200-mile-wide (320-kilometer-wide) Encke Gap, which is held open by the much larger moon Pan, as reported.

NASA said the detailed structure of the Earhart propeller differs from that of Santos-Dumont. And it is not clear whether these differences have to do with intrinsic differences between Earhart and Santos-Dumont, or whether they have to do with different viewing angles or differences in where the propellers were imaged in their orbits around Saturn.

The Cassini mission is a cooperative project of NASA, ESA (the European Space Agency) and the Italian Space Agency.