WASHINGTON. March 19. KAZINFORM The seemingly serene orb of Saturn is in fact a gas giant with extraordinary patterns of charged particles and rough and tumble roller derbies for rings, NASA's Cassini spacecraft found since its arrival at Saturn in 2004. The findings will be published Friday in journal Science; Kazinform refers to Xinhua.

"This rambunctious system gives us a new feel for how an early solar system might have behaved," said Linda Spilker, a planetary scientist and the new Cassini project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "This kind of deep, rich data can only be collected by an orbiting spacecraft and we look forward to the next seven years around Saturn bringing even more surprises."

In the paper describing the elegant mess of activity in the rings, lead author Jeff Cuzzi, Cassini's interdisciplinary scientist for rings and dust who is based at NASA Ames Research Center, describes how Cassini has shown us that collisions are routine and chunks of ice leave trails of debris in their wake. Spacecraft data have also revealed how small moons play tug-of-war with ring material and how bits of rubble that would otherwise join together to become moons are ultimately ripped apart by the gravitational pull that Saturn exerts.

During equinox, the period when sunlight hits the rings exactly edge-on, Cassini witnessed rings that are normally flat -- about tens of meters thick -- being flipped up as high as the Rocky Mountains.

The spacecraft has also shown that the rings are composed mostly of water ice, with a mysterious reddish contaminant that could be rust or small organic molecules similar to those found in red vegetables on Earth; Kazinform cites Xinhua.

See www.xinhuanet.com/english2010/ for full version