Episode 163: The Ring Worlds of Saturn, with Bonnie Buratti

The Star Spot

Feature Guest: Bonnie Buratti

The spacecraft Cassini went out in spectacular fashion, travelling through Saturn’s rings for a final death dive into the gas giant. Even in its final heroic moments, Cassini was relaying back data shedding light on the bizarre worlds known as the ring moons of Saturn. The origin of these small bodies, which manage to maintain orbits within the turbulent environment of Saturn’s rings, pose a a puzzle for scientists. Today we’re joined here at The Star Spot by Bonnie Buratti of JPL with updates from her recently published study into this young and dynamic system of oddball worlds.

Current in Space

Dave presents a hole of a breakthrough: The much-anticipated Event Horizon Telescope has at last come online, and has already given us the stunning first-ever image of a black hole. Then Amelia and Samantha explore newly proposed possibilities concerning the habitable zone, the region around a star in which planets could support liquid water on their surfaces. And lastly Tony and Simon offer a back to back analysis of how we might save ourselves from a killer asteroid. Spoiler alert! The movies have it wrong, but we’re not entirely without hope.

About Our Guest

Bonnie Buratti is a planetary astronomer in the Division of Earth and Space Sciences at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where she leads the Comets, Asteroids, and Satellites Group. She has worked on the Voyager program, the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft, the New Horizons space probe and the Rosetta mission. She was awarded the NASA exceptional achievement medal for her contributions to the Cassini mission. In 2014 she was elected Chair of the Division of Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society. She is a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union.