02/12/2026
By Lynne Schaufenbil

Please join the Lowell Center for Space Science and Technology on Thursday, Feb. 26 at 11 a.m. for a talk by Ryan Maguire.

Launched in 1997, the Cassini spacecraft orbited the ringed planet Saturn for 13 years, arriving in 2004 and finishing its Grand Finale in September 2017. During this period dozens of occultation events occurred where the rings of Saturn blocked the line of sight from the spacecraft to Earth. When these events took place, radio signals in the X, S, and Ka bands passed from Cassini through the rings and were diffracted on their way to the DSN stations on Earth, producing "diffraction-limiting profiles" (DLPs). Using new inversion methods and improved numerical integration, we are now able to remove these diffraction artifacts to create extremely high-resolution profiles (20 meters) for the rings of Saturn (and Uranus using Voyager data). In this talk we'll discuss the process of reconstructing these profiles from the radio science data and some of the surprising new results that are being found.

If you are interested in attending either in-person or via Zoom, please contact Lynne_Schaufenbil@uml.edu.